From rah at shipwright.com  Mon Dec  1 05:54:29 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 08:54:29 -0500
Subject: Big Japanese firms claim encryption breakthrough
Message-ID: <p06010235bbf0f869ff75@[66.149.49.5]>

<http://www.theinquirer.net/print.aspx?article=10709&print=1>


Big Japanese firms claim encryption breakthrough

Elliptic curve cryptosystems

By INQUIRER staff: Monday 28 July 2003, 07:36


NTT, MITSUBISHI and Hitachi today said they have succeded in developing a
more effective type of cryptography based on what the companies call
elliptic curve cryptosystems.

Earlier this year, the European Union started NESSIE 5, a plan to use next
generation cryptography, and chose Camella 6, Misty1 7 and PSEC-KEM as
algorithms - developed by Mitsubishi and NTT.

NESSIE stands for the New European Schemes for Signatures Integrity and
Encryption.

Camellia is a 128-bit block encryption algorithm, Misty1 is a 64-bit block
encryption algorithm, while PSEC-KEM is an NTT public key encryption
algorithm.

The firms said that the new project, codenamed CRESERC, creates public key
cryptosystems using mathematical operations over elliptic curves. µ


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Tue Dec  2 01:09:31 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 01:09:31 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
Message-ID: <200312020909.hB299Vaf010508@artifact.psychedelic.net>

As reported today on Slashdot, in linux kernels prior to 2.4.23, it is
possible to map the kernel into user space with brk(), since apparently no
one ever bothered to check that the argument passed was in the lower 3 gig
of the address space.

This is almost as funny as early linux kernels in which the LDT was user
writable.

In any case, the patch is to stick the following check in do_brk() in
/mm/mmap.c

  if ((addr + len) > TASK_SIZE || (addr + len) < addr) 
           return -EINVAL;

This is of course a serious bug, since anyone on a vulnerable machine has
access to kernel memory by writing a terse no-brainer C program, of which
I will not give an example, because enough people on the Internet hate me
already. :)

An interesting occurrence, because it demonstrates that massive numbers of
open source participants auditing the code aren't sufficient to ferret out
every giant coding blunder.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Dec  2 00:00:14 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 02:00:14 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [discuss] Tue, Dec 16: EFF-A CyberDawg (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0312020157170.1571-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 16:36:29 -0600
From: David Nunez <david at davidnunez.com>
To: discuss at effaustin.org
Subject: [discuss] Tue, Dec 16: EFF-A CyberDawg

Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday! Get ready for chills, thrills and
bone-crushing spills! More excitement and more mud than ever before!

Hear the screaming crowd, hear the crushing of metal, and feel the
adrenaline of the CyberDAWWWWWWG!

That's right, it's time for CyberDAWWWWWWWWG Madness! Tuesday! Tuesday!
TUUUUESDAY!

Be there!

Please RSVP by sending email to rsvp at effaustin.org.

EFF-Austin MegaEvent on Dec 16th, 2003 Opal Divine's in Austin (6th and
Rio Grande)

    * 6:00-8:00 - eVoting Dinner Discussion (serious discussion)
    * 8:00-close - CyberDawg 2003 (wild party)

BuyYerOwnDinner for the eVoting Discussion... Light snacks served at
Cyberdawg. Cash bar.

Everyone showing up gets a free EFF bumper sticker and instigator badge!

All new 2004 exclusive EFF-A T-shirts will be on sale.

(http://www.eff-austin.org)

=====================================================

Calling all cyberhippies, geeks, artists, filmmakers, WiFi Superheroes,
technovangelists, computer builders/programmers/networkers/users,
robotic mad scientists and their cyborganic chimpanzee lab assistants,
liberty-lovin' lawyers, techeductors, wonks, weirdos, walruses, open
source hackers, octopodes, and friends of all of the above.

Come one, come all, and bring 20 of your friends. This is NOT the event
to miss.

Please help us by forwarding along this invitation to your friends and
fellow cybernauts.

=====================================================

EFF-Austin (http://www.eff-austin.org) proudly brings you the CyberDawg
2003 World Tour*** December 16th at Opal Divines in Austin, TX.

6:00-8:00 - eVoting Roundtable:

Join Dan Wallach, Computer science professor and security expert from
Rice University, for dinner and discussion on eVoting for the December
edition of the EFF-Austin Policy Roundtable.

Dan Wallach is a member of the team, organized by Avi Rubin of Johns
Hopkins, which conducted a scathing analysis of the Diebold voting
system earlier this year.

Dan will discuss the "threat model" for electronic voting. What can go
wrong with evoting systems, what was wrong with the market-leading
Diebold system, and what can geek activists do about it?

8:00-close - CyberDawg:

What happens when you bring together smart, creative, and passionate
minds together to do nothing but talk, laugh, and instigate? We're not
sure. We think it'll be an earth-shattering event, though... The
Singularity, even.

What is EFF-Austin? Who's working behind the scenes? What is it up to
these days? What madcap adventures are planned for 2004? Calendar of
events? How can YOU get involved in the fray? These questions and more
will be answered at the Cyberdawg.

If nothing else, you'll be in the same room with movers, shakers, and
instigators in the Austin Tech/Art/and Cyberliberties scene... That's
gotta be worth something, right?

=====================================================

*** CyberDawg 2003 will not actually go on a world tour. Just Austin...
For that matter, there probably won't be too many thrills, chills, and
spills or the gnashing of metal or screaming fans, either. But it will
be fun, nonetheless.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: discuss-unsubscribe at effaustin.org
For additional commands, e-mail: discuss-help at effaustin.org




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Dec  2 08:12:22 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 08:12:22 -0800
Subject: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
Message-ID: <3FCCB9E6.FF15B5E9@cdc.gov>

At 01:09 AM 12/2/03 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:
>As reported today on Slashdot, in linux kernels prior to 2.4.23, it is
>possible to map the kernel into user space with brk(), since apparently
no
>one ever bothered to check that the argument passed was in the lower 3
gig
>of the address space.

Question from a BSDer:
Was this bug in the NSA's secure version?




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Tue Dec  2 10:05:37 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 10:05:37 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
In-Reply-To: <3FCCC308.8030501@tully.com>
Message-ID: <200312021805.hB2I5b3U017054@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Eric Tully writes:

> I've heard that argument before (last time I heard it was a problem with 
> a PGP implementation) and I never understand what people are trying to 
> prove when they say it.

Let me simplify.  I found it startling that a Redmond-level bug was in a
mature open-source project, the result of many years of hard work and
evolution, deemed "Ready for the Enterprise."

This isn't a slap at Open Source.  It's just mild bemusement.  

> Are you saying that the Open Source model isn't as good as proprietary 
> "we'll-fix-it-if-we-feel-like-it" models? Are you saying that Open 
> Source isn't the promised land like you were... um, promised? Are you 
> saying that Open Source model shouldn't be used for anything that 
> concerns security? I honestly don't know what you're getting at.

Well, let's see.  I think Open Source is better than the Closed Source
proprietary "It's not a bug, it's a feature" model.  I've never been
promised anything by Open Source, so it's certainly not the second thing..  
While I wouldn't say Open Source should not be used for secure code, there
seems to be a bit of overconfidence in this area, particular in the lack
of realization that Open Source clones of rock solid pieces of software
like PGP and SSH are probably exploitable and buggy when they are first
released.

But all in all, I think Open Source is an excellent idea, as long as one
does not have unrealistic expectations.  I wouldn't use Open Source to run
an artificial heart, but for most of the things it is used for, it is
probably quite satisfactory.

> So Open Source is not a perfect solution. In its defense:

> - you had the opportunity to hire a team of 50 to examine the code
> - the solution was made known to you
> - you can reject this solution and write your own if you prefer

> none of which would have been true if this were proprietary code.

Quite true.

> There's so many good things about this model - it seems silly to argue 
> that Open Souce doesn't live up to the unrealistic hype that the guys on 
> Slashdot promised you.

I have not been promised anything by the "guys on Slashdot."  I simply
found the error amusing.  Let's not get our blood pressure in an uproar
simply because virtually every Linux system in the world was just
discovered to have a user readable/writable kernel.  It will be fixed, and
life will move on.

This is a dumb coding error.  Not a referendum in the eyes of God on the 
worthiness of the Open Source movement.

Chill.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Tue Dec  2 11:11:53 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 11:11:53 -0800
Subject: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
In-Reply-To: <200312020909.hB299Vaf010508@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <v03110705bbf293feecce@[192.168.1.5]>

At 1:09 AM -0800 12/2/03, Eric Cordian wrote:
>As reported today on Slashdot, in linux kernels prior to 2.4.23, it is
>possible to map the kernel into user space with brk(), since apparently no
>one ever bothered to check that the argument passed was in the lower 3 gig
>of the address space.

Rule 1: When you audit code for security, be sure there is a complete check
of all input parameters.  Make at least one pass through the code where
this is the only check you make.  As can be seen by multiple problems of
this type, it's easy to forget.

Cheers - Bill




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz        | "There's nothing so clear as a | Periwinkle
(408)356-8506      | vague idea you haven't written | 16345 Englewood Ave
www.pwpconsult.com | down yet." -- Dean Tribble     | Los Gatos, CA 95032




From eric at tully.com  Tue Dec  2 08:51:20 2003
From: eric at tully.com (Eric Tully)
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 11:51:20 -0500
Subject: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
In-Reply-To: <200312020909.hB299Vaf010508@artifact.psychedelic.net>
References: <200312020909.hB299Vaf010508@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <3FCCC308.8030501@tully.com>

Eric Cordian wrote:

>An interesting occurrence, because it demonstrates that massive numbers of
>open source participants auditing the code aren't sufficient to ferret out
>every giant coding blunder.
>  
>


I've heard that argument before (last time I heard it was a problem with 
a PGP implementation) and I never understand what people are trying to 
prove when they say it.

Are you saying that the Open Source model isn't as good as proprietary 
"we'll-fix-it-if-we-feel-like-it" models? Are you saying that Open 
Source isn't the promised land like you were... um, promised? Are you 
saying that Open Source model shouldn't be used for anything that 
concerns security? I honestly don't know what you're getting at.

So Open Source is not a perfect solution. In its defense:

- you had the opportunity to hire a team of 50 to examine the code
- the solution was made known to you
- you can reject this solution and write your own if you prefer

none of which would have been true if this were proprietary code.

There's so many good things about this model - it seems silly to argue 
that Open Souce doesn't live up to the unrealistic hype that the guys on 
Slashdot promised you.

- Eric Tully




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Dec  2 10:13:19 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 12:13:19 -0600 (CST)
Subject: ZDNet UK - News - North Korea launches 'secure' email (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0312021212570.1571-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39118217,00.htm

 -- --

Open Forge, LLC  24/365 Onsite Support for PCs, Networks, & Game Consoles
512-695-4126 (Austin, Tx.)  help at open-forge.com  irc.open-forge.com

Hangar 18  Open Source Distributed Computing Using Plan 9 & Linux
512-451-7087  http://open-forge.org/hangar18  irc.open-forge.org

James Choate  512-451-7087  ravage at ssz.com  jchoate at open-forge.com




From declan at well.com  Tue Dec  2 10:20:23 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 12:20:23 -0600
Subject: Chaum's hand?
In-Reply-To: <3FCA3657.41E06789@cdc.gov>; from mv@cdc.gov on Sun, Nov
  30, 2003 at 10:26:32AM -0800
References: <3FCA3657.41E06789@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20031202122023.A32255@baltwash.com>

On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 10:26:32AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Take a look at
> http://www.chaum.com/images/Photo_of_David.gif
> and tell me his hand isn't photoshopped.  Is this
> for security reasons, or is his hand malformed?

David's hands are normal. Perhaps he was holding something in that
photograph.

http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-22/david-chaum-1.html

-Declan




From declan at well.com  Tue Dec  2 09:23:29 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 12:23:29 -0500
Subject: People getting high == "threat to homeland security"
Message-ID: <6.0.0.22.2.20031202122250.020e0f48@mail.well.com>

Query: What, nowadays, is *not* a "threat to homeland security?"



1. Airport drug bust heightens debate over non-federal forces
By Chris Strohm
A recent drug bust at Kennedy International Airport shows that the use
of workers from private companies in sensitive security jobs poses a
substantial risk, federal airport screeners argued Monday.

Government agents arrested 20 baggage and cargo handlers at Kennedy last
Tuesday and charged them with slipping tens of millions of dollars worth
of cocaine and marijuana past security checkpoints during the last
decade. Authorities said the workers were employed by American Airlines,
Delta Airlines, United Airlines and five smaller companies: Globe Ground
North American, Evergreen Eagle, Hudson General, Swissport USA and
Flying Foods.

The operation represented "a potential threat to homeland security,"
said Michael Garcia, acting head of the Bureau of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

Full story:  < http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1203/120103c1.htm >
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1203/120103c1.htm




From rah at shipwright.com  Tue Dec  2 10:40:35 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 13:40:35 -0500
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Diebold query for the Group
In-Reply-To: <CD44D03584C7A249A3F86891B24EB8EA0B08545D@ehost003.interme
  dia.net>
References: <CD44D03584C7A249A3F86891B24EB8EA0B08545D@ehost003.intermed
  ia.net>
Message-ID: <p060102e4bbf2851a4aaa@[66.149.49.5]>

[cc'd to cryptography (where clues reside...), and to cypherpunks (yeah, I
know, don't feed the animals :-))]

At 8:32 PM -0800 12/1/03, Donald L. Luskin wrote:
>I see that Krugman's column today is about Diebold and his voting
>machines. I recall that this discussion group had a thread going about
>that several weeks ago that seemed quite involved, but I never read it.
>Would someone be so kind as to remind me what that was all about?
>Thanks!

Coming from someone whose primary interest is (still?...) financial
cryptography these days, and internet bearer financial cryptography in
particular, the answer here is a simple -- if you will -- paradox:

---> You cannot have a perfectly secret electronic vote unless everybody
can sell their votes. <---


The most anonymous protocols for electronic voting are the same protocols
that were invented for electronic bearer transactions like anonymous
digital cash, bearer bonds/stock, etc. You're given a unique, anonymous,
blinded, non-forgeable glop of bits, which you produce in exchange for a
single operation of the voting protocol at the time of your vote. The
problem is, you can sell said glop of bits -- for, say, another glop of
bits representing a requisite amount of cash in the fiat, or
commodity-backed, currency of your choice.


Thus, more important, and to turn the above paradox on its head, the *only*
way you can prevent the sale of that glop of bits is with some form of
direct observation of the voter, complete with is-a-person identity schemes
and/or other forms of virtual state-sponsored proctology.



As an anarchocapitalist, of course, selling votes is fine by me. Monopolies
on force are evil anyway, so selling my franchise for a mess o' pottage
doesn't carry nearly the moral suasion that it used to. Moore's law and the
internet can't price force-monopoly out of business fast enough, if you ask
me.

But, for your average demopublican (okay, I vote congenitally Republican,
somebody stop me, I know it only encourages them -- but then again I go to
church, too, silly atavist me...) selling votes is the highest sacrilege
against the State there is. Something on the order of eating the wafer
before the wine, or vice-versa, or whatever.

For anarchocapitalists, selling your vote (aka equity), is something you're
*supposed* to be able to do, something you're *honor-bound* to do,
borrowing "votes", if necessary, and selling them *short*...



Cheers,
RAH
Whose last Financial Cryptography conference, in the Caymans in 2001, was
spent pointing out that the previous "stolen" election was not a
*financial* problem, 4 hours of the best and brightest's vociferous
disputation through lunch to the contrary.



"Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere."  -- Persian proverb

"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of
limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and
great nations." -- David Friedman, _The_Machinery_of_Freedom_

"No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected." --Lizard,
fronting an old chestnut, he says

"When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid
on our own! And we were grateful!" --Alan Olsen


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From roy at rant-central.com  Tue Dec  2 10:51:11 2003
From: roy at rant-central.com (Roy M. Silvernail)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 13:51:11 -0500
Subject: People getting high == "threat to homeland security"
In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.2.20031202122250.020e0f48@mail.well.com>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031202122250.020e0f48@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <20031202185111.GA6383@mesmer.rant-central.com>

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 12:23:29PM -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> Query: What, nowadays, is *not* a "threat to homeland security?"

Anything that advances the cause of repealing the Constitution.
-- 
Roy M. Silvernail is roy at rant-central.com, and you're not
http://www.rant-central.com is the new scytale
Never Forget:  It's Only 1's and 0's!
SpamAssassin->procmail->/dev/null->bliss




From petard at freeshell.org  Tue Dec  2 06:59:13 2003
From: petard at freeshell.org (petard)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 14:59:13 +0000
Subject: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
In-Reply-To: <200312020909.hB299Vaf010508@artifact.psychedelic.net>
References: <200312020909.hB299Vaf010508@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <20031202145913.GA14036@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG>

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 01:09:31AM -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:
> An interesting occurrence, because it demonstrates that massive numbers of
> open source participants auditing the code aren't sufficient to ferret out
> every giant coding blunder.
I don't know that I'd call it "auditing" exactly; to my knowledge, no
audit as such has been undertaken with the kernel. That said, evidently,
a pair of the "many eyes" did ferret this one out, about 9 weeks ago:

http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.4/diffs/mm/mmap.c at 1.32?nav=cset at 1.1148.2.2

Unfortunately, he did not see it as critical enough to throw out
security alerts and make a new release right then, so anyone with
untrusted local users was completely unprotected. Including Debian,
apparently.

Regards,
petard




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Tue Dec  2 08:06:43 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:06:43 +0000
Subject: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)
In-Reply-To: <0311282257350.0@somehost.domainz.com>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A73D5@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com> <20031126161059.GA24701@mail.dadadada.net> 
  <95470B54-2034-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <200311261946.01097.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
  <0311282257350.0@somehost.domainz.com>
Message-ID: <3FCCB893.7010000@students.bbk.ac.uk>

Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:
> 
> 
>>>""Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
>>>Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
>>>-- Ben Franklin
>>
>>And if they are all armed ? They all starve.
> 
> 
> Lambs can eat grass, which is usually unarmed.

It is not. Grass is stuffed full of all sorts of complicated 
chemicals that can cause confusion to creatures that chomp it. Not 
to mention nassty little silica crystals.

Lambs can eat grass because they are toughened and honed 
grass-killers, fitted by millions of years of evolution to survive 
everything the grass can throw at them.  And even then they only 
cope with some kinds of grass. When a cat eats grass it gets sick.

It doesn't take much intelligence to sneak up on a leaf, but it 
takes one hell of a digestive system to eat it.

Us mammals are downstream of a 200-million-year evolutionary race 
between ourselves and green plants - they evolve a new poison, we 
evolve to tolerate it. Then we put it in hot drinks. Why else do 
so many plant compounds have such powerful drug effects on animals?

At the time of writing there is no winner in sight.

It isn't impossible to imagine one side winning in the end though. 
The plants really did beat the bacteria way back in the Palaeozoic 
- wood is about the only living tissue that bacteria can't eat. 
Which is why there is so much coal around.  Fungi got the better 
of them later.

Democracy tries to get the majority of participants through to the 
next round of the game. Natural selection kills nearly everybody, 
nearly all the time. Which is why it is so effective. But, given 
the choice, I'll take democracy.


Trust me, I'm a botanist.




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Dec  2 15:04:36 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 17:04:36 -0600
Subject: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)
In-Reply-To: <3FCCB893.7010000@students.bbk.ac.uk>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A73D5@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com> <20031126161059.GA24701@mail.dadadada.net>
  <95470B54-2034-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <200311261946.01097.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
  <0311282257350.0@somehost.domainz.com>
  <3FCCB893.7010000@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <20031202230436.GA27802@cybershamanix.com>

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 04:06:43PM +0000, ken wrote:
> Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>""Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
> >>>Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
> >>>-- Ben Franklin
> >>
> >>And if they are all armed ? They all starve.
> >
> >
> >Lambs can eat grass, which is usually unarmed.
> 
> It is not. Grass is stuffed full of all sorts of complicated 
> chemicals that can cause confusion to creatures that chomp it. Not 
> to mention nassty little silica crystals.
> 
> Lambs can eat grass because they are toughened and honed 
> grass-killers, fitted by millions of years of evolution to survive 
> everything the grass can throw at them.  And even then they only 
> cope with some kinds of grass. When a cat eats grass it gets sick.
> 

   Right, in fact if sheep (and sometimes cattle) eat Phalaris sp., for
instance, they get the "staggers", depending on the time of year and other
environmental conditions, and also upon the alkaloid makeup of the particular
cultivar. Phalaris, of course, contains fairly large amounts of tryptamines,
like dimethyltriptamine (DMT), as do many other plants. And thank the Goddess
for that -- but sheep don't like it. Or maybe they do, and just aren't saying.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Dec  2 15:13:37 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 17:13:37 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [discuss] national Community Technology Network conference,
  Austin Dec 7-9 (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0312021712390.1571-201000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 16:01:35 -0600 (CST)
From: gene crick <gcrick at main.org>
To: discuss at effaustin.org
Subject: [discuss] national Community Technology Network conference,
     Austin Dec 7-9



Comrades, the Time Has Come To Arise!

[I still miss ole Leon Trotsky and his gang]

EFF supporters have a unique opportunity to hear and be heard at the Sixth
Annual Community Technology Networking Conference at the Holiday Inn (I-35
at Woodward this Monday and Tuesday.  Public interest technology is facing
near-crisis: we're out of fashion with government and corporate leaders,
telecom providers are avoiding underserved people, challenges like spam
and threats to free speech are back on the rise.  2004 will be a critical
year.

But there are good prospects as well.  Community Information
Communications Technology (ICT) is one of the few telecom professions
solidly growing, and the major players are coming to Austin to meet with
us in a few days. (FCC, Department of Commerce, Gates Foundation and many
more) You need to be here.

EFF should be solidly represented, sharing views and plans for the future
of the Internet as something more than a mass marketing sales outlet. Cost
for the conference is no barrier either:  register as student is only $50,
includes three meals, and we don't check student IDs :) (regular is $100)

So come join us; we finally have a chance to make our concerns known!

thanks
gene

Gene Crick
TeleCommunity Resource Center
EFF, EFF-Austin

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/MSWORD which had a NAME of CN2003 invitation.fin.doc]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: discuss-unsubscribe at effaustin.org
For additional commands, e-mail: discuss-help at effaustin.org




From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Dec  2 09:13:12 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 18:13:12 +0100
Subject: 25x faster RFIDs
Message-ID: <20031202171312.GO22120@leitl.org>

Infineon has just released new RFID silicon
with 25x the speed. Available in quantities
starting 2004.

It's 13.56 MHz (Phase Jitter Modulation, 8 channels),
and can read up to 500 tags/s (limit hitherto 30 tags/s).
No idea about the package size nor the reading range.

Use a dekrautizer of your choice:
	http://golem.de/0312/28756.html

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From rah at shipwright.com  Tue Dec  2 17:24:22 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 20:24:22 -0500
Subject: Japan police arrest two Winny/Freenet users
Message-ID: <p0601024abbf2eb7a4999@[66.149.49.5]>

<http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/security/printfriendly.htm?AT=39159923-39001150t-39000005c>




Japan police arrest two P2P users
By Staff, CNETAsia
3/12/2003
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/security/0,39001150,39159923,00.htm

A Japanese peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network which claimed to keep
user identities untraceable has failed to work--two users in Japan have
been arrested.

The developer of the P2P software has also had his home searched by police,
according to a report in the Mainichi Daily.

There are around a quarter of a million users of the supposedly anonymous
file-trading network, called Winny, which rides on the more well-known
Freenet network.

Such networks differ from other file trading software such as Kazaa in that
they claim to be able to hide the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of
users. It is not known how the police managed to track down the two users,
or why criminal action is being taken against them. In other countries, P2P
users have been hit with civil lawsuits instead.

The creator of Freenet, Ian Clarke, has cast doubt on whether Winny uses
Freenet's full identity-cloaking features or its cryptography, according to
a report in New Scientist.

Freenet is an open-source project and is most prominent of a growing number
of projects aimed at giving people the ability to communicate online
without being tapped, traced or monitored.

The software marks an attempt to create a network that exists as a parallel
Internet, where content of any kind can be uploaded and downloaded without
any way to track who created a given "site".

Unlike other peer systems, Freenet has a built-in method of pushing content
between different computers, so that a given file can migrate around the
network between different people's hard drives until it is stored near
regions where it is most often used.

The arrested are two men, aged 41 and 19, said the Mainichi Daily report.
Among other charges, the older man is accused of sharing the Hollywood
movie A Beautiful Mind while the teenager is being held for making the game
Super Mario Advance available online.

Several companies, including game maker Nintendo, are pressing charges
against the pair. This is the first known case of legal action being taken
on users on anonymous file-sharing networks.

In Korea and Taiwan, lawsuits have been filed against users of P2P
networks. A copyright body in Taiwan is suing three users of file sharing
networks while in Korea, recording companies are threatening to do the same.

In both countries, creators of file sharing software have been brought to
court, but defendants are arguing they are not responsible for what people
choose to share. Both cases involve homegrown P2P networks sharing
local-language music.

In Taiwan, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)
has sued three P2P users who are said to have shared files on the
locally-popular Kuro and Ezpeer networks.

Unlike internationally popular networks such as Kazaa, both Taiwanese
services are fee-based.

The Recording Industry Association of Korea (RIAK) is said to be mulling
suing end users of free-use P2P software Soribada.

Soribada's 4.5 million users have lost the recording industry millions in
revenue, claimed the RIAK. The makers of the software have been slapped
with a US$16,300 fine, despite claiming that they are not responsible for
the actions of its users.

In the U.S., the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has
targeted hundreds of P2P users for legal action.

There is some evidence that the controversial RIAA lawsuits against
ordinary computer users are making a dent in the file-swapping world.
According to Web analysis firm Nielsen/NetRatings, weekly usage of the
Kazaa software in the United States plummeted from a high of 7 million
people in early June to just 3.2 million people in late October.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Dec  2 22:43:43 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 00:43:43 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Inferno: PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0312030043330.1571-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

What I find most interesting in this article is not MS marketing noise but
the comment about the White House, robot.txt, and Google...

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031120.html

Truly a despicable act for a -public servant-.

 -- --

Open Forge, LLC  24/365 Onsite Support for PCs, Networks, & Game Consoles
512-695-4126 (Austin, Tx.)  help at open-forge.com  irc.open-forge.com

Hangar 18  Open Source Distributed Computing Using Plan 9 & Linux
512-451-7087  http://open-forge.org/hangar18  irc.open-forge.org

James Choate  512-451-7087  ravage at ssz.com  jchoate at open-forge.com




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec  3 06:30:04 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 08:30:04 -0600
Subject: [p2p-hackers] Peer-to-Peer Journal (P2PJ) CFP (fwd from
  sam@neurogrid.com)
In-Reply-To: <20031203095212.GH22120@leitl.org>
References: <20031203095212.GH22120@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <20031203143004.GB30336@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 10:52:12AM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:

(snip)

> ----- Forwarded message from Sam Joseph <sam at neurogrid.com> -----
> 
> From: Sam Joseph <sam at neurogrid.com>
> Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 11:06:08 +0900
> To: "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers at zgp.org>
> Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Peer-to-Peer Journal (P2PJ) CFP
> Organization: NeuroGrid http://www.neurogrid.net/
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ja-JP;
> 	rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
> 	"Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers at zgp.org>
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> Although I agree with you about the copyright issue, I think that this
> kind of thing is pretty common with academic journals. I'm not saying
> that makes it right, but it is true.  Every time I get a paper published
> in a book or journal I have to sign away my rights to the paper.
> 
> It is a wonderful little earner for the academic publishing industry
> generally.  They have academics working for free to generate the
> content, and then they charge other academics to get access to the
> journal. I think it is another one of those fucked up things that we
> can't do very much about.  However I would imagine that the publishers
> of academic journals would say that there is such low readership that
> without free content and exorbitant fees to libraries the entire thing
> would not be profitable, i.e. they couldn't make enough money to pay the
> people who work to actually print the journal.  At the moment P2PJournal
> is not making any money, is not charging you to read the journal, and
> everyone is putting in their time for free.  As it happens I have yet to
> have any say in the copyright issues.  I'm working on trying to get the
> P2PJournal to serve the best interests of the P2P community.  I will
> pass on your comments to the Editor-in-chief.
> 
> BTW, I think the standard deal with most journals is that you can
> publish the work on your own personal website as well - but it would be
> good to make that explicit.

 
    Unless things have changed in the last few years, that's not true. When I
was at the Biomedical Library in Mobile, we had to make very sure that
profs there had gotten *written* permission to put their previously published
papers on their websites (which we ran for them), and even pictures of book
covers. It most definitely wasn't automatic, at least not with most publishers. 


(rest snipped)

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec  3 06:35:56 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 09:35:56 EST
Subject: Recommended Pro freedom discussion list 
Message-ID: <167.29199924.2cff4ecc@aol.com>

[Note from Matt Gaylor:  I've been on this list for a couple of years and on
occasion I find the discussion lively and interesting. It's coming from Kent
State University, the place where actual real assault rifles were used May 4,
1970 to wound 9 and kill 4 student war protesters. Ohio Guardsmen opened fire
during a noontime demonstration.  For a chronology of the shooting please go
to: http://members.aol.com/nrbooks/chronol.htm. I can think of no better way
to
remember the fallen, than by discussing liberty via the school they
attended.]




-=> the libertarian discussion list <=-
ldl at listserv.kent.edu

The ldl list is intended for discussion of libertarian issues,
as well as announcements of local and state events. We encourage
lively and active discussion, and discourage mean, derogatory, or
wildly off-topic posts.

- To subscribe, send 'subscribe ldl' in the body
   of an email message to  listserv at listserv.kent.edu

- To get a reference of listserv commands and options,
   send 'info ref' in the body of an email message to
   listserv at listserv.kent.edu

- For other problems or questions, send email to list owner Bob Hart at
   bobhart at neo.rr.com




From eugen at leitl.org  Wed Dec  3 01:52:12 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 10:52:12 +0100
Subject: [p2p-hackers] Peer-to-Peer Journal (P2PJ) CFP (fwd from
  sam@neurogrid.com)
Message-ID: <20031203095212.GH22120@leitl.org>

Right now we're getting increasing FUD from the sides of Elsevier & Co
against emerging open content journals. I don't think there's a turning
of the tide, though, as early adopters have already embraced alternative
channels of publication (physicists and math people foremost in arXiv),
and it's only a matter of time before more conservative branches of
science (medical, chemistry and biology people: that's you) are to follow.

We might be getting the publishing monopolists to try grasping for DRM for
paper copyright. I'm wondering why they haven't started watermarking
their .pdfs yet, shough a crawler looking for phrases or computing
document hashes would do just as nicely.

Either way, the librarians are attempting to revolt using whatever
little leverage they have. Fact is, the budgets are shrinking, and
the shelves are emptying, while the content owners have established
a de facto pay per view.

----- Forwarded message from Sam Joseph <sam at neurogrid.com> -----


From sam at neurogrid.com  Tue Dec  2 18:06:08 2003
From: sam at neurogrid.com (Sam Joseph)
Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 11:06:08 +0900
Subject: [p2p-hackers] Peer-to-Peer Journal (P2PJ) CFP
Message-ID: <mailman.818.1576007639.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

Hi David,

Although I agree with you about the copyright issue, I think that this
kind of thing is pretty common with academic journals. I'm not saying
that makes it right, but it is true.  Every time I get a paper published
in a book or journal I have to sign away my rights to the paper.

It is a wonderful little earner for the academic publishing industry
generally.  They have academics working for free to generate the
content, and then they charge other academics to get access to the
journal. I think it is another one of those fucked up things that we
can't do very much about.  However I would imagine that the publishers
of academic journals would say that there is such low readership that
without free content and exorbitant fees to libraries the entire thing
would not be profitable, i.e. they couldn't make enough money to pay the
people who work to actually print the journal.  At the moment P2PJournal
is not making any money, is not charging you to read the journal, and
everyone is putting in their time for free.  As it happens I have yet to
have any say in the copyright issues.  I'm working on trying to get the
P2PJournal to serve the best interests of the P2P community.  I will
pass on your comments to the Editor-in-chief.

BTW, I think the standard deal with most journals is that you can
publish the work on your own personal website as well - but it would be
good to make that explicit.

As for a complete copyright share - personally that sounds fine to me,
but one could argue that if the same work was completely free to be
published anywhere else then why would anyone want to read the
P2PJournal.  I'm not sure I totally buy the argument myself, but I think
the reason that most academic journals and conferences give for holding
on to the copyright of the papers they publish is that if they didn't
then they would be unable to maintain their readership or attendees.
Whether this is true or not is open to question.

There is also a sot of contradiction in terms of having a P2PJournal
with restrictive copyright rules - but then such is life.  Let us see
what we can evolve.

CHEERS> SAM

David Gvthberg wrote:

>  I checked out your "writer's guidelines" and was somewhat shocked.
>You state that after accepting submission of a paper to your journal,
>the journal (that is Raymond F. Gao, Editor-in-Chief) gets the copyright
>of the submitted text.
>
>That's pretty silly especially since you don't even pay for the work
>and expect people to write about their inventions and research.
>
>When my mother hired an artist to do the pictures to her children's
>books we used a much better way: We signed a contract stating a "split"
>or "shared" copyright. That is, both the artist and my mother can do
>what they want with the pictures. Thus both parties can reprint them,
>sell them and use them in any way they see fit and booth are happy!
>
>I suggest you should do the same, or people like me will never bother
>to write for your journal. Among other things, your "rule" makes it
>impossible to send you texts that one has already published in other
>places and your rule makes it impossible to reuse that material as
>one sees fit. If I write about my inventions I of course want to be
>able to reuse any text I write about them. But writing for you is
>a one time thing and thus not worth the effort.
>
>And don't just say: "This is how it is normally done." Just because
>it's common to do like that it doesn't make it right.
>
>But I do like the thought of a p2p journal!




_______________________________________________
p2p-hackers mailing list
p2p-hackers at zgp.org
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
_______________________________________________
Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences:
http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From dave at farber.net  Thu Dec  4 08:25:27 2003
From: dave at farber.net (Dave Farber)
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 11:25:27 -0500
Subject: [IP] The Third Annual Workshop on Economics and
  Information Security
Message-ID: <mailman.819.1576007639.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>


>
>                  The Third Annual Workshop on
>                Economics and Information Security
>                            (WEIS04)
> 		       May 13-14, 2004
>                    University of Minnesota
> 	       http://www.dtc.umn.edu/weis2004
>
> Submissions due: March 1, 2004
>
>    How much should we spend to secure our computer systems?  Can we
> determine a.which investments will provide the best protection?
>  How will
> we know when we've reached our goals?  Can market forces ensure that
> firms will act to improve security?  Can incentives align the goals of
> employees with the security goals of their employers?
>
>    While security technologies have benefited from decades of study,
> there has been a dearth of research into decision making
> tools required
> to choose among these technologies and employ them properly.  The
> growing importance of information security and the failings of
> technology-centric approaches have made security economics an
> area ripe
> for new research.  There is much work to be done both in applying
> existing economic tools to today's security questions and in
> pioneering
> new economic approaches to address problems unique to the study of
> security.
>
>    The Third Annual Workshop on Economics and Information
> Security (WEIS04)
> is a successor to the two pioneering workshops on this
> subject, held in
> 2002 at UC Berkeley and in 2003 at Univ. Maryland.
> Information about them
> is available at URLs given at end.
>
>    We encourage economists, computer scientists, security specialists,
> business school faculty, and industry experts to submit
> original research
> to the 2004 conference.  We would especially like to
> encourage collaborative
> research from authors in multiple fields.  Among past and
> suggested topics are:
>
>    Game theoretic security models      Analysis of security
> solutions market
>    Security investment optimization    Threat modeling
>    Information sharing                 Risk management
>    Algorithmic mechanism design        Security metrics
>    DRM and customer lock-in            Security loss estimation
>    Economics of privacy                Cyberterrorism
>    Behavioral security economics       Economics of pseudonyms
>    Reputation systems                  Case studies
>
>    There will be no printed proceedings of this workshop, but
> as with the
> preceding workshops, authors of accepted papers will be
> encouraged to post
> their papers and presentation decks on the conference site.
> There may later be
> a printed volume of selected papers from the workshop,
> similar to the volume
> based on the first two workshops that is in preparation.
>
>    Submissions should not exceed approximately 8,000 words
> (i.e., about 12 single
> spaced pages in a standard 11 point font). They must be
> submitted by March 1,
> 2004. Position papers of significantly shorter length are
> also welcome.
> Notification of acceptance for the program will be sent by
> April 1, 2004.
> Submissions should be sent, preferably in PDF format, to
> weissub at dtc.umn.edu.
> For general information about the conference, check the website:
> http://www.dtc.umn.edu/weis2004/ or email weisinfo at dtc.umn.edu.
>
> Program Committee:
>
>    Alessandro Acquisti, Heinz School, Carnegie Mellon University
>    Ross Anderson, Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University
>    Jean Camp, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
>    Li Gong, Sun Microsystems
>    Larry Gordon, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
>    Marty Loeb, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
>    Andrew Odlyzko (co-chair), Digital Technology Center,
> University of
>                      Minnesota
>    Stuart Schechter, Division of Engineering and Applied
> Sciences, Harvard
>    Bruce Schneier (co-chair), Counterpane Internet Security
>    Doug Tygar, Computer Science and Information Management,
> UC Berkeley
>    Hal Varian, School of Information Management and Systems
> and Economics
>                      Dept., UC Berkeley

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as eugen at leitl.org
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From trunks at stackers.org  Thu Dec  4 12:33:21 2003
From: trunks at stackers.org (kawaii ryuko)
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 15:33:21 -0500
Subject: Uniform Police apparently unconstitutional
Message-ID: <01fd01c3baa5$dbe7af30$2701a8c0@FOLKEN>

http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm

"Police work is often lionized by jurists and scholars who claim to employ
"textualist" and "originalist" methods of constitutional interpretation. Yet
professional police were unknown to the United States in 1789, and first
appeared in America almost a half-century after the Constitution's
ratification. The Framers contemplated law enforcement as the duty of mostly
private citizens, along with a few constables and sheriffs who could be
called upon when necessary. This article marshals extensive historical and
legal evidence to show that modern policing is in many ways inconsistent
with the original intent of America's founding documents. The author argues
that the growth of modern policing has substantially empowered the state in
a way the Framers would regard as abhorrent to their foremost principles."

(Stolen from Declan's Politech list and reposted here.)

Ever lovable and always scrappy,
kawaii




From eugen at leitl.org  Thu Dec  4 09:23:29 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 18:23:29 +0100
Subject: [IP] The Third Annual Workshop on Economics and Information
  Security (fwd from dave@farber.net)
Message-ID: <20031204172329.GL5783@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <dave at farber.net> -----


From declan at well.com  Fri Dec  5 06:26:07 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:26:07 -0500
Subject: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
Message-ID: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>

See also:
http://politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2003-December/000268.html

---

>Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:12:16 -0500
>To: politech at politechbot.com
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>Subject: Larry Lessig replies to Politech over limiting anonymity [fs][priv]
>
>
>---
>
>[Why do I get the feeling that Larry Lessig doesn't like "absolute" 
>anonymity much at all? Systems for building and defending "absolute" 
>anonymity already exist in the form of anonymous remailers and Freenet, 
>among others. It would be foolish to follow Larry's advice and concede too 
>quickly that such technologies have so few legitimate uses that they 
>cannot be reasonably defended. Even the oft-benighted Eurocrats have 
>recognized this: a 1997 EC directive encourages anonymity, as does a 
>German federal law (http://www.iid.de/rahmen/iukdgebt.html). In the U.S., 
>since the Federalist Papers were published with effectively "absolute" 
>pseudonymity, surely the framers of the U.S. Constitution had them in mind 
>when crafting the Bill of Rights. Justice Thomas lists more 
>contemporaneous examples in his McIntyre concurrence 
>(http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZC1.html). Saying 
>anonymous technologies are indefensible concedes a crucial point: that the 
>government's power is so sweeping that police have the right to learn our 
>identity in all cases. So much for whistleblowing and anonymous reports of 
>public brutality.
>
>Perhaps more to the point, the twin privacy-encroaching technologies of 
>automated electronic surveillance and efficient large-scale databases did 
>not exist decades or centuries ago. "Absolute" anonymity lets us reclaim 
>some of that lost zone of privacy. Lastly, trying to remove "absolute" 
>anonymity from the Internet (banning strong encryption and computers that 
>can be programmed not to keep logs) would be far more disruptive, 
>destructive, and harmful than proposals like Hollings' CBDTPA that Larry 
>has rightly opposed. --Declan]
>
>---
>
>From: Lawrence Lessig <lessig at pobox.com>
>Cc: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>Subject: Re: [Politech] Economist, Lessig want to preserve freedom by 
>ending anonymity [fs][priv]
>Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 10:16:31 +0900
>To: Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com>
>
>It's not an inaccurate quote, but it is taken out of context.
>
>What I said was that the trend in our laws was to destroy any privacy at 
>all -- that the idiocy of Patriot Acts, etc., was effectively eliminating 
>any form of privacy. There are two kinds of responses to this -- one to 
>try to defend and build a system protecting absolute anonymity; the second 
>is to build effective protections for pseudonymous life, which is 
>shorthand for traceable transactions, but where the permission to trace is 
>protected by something like a warrant requirement. I'm not saying the 
>government should build these systems, but that they should be permitted 
>and indeed encouraged.
>
>In my view, we will make no progress following path one, but that we would 
>strongly advance privacy if we could advance path two. A strong ethic and 
>architecture of pseudonymous identity, properly protected, would give us 
>more privacy than we have today.
>
>Of course, it is possible (and probably likely) that such an architecture 
>would not properly protect the link between a transaction and the privacy 
>of a person. Government officials, for example, upon mere suspicion would 
>be able to break the link, etc. That of course is not what I am promoting. 
>I would promote a regime where the gov't required a very strong 
>warrant-like reason before it could break the code that makes the link. 
>But I will not that the baseline from which we're starting is a world 
>where no real showing is necessary for this sort of surveillance.
>
>
>On Dec 4, 2003, at 9:26 AM, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
>>>To preserve freedom further, suggests Mr Lessig, anonymity could be 
>>>replaced by [warrant-traceable] pseudonymity.
>>
>>Can you explain this? The Economist article seemed to be total nonsense, 
>>but I'm surprised they paraphrase you as saying something like this. In 
>>general, for eliminating anonymity to make sense you need to answer three 
>>questions:
>>
>>1. Is anonymity the problem? Between DMCA subpoenas and national security 
>>letters, it seems that very few people on the Internet have even limited 
>>anonymity.
>>
>>2. Will the people who are anonymous evade things? The people who _are_ 
>>anonymous, of course, are people like crackers. If you outlaw anonymity, 
>>crackers will likely find security holes that let them hide their 
>>identity and pass their actions off as those of others (e.g. using the 
>>WiFi network of some squeaky-clean grandma to launch the attacks).
>>
>>3. Is it worth the cost? Even if you can answer the above questions, 
>>it'll be difficult to do without knocking large groups of people off the 
>>Internet. (If the digital divide is bad now, imagine what it'll be like 
>>when you need a credit card to get on the Net.)
>>
>>Were you misquoted? If not, can you answer these questions? Or is this 
>>more blind optimism?
>>--
>>Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/
>-----
>Lessig
>Stanford Law School
>559 Nathan Abbott Way
>Stanford, CA  94305-8610
>650.736.0999 (vx)
>650.723.8440 (fx)
>
>     Ass't: <laura.lynch at stanford.edu>
>     <http://lessig.org/blog>
>     <http://creativecommons.org>
>     <http://eldred.cc>
>
>     Help reclaim the Public Domain: Please sign this petition:
>     http://eldred.cc/sign
>
>     How else can you help? Check out:
>     http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=Lessig




From dave at farber.net  Fri Dec  5 07:17:55 2003
From: dave at farber.net (Dave Farber)
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 10:17:55 -0500
Subject: [IP] Markle Report -- Creating A Trusted
  Information Network for Homeland Security
Message-ID: <mailman.820.1576007639.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>


[ For the record, I am a member of the Markle Taskforce djf]''


TASK FORCE SAYS GOVERNMENT HAS NOT YET TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF AMERICA'S
TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE TO COMBAT TERRORISM

Markle Task Force Addresses Actions Needed to Create Information Network to
Enhance Security while Preserving Civil Liberties

To download a copy of Creating A Trusted Information Network for Homeland
Security or for more information on the Task Force, please visit
www.markletaskforce.org <http://www.markletaskforce.org>

Washington, D.C. (December 2, 2003) - The Markle Foundation Task Force on
National Security in the Information Age today released its second report,
concluding that the U.S. government has not yet taken advantage of
America's technology expertise to fight the war on terrorism. In its
report, Creating A Trusted Information Network for Homeland Security, the
Task Force catalogs current gaps in the nation's system for analyzing and
sharing intelligence. It details the elements of a proposed System-wide
Homeland Analysis and Resource Exchange (SHARE) Network that would more
effectively combat terrorism while protecting privacy and other civil
liberties.

In its first report in October 2002, the Markle Task Force identified the
ability to share information as the most urgent task facing government in
protecting the homeland. It laid out a plan for a distributed information
technology network to share terrorism-related information among federal,
state and local government agencies and the private sector so that threats
could be identified and prevented. In it second report, the Task Force
finds that the government's progress since September 11, 2001, toward
building an adequate network has been slow and is not guided by an overall
vision of how information should be shared and analyzed in keeping with
adequate guidelines to protect privacy and other civil liberties. Good work
is being done in some agencies, but isolated projects cannot reach scale or
break through cultural barriers fast enough to prevent another attack.

"Using currently available technology, the government can set up a network
that substantially improves our ability to prevent terrorism and protect
civil liberties," said Zoe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation and
co-chair with James Barksdale of the Markle Task Force on National Security
in the Information Age. "Public trust in a network that uses information
about people in the U.S. can only be achieved if government-wide guidelines
for information sharing and privacy protection are established after open
public debate."

The Task Force -- whose members include some of the nation's leading
experts on national security who served in the Carter, Reagan, Bush and
Clinton Administrations, as well as leading experts on information
technology and civil liberties -- calls on the President to:

*	Set the goal of creating the network;
*	issue clear government-wide policy guidelines for the government's
collection and use of domestic information, including private sector
information about U.S. persons;
*	clarify the respective roles of DHS, the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center (TTIC), the FBI and other federal agencies involved with
collection and analysis of domestic terrorism information.

The Task Force concluded that until the government gives priority to
breaking down its institutional barriers to cooperation and presents the
public with a cohesive plan for the network, the public will not understand
how private sector information is a critical part of the network. Further,
government-wide guidelines are needed that clearly define the security
interests in research into data mining of private sector information and
that provide controls to address the privacy implications of such programs
in order to establish public trust in these programs.

In its report, the Task Force notes that it is essential that the
government shed its Cold War culture in order to properly address the
threat the nation faces from terrorism. During the Cold War, the use of
information was dominated by a culture of classification and tight
limitations on access, in which information was shared only on a "need to
know" basis. However, the events of September 11 have starkly demonstrated
the dangers associated with the failure to share information, not only
within the federal government, but also between the federal government, on
the one hand, and state and local governments and the private sector on the
other. The threat today requires unprecedented speed in the way the
government collects, shares, and acts on information. To deal with this
threat, information needs to be tailored to facilitate decision-making and
action at all levels-not only by the President, but also the police
officers on the street.

"Our Task Force's fundamental objective was to identify the technological
tools and infrastructure, the policies, and the processes necessary to link
different levels of government and the private sector, so that important
information can be shared among the people who need it as rapidly as
possible, within a system of guidelines and technologies designed to
protect civil liberties," said Michael Vatis, executive director of the
Task Force. "The government has caused confusion by creating multiple new
agencies without clearly defining their respective roles and
responsibilities."

The SHARE network that the Task Force has proposed - which it recommends be
overseen by DHS -- in the first stage could be built using existing
technology. Technology products that are currently available would allow
information to be both protected and shared through the use of published
directories, listing who has relevant information, and permissioning rules
to determine whom can access the information. Currently available
technology would also allow for the authentication for subscribers to the
directories and the anonymization of personally identifiable information
where appropriate in order to share the necessary information while
protecting privacy.

As the recent controversies surrounding DARPA's Terrorist Information
Awareness program and an Army contractor's use of Jet Blue passenger data
demonstrate, government access to, and use of, privately held data remains
a vexing problem. In its report, the Task Force notes that the government
should effectively utilize the valuable information that is held in private
hands, but only within a system of rules and guidelines designed to protect
civil liberties. Since it is not possible for the nation to harden all
potential targets against terrorist attack, the Task Force concludes that
the government must rely on information to detect, prevent, and effectively
respond to attacks. The travel, hotel, financial, immigration, health, or
educational records of a person suspected by the government to be a
terrorist may hold information that is vital to unveiling both his
intentions and those of other terrorists.

However, the Task Force also concludes that the government should not have
routine access to personally identifying information even if it is widely
available to the public. If government is to sustain public support for its
efforts, it must demonstrate that the information it seeks to acquire is
genuinely important to the security mission and is obtained and used in a
way that minimizes its impact on privacy and civil liberties. Until
government-wide guidelines that achieve this are developed, public concern
over potential privacy infringements will continue to hamper the necessary
development of new technologies and new operational programs necessary to
use that information. Policy guidelines like these are meant to empower
government officials as well as limit them, and Congress and the Executive
Branch should share a common commitment to both objectives.

The Task Force also calls on the President to issue guidelines governing
the authority of intelligence and security agencies to receive, retain and
disseminate government information gathered in the U.S. about U.S. persons
and guidelines governing their ability to task the domestic collection of
information. New guidelines in this area are particularly important since
the creation of TTIC as an all-source intelligence and analysis center
raises the question of what will replace the previous "line at the border"
that largely defined the distinctive rules for foreign and domestic
intelligence.

It is critically important that the President issue this guidance before
another major terrorist incident occurs. If public debate were to take
place in the shadow of another major national tragedy, it could lead to
rushed and poorly conceived initiatives that not only fail to solve the
underlying problems, but also have a detrimental impact on civil liberties.

Finally, the Task Force recommends that in one year, the Executive Branch
and Congress evaluate the progress of federal, state, local, and private
sector entities in improving information sharing and analysis and in
utilizing private sector data while protecting civil liberties. To help
with this evaluation, the Task Force issued detailed sets of questions than
can be asked to determine whether adequate progress has been made.

To download a copy of Creating A Trusted Information Network for Homeland
Security or for more information on the Task Force, please visit
www.markletaskforce.org

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as eugen at leitl.org
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Dec  5 15:53:38 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 15:53:38 -0800
Subject: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

DO NOT FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ANY OTHER LISTS. I AM GETTING TIRED OF 
SEEING CYPHERPUNKS JUST BE THE DUMPING GROUND FOR STUFF FROM OTHER 
LISTS.


In almost all foreseeable cases, a system which allows identity escrow 
_cost more_ than a system which does not. This is analogous to the 
increased costs of a identity-based money system over an 
immediate-clearing, non-identity-based system.

As an example, consider the network of CP or Mixmaster sorts of 
remailers. To package a payload through N remailers is a relatively 
easy thing for a a sender to do. But to arrange for propagation of 
"escrowed identity" at each (or most) of these N remailer nodes is 
costly.

Any  of these N remailers, in K different countries/jurisdictions, may 
use the "legal warrant" access method to open the identity escrow. For 
example, Finland in the Scientology/NOTS case...Finland surely would 
have used their "legal warrant" method had such an option existed.

This is part of a larger issue, a philosophical one, about who controls 
"legal warrants." The Jew can be killed by using legal warrants, in 
Third Reich Germany. The libertarian in Soviet Russia. The pornographer 
in Canada. And nearly anyone who deviates from the official line in 
these beknighted states of america: smut peddlers, drug legalization 
advocates, supporters of Russia vs. Chechnya prior to 9/11, supporters 
of Chechnya vs. Russia after 9/11, liberators of Diebold documents 
showing the weakness of their voting machines, and so on and on. See my 
1995-6 list of our enemies (Catholics, Whigs, Mormons, Communists...) 
for a very long list of those for whom "identity escrow" would have 
meant death or imprisonment in these beknighted states.

Back to the cost issue. Prof. Lessig argues that voluntary identity 
escrow systems should be "encouraged." How/ Through nattering to people 
about how they ought to use a more expensive, less flexible system 
which exposes them to possible danger and which costs them more to use 
than the stronger alternative?

Ha!

Or "encouraged" in the sense of using state power to make stronger 
systems illegal or artificially taxed at higher rates?

Why doesn't the U.S.G. just set up a "Big Brother Remailer" with the 
kind of identity escrow proposed?

Let's then see how many freedom fighters working for the overthrow of 
the U.S. government use it. Let's see how many critics of the Church of 
Scientology, threatened with lawsuits and "legal warrants," use it. 
Let's see how much child porn gets traded on it.

--Tim May




From eugen at leitl.org  Fri Dec  5 07:20:12 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 16:20:12 +0100
Subject: [IP] Markle Report -- Creating A Trusted Information Network
  for Homeland Security (fwd from dave@farber.net)
Message-ID: <20031205152012.GX5783@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <dave at farber.net> -----


From timcmay at got.net  Fri Dec  5 16:45:51 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 16:45:51 -0800
Subject: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
In-Reply-To: <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 5, 2003, at 3:53 PM, Tim May wrote:
> Back to the cost issue. Prof. Lessig argues that voluntary identity 
> escrow systems should be "encouraged." How/ Through nattering to 
> people about how they ought to use a more expensive, less flexible 
> system which exposes them to possible danger and which costs them more 
> to use than the stronger alternative?
>
> Ha!
>
> Or "encouraged" in the sense of using state power to make stronger 
> systems illegal or artificially taxed at higher rates?
>
> Why doesn't the U.S.G. just set up a "Big Brother Remailer" with the 
> kind of identity escrow proposed?
>
> Let's then see how many freedom fighters working for the overthrow of 
> the U.S. government use it. Let's see how many critics of the Church 
> of Scientology, threatened with lawsuits and "legal warrants," use it. 
> Let's see how much child porn gets traded on it.
>


And there are so many other points, long discussed here (1992-present), 
which Lessig's proposal would run into:

* what if someone, like me, forwards items sent untraceably to me? (The 
Lessig Escrow remailer does not even know it is from me, or forwarded 
by me, unless and until he gets a "legal warrant" to open the 
contents...too late, then.)

(If passing on a comment from another is illegal, on what basis? A 
remailer is just as easily seen as an "editor" or "re-commenter.")

* if government controls remailers, what of those plotting against 
government? Is Jefferson supposed to use the King's remailers?

* if the systems Lessig thinks should be "encouraged" are in fact set 
up--and no doubt some such systems already exist--how can they know 
that they are not themselves being used as part of a chain which 
includes traditionally-untraceable (CP, Mix remailers) upstream? 
Without looking, using their ostensible "legal warrants," a Big Brother 
Remailer has no way of knowing that the messages sent through from 
"Tim" were not just the messages of others.

BTW, an argument I heard years ago from a proponent of an identity 
escrow system, long before Lessig, was that this approach would be 
blocked by making "Tim" responsible for all words or messages flowing 
into an IE remailer, even those he could not read (because they had 
been encrypted). The idea is to stop this chaining attack by making 
each user responsible for checking all the way back. In other words, 
for an IE system to work, competitors must be banned. Which is the same 
conclusion reached via other paths.

(And, though IANAL, even I know that making "Tim" legally responsible 
even for messages he has no way of knowing fails the "scienter" test. 
Absent a ban on encryption, what "Tim " has done in passing along to 
"Larry's Remailer" a message which actually arrived from a non-IE 
remailer is nothing more than passing along something he was given. He 
has no knowledge of the contents (scienter requirement) and is not 
breaking any laws, absent a ban on competitors to IE remailers.)

Anyway, this was hashed out many times in the early 90s and shortly 
after the very similar proposal for Clipper and other similar forms of 
key escrow.

I have nothing against Lessig, but it bugs me that he's considered by 
some to be one of the Great Cyberspace Thinkers when his ideas are so 
easily dismissed...and were argued on both sides so many years ago.

Larry Lessig ought to read, and think deeply about, the first ten years 
of traffic on the Cypherpunks list. Especially the first five years.


--Tim May




From eugen at leitl.org  Fri Dec  5 08:22:49 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 17:22:49 +0100
Subject: Privacy and Property on the Net: Research Questions
Message-ID: <20031205162249.GC5783@leitl.org>

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5651/1686

PERCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE ESSAY:
Privacy and Property on the Net: Research Questions
William Sims Bainbridge*

The Net, which consists of the Internet plus the parallel networks of
commercial and military data communication, raises serious issues of personal
information vulnerability and ownership of intellectual property.
Peer-to-peer sharing of music files over Internet, for example, challenges
the existing system of copyright. Counterterrorism "data mining" systems hunt
for signs of suspicious activity across vast databases of information about
people who do not wish to be spied upon. Research by social and information
scientists is needed to clarify many such issues.

To a sociologist, perhaps the most interesting quality of Internet and other
data transmission networks is their potential to alter power relationships
with respect to personal privacy and intellectual property. Both are
restrictions on the free flow of information. Government is implicated in
both, on the one hand by providing legal support for them and, on the other
hand, by potentially violating them in the pursuit of its own goals, such as
national security. Social scientists have only just begun framing research
projects to learn how the Internet is liberating information from traditional
restraints or to understand the likely human consequences.

Although both privacy and property are rooted deep in humanity's evolutionary
past, they are variables, and societal norms change. For example, until a
century and a half ago, U.S. census takers would post their completed
enumeration forms in the town square for anyone to read, but from 1850 until
1954 when Title 13 of the U.S. Code forbade publication of an individual's
records, a complex series of steps gradually increased confidentiality
protections (1). Today, the Census Bureau keeps the data confidential for 72
years. This change has largely been driven by the increasing government
collection of data about its citizens, to facilitate social services,
taxation, and management of the economy (2). By offering confidentiality,
government hopes the public will relinquish some of its traditional privacy.
Whether citizens benefit from government collection of data about them is
another matter. In Maryland, every prospective juror is asked what his or her
religion is, even though this information is not used in the jury selection
process. The religion data are kept confidential, but all information about
prospective jurors that is used in the selection is made public. Thus, we
have the bizarre situation of costly information being kept confidential
precisely because it is useless.

The idea that government should regulate intellectual property through
copyrights and patents is relatively recent in human history, and the precise
details of what intellectual property is protected for how long vary across
nations and occasionally change. There are two standard sociological
justifications for patents or copyrights: They reward creators for their
labor, and they encourage greater creativity. Both of these are empirical
claims that can be tested scientifically and could be false in some realms
(3, 4).

Consider music (5). Star performers existed before the 20th century, such as
Franz Liszt and Niccolo Paganini, but mass media produced a celebrity system
promoting a few stars whose music was not necessarily the best or most
diverse. Copyright provides protection for distribution companies and for a
few celebrities, thereby helping to support the industry as currently
defined, but it may actually harm the majority of performers. This is
comparable to Anatole France's famous irony, "The law, in its majestic
equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges." In
theory, copyright covers the creations of celebrities and obscurities
equally, but only major distribution companies have the resources to defend
their property rights in court. In a sense, this is quite fair, because
nobody wants to steal unpopular music, but by supporting the property rights
of celebrities, copyright strengthens them as a class in contrast to
anonymous musicians.

Internet music file sharing has become a significant factor in the social
lives of children, who download bootleg music tracks for their own use and to
give as gifts to friends. If we are to believe one recent poll done by a
marketing firm rather than social scientists, 48% of American Internet users
aged 12 to 17 had downloaded music files in the past month (6). In so doing,
they violate copyright laws, and criminologists would hypothesize they
thereby learn contempt for laws in general. A poll by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project found that two-thirds of an estimated 35 million
Americans who download music files do not care whether they are copyrighted
(7). Thus, on the level of families, ending copyright could be morally as
well as economically advantageous. On a much higher level, however, the
culture- exporting nations (notably the United States) could stand to lose,
although we cannot really predict the net balance of costs and benefits in
the absence of proper research. We do not presently have good cross-national
data on file sharing or a well-developed theoretical framework to guide
research on whether copyright protection supports cultural imperialism versus
enhancing the positions of diverse cultures in the global marketplace.

It will not be easy to test such hypotheses, and extensive economic research
has not conclusively answered the question of whether the patent system
really promotes innovation. We will need many careful, sharp-focus studies of
well-formed hypotheses in specific industries and sectors of life. For
example, observational and interview research can uncover the factors that
really promote cultural innovation among artists of various kinds and
determine the actual consequences for children of Internet peer-to-peer file
sharing.

The classic sociological theory of privacy asserts two main principles that
are relevant to current information debates (8, 9). First, private relations
between individuals are not merely a personal luxury but the very basis of
all societies. Thus, surveillance of citizens in the name of national
security undermines the very society it was intended to protect. Second,
privacy and its violation are inescapably issues of power, with power defined
as the ability to defend one's own privacy while being able to invade the
privacy of others. Thus, citizens' privacy is violated by government
surveillance, even if the information is kept confidential afterward by the
agencies.

Computer scientists have begun to develop systems that would defend people's
information privacy (10). For example, the World Wide Web consortium, which
is the chief forum for development of Web standards, has launched the
Platform for Privacy Preferences, which automatically manages personal
information when interacting with Web sites, following the explicit wishes of
the user (11).

Ethically informed research can be valuable for design and implementation of
information systems. Data mining, for example, can be used in
noncontroversial situations like intrusion detection, when you need to defend
your own data against attack from outside. But it can also be used
aggressively to sift through vast troves of data, pulled together via the Net
in a process called data fusion, in a way that violates the privacy of
law-abiding citizens while hunting for a few criminals or terrorists. In its
recent report, Information Technology for Counterterrorism, the National
Research Council blithely suggests that all airport security baggage x-ray
machines could send their pictures to a unified computer network that would
monitor the collective movements of terrorists boarding different airplanes
in different cities, incidentally spying on everybody else who flies (12).
Proper sociotechnical design could limit the harm. For example, an automatic
data-mining system could seek patterns of suspicious behavior, without
allowing any human being to see the data. Then, specially sworn court
officials could carefully examine the suspicious cases, before reporting to
law enforcement only those few that met statutory definitions of probable
cause.

What is the optimal design for such a multitiered confidentiality system?
Would there be unintended consequences? Would it be acceptable to the public?
Without good answers to such questions, information technology could fall
under the same cloud of public suspicion that hangs over nuclear power and
genetic engineering. Already, aggressive telemarketing has made people very
reluctant to answer scientific surveys administered by telephone (13).
Internet-based surveys have promise, but they typically lack the reliability
of traditional random-sample polling. Another challenge is that impartial
research on the real consequences of government security-motivated data
fusion and mining may not be possible within the government security regime
itself, because impartiality in science requires the research to be made
public.

Like other buzzwords, "data mining" is difficult to define precisely, and it
is practically indistinguishable from a wide range of statistical and pattern
recognition techniques used throughout the sciences. Thus, if it is brought
into disrepute by privacy violations, science could be harmed. Similarly,
many scientists use data that belong to other people, such as the social
survey data archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and
Social Research (14), so they would be affected by any change in the
intellectual property regime. Internet arose as a medium of scientific
communication and is an indispensable tool for scientists today. Thus,
research on Internet privacy and property issues could benefit science
itself, as well as society.

Only an anarchist would argue for complete government deregulation of
information, but any social scientist would find it interesting to
contemplate the implications of major changes in government enforcement of
intellectual property rights and government collection of data about its
citizens. This essay has briefly sketched theoretical issues that would
underlie research on information privacy and property in the age of Internet,
and policy-makers should be aware that current practices may reflect cultural
lag, the conflict-ridden situation when technological development has
rendered traditional norms obsolete (15).

References and Notes

   1. R. McCaa, S. Ruggles, Scand. Pop. Stud. 13, (2002).
   2. D. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Basic Books, New York,
1973).
   3. C. A. Ganz-Brown, J. World Intellect. Property 1, (1998).
   4. National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age
(National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2000).
   5. W. S. Bainbridge, in Social Sciences for a Digital World, M. Renaud,
Ed. (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Paris, 2000).
   6. Ipsos-Insight, "Legal issues don't hinder American downloaders" (14
March 2003); [cited from www.ipsos-reid.com 5 May 2003]; available at
www/ipsos-insight.com.
   7. M. Madden, S. Lenhart, "Music downloading, file-sharing and copyright"
(July 2003) at www.pewtrusts.com.
   8. B. Schwartz, Am. J. Sociol. 73 (1968).
   9. W. S. Bainbridge, "Privacy," forthcoming in Encyclopedia of Community,
K. Christensen and D. Levinson, Eds. (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2003).
  10. National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board, Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy (National
Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2003).
  11. World Wide Web Consortium at www.w3c.org.
  12. National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board, Information Technology for Counterterrorism (National Academies Press,
Washington, DC, 2003).
  13. D. El Boghdady, Washington Post, 8 September 2002, p. H1.
  14. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at
www.icpsr.umich.edu.
  15. W. F. Ogburn, Social Change (Huebsch, New York, 1922).
  16. The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent the
views of the National Science Foundation or the United States.

The author is in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, the
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National
Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22230, USA. E-mail:
william.bainbridge at verizon.net

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Dec  6 13:59:26 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 13:59:26 -0800
Subject: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
In-Reply-To: <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 5, 2003, at 5:53 PM, Jamie Lawrence wrote:

>
>> I have nothing against Lessig, but it bugs me that he's considered by
>> some to be one of the Great Cyberspace Thinkers when his ideas are so
>> easily dismissed...and were argued on both sides so many years ago.
>>
>> Larry Lessig ought to read, and think deeply about, the first ten 
>> years
>> of traffic on the Cypherpunks list. Especially the first five years.
>
> Lessig is a very smart man, in the framework he's very smart at dealing
> with.  And probably more beyond that.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't think copyright is an appropriate framework from
> which to launch a discussion about wider modes of human communication.
>
> Correcting him early and often is absolutely in order - hopefully he'll
> rethink a thing or two.

This actually fits in with something Lessig is widely known for, his 
"technology-custom-law" trichotomy (*).

(* He may call it something different...I haven't checked in a while. 
And I recall he may have a fourth component. I was talking in similar 
terms many years ago, too. Not that I am saying Lessig borrowed from my 
ideas, as I am sure many of us independently realized this. Cf. via 
Google some of the things I wrote about VCRs and how they changed the 
ground truth of what was legally copyable. Or how Gutenberg created a 
technology which made existing custom (e.g., the Church) and law (e.g., 
the Guilds) effectively moot.)

Those who make Grand Plans about such things as "pseudonymity with 
legal warrant access" need to take systems and computer science (and 
hence math) into account. This usually comes through thinking about 
possible attacks, weaknesses, and design flaws.

For example, I have cited the obvious case of someone, call him "Tim," 
using "Larry's LEO-Friendly Remailer." But Tim is _not_ a LEO-friendly 
remailer, and Tim has taken in articles from other such 
non-LEO-friendly remailers.

The only way Larry knows that Tim is doing this is if Larry "peeks" 
(examines the content to see what it is, to see that it does not 
contain seditious or pornographic or non-LEO-friendly packets). Or 
Larry can wait for the eventual "legal warrant" and then find that Tim 
was remailing packets which could not be traced. Oops. Larry can then 
cancel Tim's account.

More generally, I think Lessig has failed to understand the very 
fundamental, underlying structure of true Cypherpunks-style remailers:

::request-remailing-to: foo at anotherremailer.org
This can be any arbitrary text, and all that is passed on to the next 
remailer or recipient.
And this text block is not tagged in any way with sender ID. And this 
text can be encrypted,
readable only by the specified "nextremailer." And this text block can 
included further
requests for remailing, and so on and so forth.


Tim again. With this structure, nested and packaged as a payload, for 
Lessig's scheme to actually give "warrant-only traceability," it must 
ban such nested remailings. Which means, ban on crypto.

(For if crypto is allowed, then even a warrant cannot crack it. "Oh, 
then we'll have key escrow...")

And so on. A little bit of thought reveals numerous such attacks on a 
"LEO-friendly remailer." And the "fixes" are all in the direction of, 
in the final analysis, banning strong encryption.

Of course, Lessig may say that he is only advocating an ultra-weak 
system of remailers that only dummies will use. He may say he does not 
propose to actually ban "strong remailers."

Some argue that weak systems--remailers or crypto--will thrive "because 
most crooks are lazy" has been dealt with many times. Sure, some people 
doing things use weak systems, out of ignorance, out of laziness, out 
of a sense that they are immortal and cannot be caught. But others 
doing illegal or marginal things are amongst the earliest adopters of 
relatively robust systems: offshore banks, encrypted disks, and, 
ironically, secure anonymous remailers.

(When the Finnish police finally forced Julf Helsingius to reveal the 
pseudonym attached to the Church of Scientology "NOTS" documents, they 
found that inside was a packet from a true Cypherpunks remailer, whose 
last node was at C2Net, the company Sameer Parekh founded. End of 
trail. This showed that even as early as 1995 someone was thinking 
ahead to the day when the Finnish police would force a "weak 
pseudonymity" system like PENET (Julf's system, based on earlier code 
written by another hacker) to give "warranted access" a la Lessig. So 
much for people being too dumb to use a strong system!)

If Lessig is truly _only_ proposing that some idiots be encouraged to 
use weak remailers and weak crypto, then, fine, no harm done.

However, the goals Lessig is avowedly seeking, of access to identities 
through "legal warrants," then his system will rapidly  become unused 
after the first few "legal warrant" convictions.

So long as strong systems cost little more than weak systems, strong 
systems prevail. (And, for various reasons, strong systems are in most 
cases cheaper to use than weak systems.)

In a kind of reverse of Gresham's Law ("weak money drives out good 
money"), strong crypto drives out weak crypto.

(Actually, this is not so much a reverse of Gresham's Law as its 
manifestation in terms of what money is: people seek to get rid of (= 
spend) weak money and hold on to (= hoard, save) strong money. So they 
spend their "debased" currency and hold on to their gold double eagles. 
This actually confirms the above point.)

Bottom Line: In the ecology of encryption, remailers, and digital 
money, weak systems that are LEO-friendly will ultimately lose out to 
strong systems. Unless the strong systems are outlawed, and maybe not 
even then.

--Tim May

"I'm sorry that Tim is being a bother again. He has a long history of
being obnoxious and threatening. So far, he has not broken any laws. We 
have talked to the authorities about him on numerous occasions. They 
have chosen to watch but not act.  Please feel free to notify me if he 
does anything that is beyond rude and actually violates any laws and I 
will immediately inform the authorities."

Thank You
Don Frederickson  (co-owner and CEO of got.net, Santa Cruz)




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sun Dec  7 13:47:12 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 13:47:12 -0800
Subject: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
In-Reply-To: <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
  <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031207131538.02880c28@idiom.com>

I think Declan's got the title wrong -
Lessig's discussions that he references aren't about
ending anonymity through escrowed pseudonymity -
they're about replacing some True-Name-based or linkable
applications with pseudonymous ones.  For instance,
one-use credit card numbers instead of regular numbers,
which not only makes it harder for the merchant to do
credit card fraud, but also makes it harder for
marketers to trace your activities,
even though they can go back to the credit card company
and get that information.

A similar application, which we'll unfortunately probably never see,
is to replace the SSN with a pile of one-use tax ID numbers.
That way, instead of giving everybody who needs to
collect taxes on your account the same SSN,
which they can then use to link lots of records together,
you'd be giving each one a single number that only
you and the IRS can coordinate.

An application that people use all the time
is disposable email addresses.  Sure, you can use declan at well.com
every time you give some web site your address or send email to
somebody you haven't talked to before, but eventually spammers get that
and it's too annoying; an alternative is to use free email accounts
when you think you might get spammed.  Hotmail was the canonical source,
though yahoo's easier to use these days.  One of Declan's
fellow columnists, Annalee Newitz, uses a different username at her domain
on each of her newspaper columns; presumably some of them become
spam targets and get trashed eventually.




From nobody at dizum.com  Sun Dec  7 06:10:04 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sun,  7 Dec 2003 15:10:04 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
Message-ID: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@dizum.com>

-----BEGIN TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE-----
Message-type: plaintext

Tim,

I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION 
FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS...

-----END TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE-----




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec  7 15:26:37 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:26:37 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
References: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@dizum.com>
  <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 7, 2003, at 1:25 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 03:10:04PM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>> Tim,
>>
>> I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION
>> FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS...
>
> He is correct, of course. One of these days I'm going to get
> MailMan working, and resurrect cpunx-news.
>
> This list shouldn't be drowned in forwards. It's a good way
> to drown discussion.
>
> Not that there is much discussion, the cyherpunk meme doesn't seem
> to draw fresh blood too effectively. I'm seeing similiar trends
> across virtually all my mailing lists, so I presume it's the medium
> itself that it's in decline.
>
> Both IRC and IM are of course even worse content killers than email.

I have several theories/conjectures about what is happening to mailing 
lists.

First, a lot of the younger folks--who used to be some of the fresh 
blood for lists like ours--are not users of mailing lists. I expect 
some of them don't even know such things exist. For them, IM is the 
norm. (And IM is mostly an interpersonal, chat format.)

Second, blogs seem to have taken over for many formerly active mailing 
lists. In some of the areas of interest to me, a dozen blogs are 
frequently read, including the ones with fairly active followup. And 
example is "Lambda the Ultimate," http://lambda.weblogs.com/, just one 
of many similar language and programming blogs.

(Personally, I think much is being lost in the shift away from Usenet 
and mailing lists towards these blogs. For while follow-ups exist for 
many of them, there is always the sense that one is participating in 
Dave Winer's blog, or Mitch Kapor's blog, or whatever. Further, many of 
the blogs take on a "my daily diary" and "random musings" tone. By the 
way, though I read the good blogs, like LtU, I don't post to any of 
them.)

Third, the explosion of mailing lists, Yahoo discussion groups, 
"pipermail" groups (such as the E language and "capabilities" folks 
tend to use), etc., has made many groups "subcritical." (Something we 
began to see half a dozen years ago, when Cypherpunks had a bunch of 
close competitors (cryptography, coderpunks, etc.), plus several lists 
run by Hettinga, plus a couple by Declan, and so on. Cross-posting to 
Usenet newsgroups was bad enough, but cross-posting to many mailing 
lists was a major pain. Especially as most lists are closed to 
outsiders, who can sometimes posts, sometimes not, but where context 
and followups are lost.)

Fourth, 9/11. A lot of people got very scared of saying what they 
think. Read the archives and note the drop-off in certain kinds of 
political discussion. Even some of the former nodes have vanished; my 
hunch is that many of those subscribed to the vanished nodes never 
bothered to find another node. (I have no idea how many subscribers the 
list has. The nodes I know of don't allow listing the subscribers. I 
would not be surprised if the subscription total has dropped below a 
few hundred. And of these, clearly only a few dozen regular posters 
come to mind.)

Fifth, relevant for our list, "crypto is tired." As in Wired's old 
"wired/tired" joke column (and of course "Wired" is _especially_ 
tired). Not that crypto is less important now than it was, but, 
plainly, some things expected have not yet happened, with little 
prospect of happening soon. And since the basic ideas have been 
discussed so many times before, in so many ways, not much excitement in 
discussing "dining cryptographers" for the 7th time, or "how to make 
PGP more popular" for the 16th time.

Sixth, the lack of news about crypto. No prosecutions of a "folk hero" 
like Zimmermann to pull in newcomers. No Clipper chip. No bans on 
crypto (at least not yet).

But even if crypto got trendy again, I just don't see the young 
students of today flocking to our particular mailing list. Too many 
other choices. Probably they'll read someone's daily blog....

One last reason, the most controversial one. When I was 40 I really had 
no difficulty dealing with the 20-year-olds. They seemed basically a 
lot like I was when I was their age. But something has changed. Maybe 
it's me, maybe it's not. But now, at the age of almost 52, I find 
dealing with most of the people in their 20s I encounter, even at CP 
meetings, much harder. Maybe it's their usually bald heads (seems many 
guys in their 20s shave their heads). Maybe it's the rings through 
their noses and eyebrows and lips and other places (shudder). Maybe 
it's that openly embrace "geekiness" without actually having a solid 
foundation in math and physics and such. And probably it's that when I 
was 40 I was not _that_ much older than the people in their 20s...but 
now I am older than their own parents!

Whatever, I find when I talk to these newcomers with their bald heads, 
their piercings, their Linux geek talk, I have almost nothing in common 
with them.

And, as many have noted, very few of the "kids" today are libertarians 
(either small L or large L). This was the fertile ground Cypherpunks 
started in (myself, Gilmore, Stewart, Sandfort, etc., whether or not 
they called themselves libertarians or not).

This shows up in the fact that protests against global capitalism draw 
vast crowds of young people, and even several subscribers to our list 
have nattered on about the dangers of globalism and free trade.

In other words, politically-speaking, Cypherpunks is out of tune with 
what most twentysomethings seem to believe.

--Tim May
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone
  with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later
  convinces himself." -- David Friedman




From measl at mfn.org  Sun Dec  7 16:11:52 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:11:52 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> I have several theories/conjectures about what is happening to mailing 
> lists.
> 
> First, a lot of the younger folks--who used to be some of the fresh 
> blood for lists like ours--are not users of mailing lists. I expect 
> some of them don't even know such things exist. For them, IM is the 
> norm. (And IM is mostly an interpersonal, chat format.)

Not true.  I personally run several mailing lists with heavy political
bents.  One in particular, "antisocial" (the name is a play on a post someone
made a long time ago) is vibrant and continually growing.  But they need to
be nurtured - this is the failing of this list.  We no longer take care to
bring in new blood.  We have failed utterly to encourage new ideas.  And any
new blood which may test the waters with a posting that doesn't follow median
doctrine is likely to find themselves and their deviant ideas under heavy
attack, rather than discussion.

People won't post ideas that conflict with the mainstream (which obviously is
different in each unique forum) if these ideas are either dismissed out of
hand or attacked ad hominem.


> Second, blogs seem to have taken over for many formerly active mailing 
> lists.

Not really.  The blogs tend to be more of a "pulpit" that an idea exchange
point.

> In some of the areas of interest to me, a dozen blogs are 
> frequently read, including the ones with fairly active followup. And 
> example is "Lambda the Ultimate," http://lambda.weblogs.com/, just one 
> of many similar language and programming blogs.


Yes, but these suffer from the same malaise of everyone having the same
opinion :-(

 
> (Personally, I think much is being lost in the shift away from Usenet 


Usenet is the perfect example of an inherently hostile arena.  Even worse,
its a perfect example of what true anarchy really is - usenet has been lost
to the disruptors.


> and mailing lists towards these blogs. For while follow-ups exist for 
> many of them, there is always the sense that one is participating in 
> Dave Winer's blog, or Mitch Kapor's blog, or whatever. Further, many of 
> the blogs take on a "my daily diary" and "random musings" tone. 

Precisely.


> By the 
> way, though I read the good blogs, like LtU, I don't post to any of 
> them.)
> 
> Third, the explosion of mailing lists, Yahoo discussion groups, 
> "pipermail" groups (such as the E language and "capabilities" folks 
> tend to use), etc., has made many groups "subcritical." (Something we 
> began to see half a dozen years ago, when Cypherpunks had a bunch of 
> close competitors (cryptography, coderpunks, etc.), plus several lists 
> run by Hettinga, plus a couple by Declan, and so on. Cross-posting to 
> Usenet newsgroups was bad enough, but cross-posting to many mailing 
> lists was a major pain. Especially as most lists are closed to 
> outsiders, who can sometimes posts, sometimes not, but where context 
> and followups are lost.)
> 
> Fourth, 9/11. A lot of people got very scared of saying what they 
> think. 

Totally agree, however, CP has been going "subcritical" since long before
9/11.


> Read the archives and note the drop-off in certain kinds of 
> political discussion. Even some of the former nodes have vanished; my 
> hunch is that many of those subscribed to the vanished nodes never 
> bothered to find another node. (I have no idea how many subscribers the 
> list has. The nodes I know of don't allow listing the subscribers. 

None of mine will allow it either, with the reason being the protection of
the list contributors.


> I 
> would not be surprised if the subscription total has dropped below a 
> few hundred. And of these, clearly only a few dozen regular posters 
> come to mind.)
> 
> Fifth, relevant for our list, "crypto is tired." As in Wired's old 
> "wired/tired" joke column (and of course "Wired" is _especially_ 
> tired). Not that crypto is less important now than it was, but, 
> plainly, some things expected have not yet happened, with little 
> prospect of happening soon. And since the basic ideas have been 
> discussed so many times before, in so many ways, not much excitement in 
> discussing "dining cryptographers" for the 7th time, or "how to make 
> PGP more popular" for the 16th time.

CP has always been so much more than crypto.  The history here is political,
with crypto not always playing a part.  Even the non-crypto discussion is
almost completely lost.



> Sixth, the lack of news about crypto. No prosecutions of a "folk hero" 
> like Zimmermann to pull in newcomers. No Clipper chip. No bans on 
> crypto (at least not yet).
> 
> But even if crypto got trendy again, I just don't see the young 
> students of today flocking to our particular mailing list. Too many 
> other choices. Probably they'll read someone's daily blog....

Unless someone goes out of their way to try and introduce them to the
list.  We regularly solicit for antisocial - especially from areas that are
anathema to the posting-core of the list.  

To put it simply, CP has lost many of the core values that made it so
important - Information Wants To Be Free, right?  Or does it. 

We are not spedning much time trying to dig up information from people with
positions we may consider abhorrent... 


> One last reason, the most controversial one. When I was 40 I really had 
> no difficulty dealing with the 20-year-olds. They seemed basically a 
> lot like I was when I was their age. But something has changed. Maybe 
> it's me, maybe it's not. But now, at the age of almost 52, I find 
> dealing with most of the people in their 20s I encounter, even at CP 
> meetings, much harder. Maybe it's their usually bald heads (seems many 
> guys in their 20s shave their heads). Maybe it's the rings through 
> their noses and eyebrows and lips and other places (shudder). Maybe 
> it's that openly embrace "geekiness" without actually having a solid 
> foundation in math and physics and such. And probably it's that when I 
> was 40 I was not _that_ much older than the people in their 20s...but 
> now I am older than their own parents!


Oh jesus: the "Young People Are So *Different*" BS.  Spare us.  This is the
easy way out - it places the onus on others, when really the weight falls to
all of us.  We need to either put up or shut up.


> Whatever, I find when I talk to these newcomers with their bald heads, 
> their piercings, their Linux geek talk, I have almost nothing in common 
> with them.
> 
> And, as many have noted, very few of the "kids" today are libertarians 
> (either small L or large L). This was the fertile ground Cypherpunks 
> started in (myself, Gilmore, Stewart, Sandfort, etc., whether or not 
> they called themselves libertarians or not).

Then why aren't you inviting them here to listen and learn?  Maybe you can
convert them?  Or maybe they will convert you?


> This shows up in the fact that protests against global capitalism draw 
> vast crowds of young people, and even several subscribers to our list 
> have nattered on about the dangers of globalism and free trade.
> 
> In other words, politically-speaking, Cypherpunks is out of tune with 
> what most twentysomethings seem to believe.


No.  Cypherpunks has become out of tune with what most CPs claim to believe.

> 
> --Tim May
> "As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone
>   with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later
>   convinces himself." -- David Friedman
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

Father, you are a great and mighty God. Help our governments to remember the
lessons of our history and to appreciate the purpose of your son Jesus. Teach
our representatives not to be so arrogant as to speak in one way, but doing
another, for surely this not the way of truth. Help us to understand that
your will is not death but life, not the darkness of hatred but the light of
friendship in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Merle Harton, Jr.




From gbnewby at pglaf.org  Sun Dec  7 18:54:51 2003
From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 18:54:51 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <E1AT9Qg-0005IG-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>
References: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <E1AT9Qg-0005IG-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <20031208025451.GB31948@pglaf.org>

On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 07:37:26PM -0800, John Young wrote:
> ...
> What I like about the ring-in-the-flesh crowd is their pleasure in
> grossing out the stodgers. Makes me wish I still had that knack
> instead of only the memories.

Hey, John -- wear some of that shit, and I promise to be grossed out.

But seriously, has anyone considered that maybe the problem is Tim
May?  His hate-filled ignorance is a real impediment to anyone who
might otherwise be interested in "the cause."  His spews are pretty
distasteful, and to him, anyone who didn't start cp a zillion years
ago is just an ankle biter come-lately.

I've only been on the list for 3 years, but I'd say that things were a
lot more interesting before (In-) Choat jumped ship.

As to John's comments, they're right on: getting subscribed is a major
PIA, and even finding out where the information about the list *is* is
non-trivial for the uninitiated.  Lack of cooperation from list
managers is just the tip of the iceberg...  unfriendliness to wanna-be
participants is endemic.  So "decline" is the exact right word: the
same people, more or less, with attrition: a downward curve.

And a big "fuck you, too" to anyone who thinks otherwise.
  -- Greg




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Dec  7 19:15:04 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 19:15:04 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>

    --
On 7 Dec 2003 at 15:26, Tim May wrote:
> Whatever, I find when I talk to these newcomers with their 
> bald heads, their piercings, their Linux geek talk, I have 
> almost nothing in common with them.

The change is in you, not them.  Your postings now sound like 
old fart postings.  A similar transformation is visible in 
Doonesbury.   I don't know the cure for it.  I don't think it 
has hit me yet, but I suppose I will be the last to know.  It 
is probably incurable, like going bald.  It does not strike 
everyone.  Some, like Feynman, never become old farts, but it 
strikes a lot of people.

> And, as many have noted, very few of the "kids" today are 
> libertarians (either small L or large L).

When you were a teenager, everyone thought that Ho Chi Minh was 
the greatest, had a picture of Che Guevera on their wall, and 
thought the Soviet Union was going to win.    I would say that 
the kids of today are a damned lot more libertarian than when 
you and I were kids.

> This shows up in the fact that protests against global 
> capitalism draw vast crowds of young people, and even several 
> subscribers to our list have nattered on about the dangers of 
> globalism and free trade.

The cartoonist in "reason" (or perhaps "liberty" not sure 
which) depicts these protests as being dominated by old farts 
about your and my age, with the young folk in reluctant tow.   
I suspect if you and he attended the same demo, he would see a 
crowd of old farts, and you would see a crowd of young punks
with nose rings.  

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     /JGPIvI11TGnJc6gE6/w/g6k0rZwAOZZoka0PiIJ
     4DnWpX4iPZy18KuWpdzmsERHsIS6O34J+itCHGsE2




From jya at pipeline.com  Sun Dec  7 19:37:26 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:37:26 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <E1AT9Qg-0005IG-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>

When I got censored by cypherpunks at lne.com a couple
of weeks ago I tried to subscribe to these nodes:

Algebra
Infonex
Lne
Minder
Sunder
Pro-ns
Openpgp
Ccc

Subscription was successful only on:

Algebra
Pro-ns

Both of thse provided a "who" response on 11/10/03 of

Algebra 122
Pro-ns 14

I get the same messages from Algebra, Pro-ns and Lne, though 
Lne still refuses mail from me.

How many other subscribers are exluded by the censorious
and dead nodes is not known. Eric calls his Lne block a result of
spam from my provider, to me it's no different than censorship,
a perfect imitation of how government justifies its suppression
of dissent.

Tim didn't mention as a cause of cpunk decline the fucking with
the list by shitheads who thought they knew best how to run
things, the first goal being censorship of those who didn't
behave. Once, Tim was a prime target of such shit and he
did a nice job of killing the controllers.

Now if you kill the bureaucrats, and the youngsters, for overreaching, 
or indifference to authority, you got to figure out how to do the dirty 
work of cleaning up after the masters' spiteful running the country, 
the firm, the estate, the family, the ideology into the ground.

What I like about the ring-in-the-flesh crowd is their pleasure in
grossing out the stodgers. Makes me wish I still had that knack
instead of only the memories.




From coderman at charter.net  Sun Dec  7 19:50:49 2003
From: coderman at charter.net (coderman)
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:50:49 -0800
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
References: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@dizum.com>
  <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <3FD3F519.2080704@charter.net>

Eugen Leitl wrote:

>Not that there is much discussion, the cyherpunk meme doesn't seem
>to draw fresh blood too effectively.
>
I've been wondering why I havent seen more discussion on
wireless networking (802.11a/b/g) and anon/mix /dark nets.
Is this a subject of interest to anyone?  I am curious what
kinds of work has been done in this area...

A few examples:
- cryptographic dead drop or anonymous broadcast: wifi
  broadcasts with clients monitoring for tagged packets.
  Anonymous transport for a number of miles. (probably
  requires amps)

- (encrypted) wireless hops in a mix network for additional
  attack resistance, and/or all wireless (mesh?) routing.

Is the mapping of existing cryptographic techniques to
wireless transport straighforward and uninteresting, or
is there additional capabilities in a wireless envrionment
that open up new uses for secure and/or anonymous
communication?




From jya at pipeline.com  Sun Dec  7 19:55:38 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 19:55:38 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <E1AT9Qg-0005IG-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <E1AT9iF-00063X-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>

This mighty wind header of Pro-ns outblows most messages, and appears
to confirm that only Algebra, Lne and Pro-ns are in the X-loop:


From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec  7 19:55:42 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 19:55:42 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
References: <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
  <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
Message-ID: <65130C7E-2932-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 7, 2003, at 7:15 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
>
>> And, as many have noted, very few of the "kids" today are
>> libertarians (either small L or large L).
>
> When you were a teenager, everyone thought that Ho Chi Minh was
> the greatest, had a picture of Che Guevera on their wall, and
> thought the Soviet Union was going to win.

Nonsense. "Everyone" did not think this. Far from it. YAF was going 
strong back then.

Of 8 of us who rented a place, 6 were fairly extreme libertarians, one 
was confused but went along, and one was apolitical. (One of these guys 
wore a dollar sign pin and subscribed to Nathaniel Branden's 
newsletter.) This, was, by the way, when we were 18-20 years old.

The Libertarian Party started at about this time, in 1972, and nearly 
all of the volunteers, spear carriers, etc. were in their 20s. This is 
very well known.

(And today most of the LP volunteers and spear carriers are in their 
40s and 50s. A correlation here.)


>   I would say that
> the kids of today are a damned lot more libertarian than when
> you and I were kids.

Quite likely you, as you have said you were a Marxist. I never went 
through such a phase, having started reading Heinlein and that crowd 
when I was around 11 or so. It always seemed self-evidently silly to 
think that "From each according to his ability, to each according to 
his need" could be taken seriously by anybody.

And I remember taking some cheer that day in November, 1963 when the 
Big Government guy was zapped. My family left the U.S. that afternoon 
and did not return for 13 months.

I was a Goldwater supporter in 1964, when I was 12. (Goldwater was way 
too liberal for me in many ways, but he was against the "Civil Rights 
Act" and other such Marxist nonsense, so I supported him. I didn't care 
for his Vietnam views, except I agreed with him we should either fight 
to win it very, very decisively, or get out.

Still think most of the baldies of today, with rings through their 
noses, marching against Coca Cola and Intel and Big Business, and 
arguing for affirmative action are "more libertarian"?

Again, apparently more so than you. In any case, saying "everyone 
thought that Ho Chi Minh was the greatest" is silly.


>
>> This shows up in the fact that protests against global
>> capitalism draw vast crowds of young people, and even several
>> subscribers to our list have nattered on about the dangers of
>> globalism and free trade.
>
> The cartoonist in "reason" (or perhaps "liberty" not sure
> which) depicts these protests as being dominated by old farts
> about your and my age, with the young folk in reluctant tow.
> I suspect if you and he attended the same demo, he would see a
> crowd of old farts, and you would see a crowd of young punks
> with nose rings.
>

This is certainly so. But it doesn't dispute my point. In fact, it 
supports it.

My generation was very active, on all sides. The droids born after 
about 1980 are mainly followers. Probably what the nose rings are for.


--Tim May, Corralitos, California
Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Dec  7 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 20:00:00 -0800
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200312080400.hB8400UH005069@slack.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Oct 13, 2003

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography
and its effect on society.  It is not a moderated list (but see exceptions
below) and the list operators are not responsible for the list content.

Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list.  A subscriber can subscribe to
one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list.  Each node
(called a "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer", although they are not
related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes
in addition to sending messages to its subscribers.  A message posted
to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes,
and vice-versa.

1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers.
Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of
spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to.

There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
messages to their subscribers. "cooked" CDRs try to eliminate the spam
on that's on the regular list by automatically sending only messages
that are from cypherpunks list subscribers (on any CDR) or people who
are replying to list messages.  Finally there are moderated lists, where
a human moderator decides which messages from the raw list to pass on
to subscribers.

2. Message Modification

Message modification policy indicates what modifications, if any, beyond
what is needed to operate the CDR are done (most CDRs add a tracking
X-loop header on mail posted to their subscribers to prevent mail loops).
Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
subscribers. CDRs should not modify mail that they pass from one CDR
to the next, but some of them do, and others undo those modifications.

3. Privacy

Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
list members, or no one ("private") , to retrieve the subscribers list.
Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
since your address is now out there.   It's really only useful for
keeping spammers from harvesting addresses from the list software.

Digest mode indicates that the CDR supports digest mode, which is where
the posts are batched up into a few large emails.  Nodes that support
only digest mode are noted.

4. Anonymous posting

Cypherpunks encourages anonymous posting.

You can use an anonymous remailer:
http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.html
http://anon.efga.org/Remailers
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html

5. Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
Since the list is run from a number of different CDRs, you have to
figure out which CDR you are subscribed to.  If you don't remember and
can't figure it out from the mail headers (hint: the top Received: line
should tell you), the easiest way to unsubscribe is to send unsubscribe
messages to all the CDRs listed below.

How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
"internet headers").  Look for the Sender or X-loop headers.  The Sender
will say something like "Sender: owner-cypherpunks at lne.com".  The X-loop
line will say something like "X-Loop: cypherpunks at lne.com".  Both of
these inticate that you are subscribed to the lne.com CDR.   If you were
subscribed to the algebra CDR, they would have algebra.com in them.
Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the
table below to find that CDRs unsubscribe instructions.

6. Lunatics, spammers and nut-cases

"I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings".
At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who
are abusing the lists openness by dumping reams of propaganda on the list.
The distinction between a spammer and a subscriber is nearly always very
clear, but the dictinction between a subscriber who is abusing the list
by posting reams of propaganda and a subscriber who is making lots of
controversial posts is not clear.  Therefore, we tolerate the crap.
Subscribers with a low crap tolerance should check out mail filters.
Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems
only.  Eudora also has a capacity for filtering mail, as do many other
mail readers.  An example procmail recipie is below, you will of
course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
    * (^From:.*ravage at ssz\.com.*|\
    ^From:.*jchoate at dev.tivoli.com.*|\
    ^From:.*mattd at useoz.com|\
    ^From:.*proffr11 at bigpond.com|\
    ^From:.*jei at cc.hut.fi)
	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

Operator:
Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at algebra.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???
Info:   ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

Operator:         drt at un.bewaff.net
Subscription:     "subscribe [password of your choice]" to 
				       cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe <password>" to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Help:             "help" to to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Web site:         http://koeln.ccc.de/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks
Posting address:  cypherpunks at koeln.ccc.de
Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and
                  every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line
                  containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. 
Digest mode:      this node is digest-only
NNTP:             news://koeln.ccc.de/cbone.ml.cypherpunks
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infonex:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at infonex.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lne:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at lne.com
Filtering policy: cooked 
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.
Message Modification policy:  
 1. messages are demimed (MIME attachments removed) when posted 
  through lne or received by lne CDR subscribers
 2. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 3. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html
(thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minder:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Help:             "help" to majordomo at minder.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at minder.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: private
Info:           send mail to cypherpunks-info at minder.net


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Help:             "help" to listproc at openpgp.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at openpgp.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder:

Subscription:     "subscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Help:             "help" to sunder at sunder.net
Posting address:  sunder at sunder.net
Filtering policy: moderated
Message Modification policy:  ???
Privacy policy:  ???
Info: ???


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pro-ns:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at pro-ns.net
Filtering policy: cooked
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.   
Message Modification policy:
 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 2. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Dec  7 20:06:49 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 20:06:49 -0800
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>
References: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <3FD38859.618.5BD27EF@localhost>

On 7 Dec 2003 at 22:25, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I'm seeing similiar trends across
> virtually all my mailing lists, so I presume it's the medium itself
> that it's in decline.

Spam.

people are continually abandoning old addresses.

Of course it does not help that the cypherpunks list itself under 
permanent massive spam attack from two hostile subscribers.

I have found a wonderful free, highly effective, spam filter   K9, 
from Keir.net.  Everyone should use it,  I expect the medium will 
recover, when everyone uses it or something similar.  




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sun Dec  7 18:06:04 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 21:06:04 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
Message-ID: <20031208020624.D05FF2323C9@gnu-darwin.org>

I'm still quite new to this list, so if you find this interesting,
please take it as from a newbie ;-}.

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:
> > Read the archives and note the drop-off in certain kinds of 
> > political discussion. Even some of the former nodes have vanished; my 
> > hunch is that many of those subscribed to the vanished nodes never 
> > bothered to find another node. (I have no idea how many subscribers the 
> > list has. The nodes I know of don't allow listing the subscribers. 

I'd volunteer GNU-Darwin.org as a new node, but we are having issues
with SMTP, dynablocker, spews list, etc.  (BTW, if anyone can recommend
a reliable and inexpensive closed relay service, that would be a big
help.)  

Anyway, is there a FAQ, HOWTO, volunteer person, where I can learn how
to set up a new Cpunks node?  I'd love to do this, if it would help, and
I'm sure that most of our users would also love the idea of GNU-Darwin
assisting the Cypherpunks list, which seems quiet apt.  

I frequently post to other forums crypto-related items, which could
include a link to the Cypherpunks list.

> > bothered to find another node. (I have no idea how many subscribers the  
> > list has. The nodes I know of don't allow listing the subscribers.  
>  
On  7 Dec, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> None of mine will allow it either, with the reason being the protection of 
> the list contributors.

A partial solution would be to list the number of subscribers in the
list info, which reveals the info that is important to the community
without revealing the identities of the subscribers.

> CP has always been so much more than crypto.  The history here is political, 
> with crypto not always playing a part.  Even the non-crypto discussion is 
> almost completely lost. 

Here is an old post of mine.  I was worried about being off-topic, so I
did not continue with it.

http://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks at lne.com/msg00722.html

I'm a person who could post a ton of political stuff, which some might
find interesting, but some of it may not be related to crypto at all.  I
support crypto against a government which would like to be called
libertarian, which prats vacantly about democracy, free trade, and
globalism while undermining freedom and constitutional liberties.  This
is the situation which necessitates private crypto.  Conversely, many
here likely would not be happy if I called myself libertarian, because I
feel that corporations are titanic forces unfriendly to the vast
majority of human beings and unworthy of human liberty.

In short, I think that the libertarian position has been entirely
undermined, coopted , and lost conceptual utility.  The whole
libertarian debate has become distasteful, trollish, and
counter-productive, and it is driving people out of forums like this
one, not attracting them.  I would probably get labeled as a political
spammer or a troll myself.  I'm not sure this is what you want here.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/
 


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From eugen at leitl.org  Sun Dec  7 13:25:46 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 22:25:46 +0100
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@dizum.com>
References: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org>

On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 03:10:04PM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Tim,
>
> I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION
> FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS...

He is correct, of course. One of these days I'm going to get
MailMan working, and resurrect cpunx-news.

This list shouldn't be drowned in forwards. It's a good way
to drown discussion.

Not that there is much discussion, the cyherpunk meme doesn't seem
to draw fresh blood too effectively. I'm seeing similiar trends
across virtually all my mailing lists, so I presume it's the medium
itself that it's in decline.

Both IRC and IM are of course even worse content killers than email.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Dec  7 22:57:00 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 22:57:00 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
Message-ID: <3FD420BC.7B29A907@cdc.gov>

At 03:26 PM 12/7/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>But even if crypto got trendy again, I just don't see the young
>students of today flocking to our particular mailing list. Too many
>other choices. Probably they'll read someone's daily blog....

A few observations.

Nowadays, colleges offer courses in crypto.
This was not the case when I started reading this list.

And 'net social issues were not widely discussed; now
there are many fora and public organizations that one
can look at.  Probably college courses on that, too.

So *perhaps* neophytes interested in these things have
many more places to learn.   Just an optimistic possibility.
I did much like your "the nose rings of the followers" comment
though.

------
"When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid
on our own! And we were grateful!" --Alan Olsen




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Mon Dec  8 00:11:45 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 00:11:45 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <65130C7E-2932-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
  <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org> <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031208000855.00a04708@idiom.com>

At 07:55 PM 12/7/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>The Libertarian Party started at about this time, in 1972, and nearly all 
>of the volunteers, spear carriers, etc. were in their 20s. This is very 
>well known.
>
>(And today most of the LP volunteers and spear carriers are in their 40s 
>and 50s. A correlation here.)

Yes, and one of the LP's problems is that we've largely turned into old 
farts there also....




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Mon Dec  8 00:21:21 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 00:21:21 -0800 (PST)
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
Message-ID: <20031208082121.20527.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,

I just a pick a book and learn and if i am in doubt,
ofcourse i do have a lot of stupid ones. but thats how
i learn.

I have friends who will help me with my queries. I
prefer not getting flamed like every one else and that
too in quick succesion :-). so my guess is that as far
as newbies are concerned all the discussions are taken
private.

Moreover,there is no loss in interest in cryptography,
we pursue it with our heart and soul.

Sarath.



At 03:26 PM 12/7/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>But even if crypto got trendy again, I just don't see
the young
>students of today flocking to our particular mailing
list. Too many
>other choices. Probably they'll read someone's daily
blog....

A few observations.

Nowadays, colleges offer courses in crypto.
This was not the case when I started reading this
list.

And 'net social issues were not widely discussed; now
there are many fora and public organizations that one
can look at.  Probably college courses on that, too.

So *perhaps* neophytes interested in these things have
many more places to learn.   Just an optimistic
possibility.
I did much like your "the nose rings of the followers"
comment
though.



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From bcl at brianlane.com  Mon Dec  8 06:26:50 2003
From: bcl at brianlane.com (Brian C. Lane)
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 06:26:50 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <1070893610.28580.113.camel@marvin.home>

On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 16:11, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:
>
> > I have several theories/conjectures about what is happening to mailing
> > lists.
> >
> > First, a lot of the younger folks--who used to be some of the fresh
> > blood for lists like ours--are not users of mailing lists. I expect
> > some of them don't even know such things exist. For them, IM is the
> > norm. (And IM is mostly an interpersonal, chat format.)
>
> Not true.  I personally run several mailing lists with heavy political
> bents.  One in particular, "antisocial" (the name is a play on a post
someone
> made a long time ago) is vibrant and continually growing.  But they need to
> be nurtured - this is the failing of this list.  We no longer take care to
> bring in new blood.  We have failed utterly to encourage new ideas.  And
any
> new blood which may test the waters with a posting that doesn't follow
median
> doctrine is likely to find themselves and their deviant ideas under heavy
> attack, rather than discussion.
>
> People won't post ideas that conflict with the mainstream (which obviously
is
> different in each unique forum) if these ideas are either dismissed out of
> hand or attacked ad hominem.
>

Clay Shirky has some good thoughts on this in his essay 'The Group Is
Its Own Worst Enemy', found at
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

[big snip]

I've been on and off the list for years, mostly as a lurker,
occasionally as a poster. Up until last month (or so) I thought the list
had died. I remember that the S/N radio went way down and toad.com was
going to drop the list a few years back.

Some of the list 'goals' have been achieved, we now have good solid
crypt that we can use. We have operating remailers (although they really
need to be more user friendly). For me personally the biggest obstacle
is time. As I've gotten older I don't seem to have the time to focus on
following discussions in 10 different lists, or work on dozens of
projects.

Brian

---[Office 72.2F]--[Fridge 34.4F]---[Fozzy 90.3F]--[Coaster 63.4F]---
Linux Software Developer http://www.brianlane.com

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]




From ericm at lne.com  Mon Dec  8 07:22:19 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 07:22:19 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <20031208082121.20527.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>; from
  jtrjtrjtr2001@yahoo.com on Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 12:21:21AM -0800
References: <20031208082121.20527.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20031208072219.A9126@slack.lne.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 12:21:21AM -0800, Sarad AV wrote:
> I prefer not getting flamed like every one else and that
> too in quick succesion :-).  so my guess is that as far
> as newbies are concerned all the discussions are taken
> private.

This is why the cpunks list has very little new subscribers...
most newbies who post questions get flamed.  Usually by Tim
who sears them for not having read some post from
1992 or for bringing up a topic that was discussed in 1996.

Perhaps if the archives were complete, well organized and
easy to find it would be appropriate to politely tell newbies to
read the FAQ.  But they're not.   It's also not a complete waste of
time to discuss topics that have been discussed previously...
some new information may come from the discussion.  Someone
who is not interested can just skip those posts.  If the list
is restricted to discusing topics that are only of interest to Tim
(or any long-time member, Tim's not the only one) then
only a few people will even be able to follow the discusssion, let
alone participate.

Tim, before you reply, I suggest that you look back through the
last year or so's worth of your cpunks posts to see how many are
the thoughtful incisive kind vs a barage of insults or complaints
that the poster you are replying to is an idiot.

A related problem is the tendency for a number of posters to turn every
thread into an intellectual dicksizewar.   It's gotten to the point where
I don't post much, and I've been _working_ in security for the 8 years
(and on Usenet, where the dicksizewar was invented, for 15).  I can only
imagine what it's like for new people.  Only the most stubborn
will stay.   The list is selecting for obstinance.

On a related note, I do see the addresses of people who unsubscribe,
and they are often addresses that recently subscribed.  


Other people have made the point that mailing lists are "old tech"
and I agree.   I don't like the new replacements (blogs, web boards)
as much as lists, but perhaps that's because of what I used first.
Kids these days don't know how to use shell shortcuts either.


BTW, there's about 415 list members.  LNE doesn't censor, we do block
networks that we've gotten spam from.  Currently we block about 12,000
spams a week and receive another 1500 or so.  We're still on dial-up
(Verizon rural phone service sucks).  Allowing those 12,000 spams
through to process them would make our 43k line unuseable.
Hence the blocking.  I explained this to John in private email, and also
explained how to get unblocked by following a link in the bounce message.
He's refused to do this, prefering to claim that I'm "censoring" him.
Whatever.  The CIA agent reading over my shoulder says that John's way
too paranoid.

I realize that my spam solution is non-optimal but its
the best I can come up with at the moment.

I'm getting tired of running the list.  As it is now it doesn't provide
much value and I could use my time for something else.  Could someone
please set up another node?  I'll send you all my scripts etc.  But I
won't maintain it on a machine you provide, you'll have to do it.
Maybe some of our list members from the government would like
to step forward with some homeland security $$. :-)


Eric




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Dec  8 08:31:07 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 08:31:07 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
Message-ID: <3FD4A74B.7B6A3208@cdc.gov>

At 07:22 AM 12/8/03 -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
>Other people have made the point that mailing lists are "old tech"
>and I agree.   I don't like the new replacements (blogs, web boards)
>as much as lists, but perhaps that's because of what I used first.

Its not just "the First is the Only Way" phenom.

What's going on is that folks are online all the time now, so
things interactive (web boards, IM) have become more popular
than they could have been in the dial-up past.

The big advantage of email, which was the original "killer app",
was store and forward.  Ie, asych; offline.  IM strikes me as
perverse.  If I wanted to be interrupted I'd answer my telephone.
Email clients of olde allowed aliasing to lists, which predated
(and motivated) mailing list exploders/auto-managers.  They
are still widely used for group-of-friends 'private' lists.  Even
my parents understand Bcc: nowadays.

Yahoo boards have options to use email, and
modern clients manage multiple email addresses.  But
for online folks a board is perhaps more convenient,
since the board is accessable everywhere.  For
home/office/school mobility this is a feature, even
if its regressing to the "PC as dumb terminal" mechanism.

The advantage of eg Yahoo groups (and presumably blogs)
is their moderation; the lack thereof enabled spammers to
bulldoze the commons of usenet.   Inevitable.  Also the
reason why lne.com is the best node.



>Kids these days don't know how to use shell shortcuts either.

Not sure what you mean by that.  "Shortcut" is a M$ term
for lame-ass sym link.

----
"Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger
of a decent sniper rifle." Michael Hohensee




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Mon Dec  8 09:34:24 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 09:34:24 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <3FD3F519.2080704@charter.net>
Message-ID: <20031208173424.83436.qmail@web40605.mail.yahoo.com>

> I've been wondering why I havent seen more discussion on
> wireless networking (802.11a/b/g) and anon/mix /dark nets.
> Is this a subject of interest to anyone?  I am curious what
> kinds of work has been done in this area...

Check the archives.

Wireless solves all crypto anonymity problems for the sender by making them
completely irrelevant - it provides good old physical anonymity.


=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From ericm at lne.com  Mon Dec  8 10:46:04 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 10:46:04 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <3FD4A74B.7B6A3208@cdc.gov>; from mv@cdc.gov on Mon, Dec
  08, 2003 at 08:31:07AM -0800
References: <3FD4A74B.7B6A3208@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20031208104604.A11414@slack.lne.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 08:31:07AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
 
> The advantage of eg Yahoo groups (and presumably blogs)
> is their moderation; the lack thereof enabled spammers to
> bulldoze the commons of usenet.   Inevitable.  

I've been hearing about blog-spamming lately, and I've
seen spammers attack web boards as well.
Spammers are also using worms to get control of victim's
machines and sending their spam from there.

> >Kids these days don't know how to use shell shortcuts either.
> 
> Not sure what you mean by that.  "Shortcut" is a M$ term
> for lame-ass sym link.

Sorry, I was in a hurry.
History substition is what I meant...  i.e.

% ericm >  mkdir /home/cpun
% ericm > ^pun^punk
% ericm > cd !$
etc.

or any of the hundreds of other history substitution commands.
No one I work with knows any of them; they all either laboriously re-type
or use the command-line editor even when it requires many more keystrokes.
I try to restrain myself from barking out "bang dollar!  bang dollar dammit!"
but sometimes I can't help it.


Eric




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Mon Dec  8 09:03:21 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:03:21 -0600
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <3FD4A74B.7B6A3208@cdc.gov>
References: <3FD4A74B.7B6A3208@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20031208170321.GB18462@cybershamanix.com>

  The web boards (forums) like phpNuke, et al, are not nearly as useful as
listservs. The problem is that you have to go there. So, for instance, for the
lists I admin, if someone puts out an announcement of an upcoming event, and
people don't think to go look at the forum for awhile, they get the annoucement
too late. Not a good thing. 
   Another serious problem with them is that if you don't go there for awhile,
the messages pile up, if it's a fairly active list, and become overwhelming. The
tendency is then to just skip them. You also can't filter out the people you
don't like -- a real drag. 
    As for the lne.com blocks on "spammers", that bit me too. When my dsl line
ip changes, sometimes I can post to lne, sometimes I can't. So I just subscribe
to lne to get the spam free postings, and then post to minder.net. 


 -- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 11:07:06 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:07:06 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031208000855.00a04708@idiom.com>
References: <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
  <20031207212546.GZ5783@leitl.org> <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
  <5.1.0.14.2.20031208000855.00a04708@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <B6E57643-29B1-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 12:11 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 07:55 PM 12/7/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>> The Libertarian Party started at about this time, in 1972, and nearly 
>> all of the volunteers, spear carriers, etc. were in their 20s. This 
>> is very well known.
>>
>> (And today most of the LP volunteers and spear carriers are in their 
>> 40s and 50s. A correlation here.)
>
> Yes, and one of the LP's problems is that we've largely turned into 
> old farts there also....

Indeed.

I can imagine a bunch of possible reasons for this development. In no 
particular order:

* In the 1950s and 60s, the effects of Rand and Heinlein were 
pervasive. Many college kids in the 60s were reading "Atlas Shrugged." 
(I won't get into how badly it's written, except to say I devoured it 
in 2 days in 1968, when I was 16, and quoted from it to all who would 
listen in the next couple of years. But I haven't been able to read it 
_since_. I can't get past about page 10 before throwing it down. It's 
strong propaganda, but badly written.)

* The mood of the 50s and 60s was actually one of nearly boundless 
possibilities for the future, at least in America. Not because of 
socialists in Congress and JFK, but because of a booming economy, 
technology, and all the usual things of the time. The generation which 
entered the work economy in the 1960s through the early 1980s is the 
wealthiest generation in history...especially those who did so in 
Silicon Valley or similar areas.

(My implication being that things were different for the generation 
which came of age much later, with more of a sense of limited horizons, 
dead-end jobs at Starbucks making lattes for Yuppies, etc. Maybe if I 
were 25, working for $9 an hour at Starbucks, I'd shave my head and 
look like a refugee from the Apple "1984" commercial too.)

* A lot of these folks, the ones who came of age in the 60s and 70s, 
were enthusiastic libertarians. Some of them joined the Libertarian 
Party, most of them dislike government drug laws and redistribution of 
their income, and so on.

* A lot of the younger folks I see interviewed describe "income 
inequality" and "discrimination" and "globalization" as the serious 
problems the world and America face. They may favor drug legalization, 
as libertarians do, but they certainly aren't sympathetic to most 
laissez-faire, "survival of the fittest" libertarianism.


A couple of folks here have followed-up in this latest thread with 
claims that the old farts, especially me, quash discussion of new 
theories, new outlooks.

Hey, this is an anarchy. I have absolutely no power whatsoever to quash 
_anything_ related to this list!

When we were a young list, but when I was still an old fart by most 
standards (I was 40 in 1992), we didn't need any permission or approval 
to post what we wished. And some of the folks then were even older than 
me (Sandy Sandfort, Arthur Abraham, maybe Jude Milhon...).

And new subscribers and young people who join the list today are 
perfectly free to make good contributions. I recall few such newcomers, 
however. (One of them was Dave Molnar, now a grad student in 
CS/something at Berkeley, interested in many of the issues we are 
interested in. He was not "censored" by the old farts when he had 
something interesting to say.)

Bottom line is that this crap about how the old farts are suppressing 
the young guns is bullshit. If someone has something to say, they 
should say it. They may not get a positive response to calls for 
passing new laws to raise taxes "on the wealthy," or to break up 
Microsoft, or to tell people what kind of software they can write, but 
that's because the underlying philosophy of the list is what it is: 
call it libertarian, call it anarcho-capitalist, call it whatever, but 
don't call it "there ought to be a law" sentiment.


--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a 
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also 
into you." -- Nietzsche




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 11:24:06 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:24:06 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <20031208082121.20527.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20031208082121.20527.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <171E4264-29B4-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 12:21 AM, Sarad AV wrote:
> I have friends who will help me with my queries. I
> prefer not getting flamed like every one else and that
> too in quick succesion :-). so my guess is that as far
> as newbies are concerned all the discussions are taken
> private.


No, I think few topics on the Cypherpunks list are taken private.

I've had several people write to me in private, asking questions about 
things that came up on the list. Sometimes I reply, but usually I urge 
them to "stop lurking and post on the list!"

My reasons are two-fold: First, to get them to stop lurking and 
participate. Second, to work up the energy to compose an essay (or 
mini-essay, whatever), I need some motivation. I am not energetic about 
writing a long response to some stranger who asks me a question in 
private. If he posts publically, I may (or may not...) decide to use 
his post as a jumping-off point for something that I think needs to be 
said.

As for you, I have dumped on you because most of your posts to the list 
look a lot like you are asking for help on a homework problem or have 
just semi-randomly pulled an example out of a crypto or algebra book 
and have decided to "participate" in the list by asking if anyone knows 
the answer to some puzzle.

"hi,

Table shown is completed to define 'associative'
binary operation * on S={a,b,c,d}.
...
So can (a*d)*d=a*(d*d)=d considered as associative
over * for this case as per definition?"

and

"hi,

If we are to convert a k-bit integer n to a base b
number,it takes us O(log n) if the base b is a power
...
Is there an algorithm with time complexity O(log n)
which allows such conversion to base b ,when b is not
a power of 2?"

are just two of your more recent examples.

Now if you had told us you were implementing a crypto system for use in 
India (where I think you are from...), and had run into a tough 
problem, these might be interesting for people to comment on.

But they sure do look like homework problems.

A more fruitful sort of post might be for you to discuss the general 
crypto situation in India, the telecom infrastructure, and Indian 
government attitudes. Or, if these topics don't interest you, your 
thoughts on implementing DC Nets, or using digital money, or whatever.

But to post snippets of problems out of textbooks is NOT participation 
in the topics of the list. Think about it.

I wish you no ill-will, but you should find ways to participate which 
suggest you are actually reading what others are saying and giving your 
own views or responses to them.

--Tim May


"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked ...A complex system designed from scratch 
never  works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to 
start over,  beginning with a working simple system." -- Grady Booch




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 11:41:43 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:41:43 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <14f.27a2ef7c.2d062616@aol.com>
References: <14f.27a2ef7c.2d062616@aol.com>
Message-ID: <8D0C3FF5-29B6-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 11:08 AM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 12/7/2003 10:58:00 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> timcmay at got.net writes:
>
>> My generation was very active, on all sides. The droids born after
>> about 1980 are mainly followers. Probably what the nose rings are for.
>>
>
> Hey Tim, why don't you continue your activism and make an attempt to 
> get your
> writing into more places where generation X might find it. If they are 
> truly
> droids surely you with your grand intellect could be become their pied 
> piper,
> leading their revolution.
>
> You might feel better venting to the cloistered culture here on CP, 
> but what
> good does that do?

I'm not interested in trying to get published in "Down with WTO Times" 
or "Skateboard Magazine," or whatever it is that these kids are 
reading. (Actually, I don't think most of them do much reading. I spend 
a lot of time in the great bookstores in Santa Cruz--rarely do I see 
the "persons of piercing" leave their hangouts out on Pacific Avenue to 
enter the bookstores, except to try to use the restrooms.)

And the problem is not even so much with Gen X but with Gen Y, or 
whatever they are being called these days.

I reach who I reach. Their choice to read what I write.

I see an explosion of Blogs, the daily musings of people involved in 
EPIC, EFF, etc.

This is similar to the explosion of personal Web pages several years 
ago, when home pages had snippets of philosophy, lists of books people 
had read, etc.

(And perhaps just as so many of these personal Web pages fell into 
disrepair and were seldom looked-at by others, the wave of personal 
Blogs will crest and then decline in amplitude.)

So, you are free to be "Matt Gaylor, Activist!" and to try to get 
articles published in "Liberty" or "Gold Currency Times" or wherever 
you get published, but I have other things I'd rather be doing.

Preaching to me that I ought to be sacrificing my time for the 
betterment of some skatepunks by publishing in "Piercing Magazine" is 
the silliest kind of altruistic thinking.


--Tim May




From bmm at minder.net  Mon Dec  8 08:48:20 2003
From: bmm at minder.net (Brian Minder)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:48:20 -0500
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <20031208020624.D05FF2323C9@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <20031208020624.D05FF2323C9@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <20031208164820.GB49042@waste.minder.net>

On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 10:37:04PM -0500, John Young wrote:
> When I got censored by cypherpunks at lne.com a couple
> of weeks ago I tried to subscribe to these nodes:
>
> Algebra
> Infonex
> Lne
> Minder
> Sunder
> Pro-ns
> Openpgp
> Ccc
> 
> Subscription was successful only on:
> 
> Algebra
> Pro-ns
> 
> Both of thse provided a "who" response on 11/10/03 of
> 
> Algebra 122
> Pro-ns 14

Thanks to John for pointing out that subscribing was broken for the 
minder.net node.  It's now working again.

Thanks,

-Brian

--
bmm at minder.net                                                1024/8C7C4DE9




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 12:51:15 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 12:51:15 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <14f.27a2ef7c.2d062616@aol.com>
References: <14f.27a2ef7c.2d062616@aol.com>
Message-ID: <4383F080-29C0-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 11:08 AM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 12/7/2003 10:58:00 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> timcmay at got.net writes:
>
>> My generation was very active, on all sides. The droids born after
>> about 1980 are mainly followers. Probably what the nose rings are for.
>>
>
> Hey Tim, why don't you continue your activism and make an attempt to 
> get your
> writing into more places where generation X might find it. If they are 
> truly
> droids surely you with your grand intellect could be become their pied 
> piper,
> leading their revolution.
>
> You might feel better venting to the cloistered culture here on CP, 
> but what
> good does that do?


By the way, I spent a lot of time writing and polishing an essay which 
Vernor Vinge and his editor wanted for his collection "True Names--and 
the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier." My article, "True Nyms and 
Crypto Anarchy" was one of the longest in the book (probably the 
longest, though I haven't checked) and was the best distillation of 
things I wanted to say. The book was delayed a couple of times, and 
came out several years after I expected it to, but that's the 
publishing world.

Frankly, this article has wider exposure than nearly anything else I 
could have written. The book is in bookstores everyplace I've checked, 
and it will be available in used copies for many years to come. I 
expect this is wider exposure than had I done a series of articles in 
Gen Y-favored mags.

And other versions of my essays have appeared in books like "Building 
in Big Brother" and that ilk (collections of articles and essays). 
These books have almost certainly reached anyone needing reaching, as 
if the Net and the Web were not enough.

In contrast to the situation in 1992-3, anyone even remotely interested 
in crypto now has ample exposure to the Cypherpunks meme. Any search 
entry in Google on the obvious topics will return numerous hits on 
articles, postings, mentions, etc. (I disagree with the claim made here 
today that the Cypherpunks archives need to be kept better...I find 
articles I want using Google, which has indexed nearly every month of 
every year. If their are gaps, the best approach is for sites to mirror 
their contents, not for any kind of formal upkeep of the archives.)

Finally, neither I nor other Cypherpunks control when some journalist 
will give us publicity. The wave of publicity in 1992-4 came for 
obvious reasons: Kevin Kelly was writing for "Whole Earth Review"on 
crypto and also was helping to start "Wired," so he got Steven Levy to 
do a cover story. A writer at "The Village Voice" saw a posting of mine 
on sci.crypt (saying that Trimble Navigation had just received a patent 
on the Pythagorean Theorem, a spoof on the wave of software and 
algorithm patents) and sent me e-mail. This led to his big piece on 
crypto and Cypherpunks. And so on.

As the Yippies of the 60s knew so well, press coverage covers breaking 
news, either real or by stunts. So the ""RSA in 4 lines of Perl" got a 
brief blurb, as did my "BlackNet" thing. Stego has gotten a couple of 
blurbs. No big cover stories in recent years, save for that other big 
stunt, the offshore gun platform used as "HavenCo.'

(And for an interesting read, see Ryan Lackey's presentation at Defcon 
this year--use Google of course--on how the HavenCo folks used 
deception to convince the reporters that HavenCo was a viable 
operation.)

Fact is, "we" could probably get a squib in "Wired" if we pulled some 
stunt like showing up at the Ninth Circuit for some crypto hearing 
wearing gorilla suits. Newspapers and magazines like media events and 
good photos. It's all bullshit.

Anyone interested in crypto and liberty has a flood of information, 
including numerous ways to find our lists if he wants to. This was not 
the situation in 1992, for various obvious reasons, and at that time 
there was a lot of pent-up demand for the stuff. (When Eric and I 
called the first meeting, we already knew of a bunch of people in the 
Bay Area interested in the general topics...the usual suspects who had 
read Heinlein, Ted Nelson, Hakim Bey, who were readers of "Reality 
Hackers/Mondo 2000," who went to the Hackers Conference most years, who 
were on the Extropians list, and who knew about PGP. It was no accident 
that we hit the ground running.)

Me, I spend most of my technical time lately with Haskell. Not writing 
encryption programs--which are plentiful already in Haskell, as in many 
languages--but thinking about the issues I've talked about here before. 
In particular, using monads to implement stateful entities, the 
connection between continuation-passing style (CPS), capabilities (as 
in E), and monads. I especially admire the work of, believe it or not, 
a Goth follower living in the Netherlands: Frank Atanassow. And the 
work of John Baez, a mathematical physicist, Jeremy Butterfield, a 
philosopher/programmer doing an implementation of quantum logic in 
Clean (a close relative of Haskell), and a bunch of others.

(By the way, a company in the Beaverton, OR area called "Galois 
Connection" (a pun, for those who know the math) is doing a crypto 
library under contract to the NSA, perhaps others. Their library is 
written in Haskell, interestingly enough. I don't know how it compares 
or overlaps with Wei Dai's crypto library. But I found it interesting 
that that some of my own thoughts on this were already being developed 
by a company.)

This is a lot more interesting to me that struggling to get the current 
editors of "Wired" to stop thinking of crypto as "tired" and write 
another story about us.

Whether my current stuff "reaches" the 20-year-old dropout skatepunk 
and convinces him to Fight for Liberty! is not of interest to me. Nor 
is it my task to write the Next Great PGP Version.

Life is too short to sacrifice it for the Good of the Herd. Saying I 
should find ways to spread memes to the Gen Y nosering crowd is no 
different than the tired old idea that I should be funding worthy 
Cypherpunks. (Luckily, I don't hear this as much as I did around 
1997-99, during the Bubble.)

--Tim May

Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 13:17:22 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 13:17:22 -0800
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
  <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 1:15 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 01:59:26PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
>> This actually fits in with something Lessig is widely known for, his
>> "technology-custom-law" trichotomy (*).
>>
>> (* He may call it something different...I haven't checked in a while.
>
> I was reading some of David Friedman's articles over the weekend and
> noticed that he also used the same trichotomy, predating Lessig.
>
>> "I'm sorry that Tim is being a bother again. He has a long history of
>> being obnoxious and threatening. So far, he has not broken any laws.  
>> We
>> have talked to the authorities about him on numerous occasions. They
>> have chosen to watch but not act.  Please feel free to notify me if he
>> does anything that is beyond rude and actually violates any laws and I
>> will immediately inform the authorities."
>>
>> Thank You
>> Don Frederickson  (co-owner and CEO of got.net, Santa Cruz)
>
> When did Don Fredderickson write this?
>
> -Declan
>


You can Google Groups for any of the unique text to find it, and the  
context.

Or, here's the thread (search on my name for the exact spot, or go to  
August 22nd):

<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF 
-8&safe=off&threadm=220820032357238678%25timcmay%40removethis.got.net&rn 
um=1&prev=/ 
groups%3Fq%3Dfrederickson%2Bgot%2Btim%26hl%3Den%26lr%3Dlang_en%26ie%3DUT 
F-8%26oe%3DUTF 
-8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3D220820032357238678%2525timcmay%2540removethis.g 
ot.net%26rnum%3D1>

Searching GG on "don frederickson got tim" is maybe more reliable than  
pasting this URL.

(If you are asking did Don write this on or about the 22nd?, I assume  
so, of course, as this is when this "Kal" nym was foaming and  
threatening to get my account yanked and have the cops raid my house.)

It happened in one of the "movies" groups (rec.arts.current-movies),  
when the thread was on DVD copy protection and the (claimed) illegality  
of making DVDs of movies.

I explained how I was cheerfully making an average of a DVD a day of my  
favorite current movies.

A couple of "nyms" went ballistic and foamed that they had forwarded my  
"admissions" to the RIAA and how I would face civil penalties and jail  
time, oh my!

Then one of them claimed he had arranged to have my account yanked, for  
"violation of the DMCA." He claimed he had sent copies of my "criminal"  
admissions to Got.net, to the RIAA, to "law enforcement" (shudder!),  
and so on.

The owner of Got.net replied to him and the above got posted (not by  
me).

I consider Don Frederickson despicable, and stupid. To not bother  
before understanding the context of the thread and say, basically,  
"Yes, we have narced out this customer to law enforcement, but they are  
just watching" is reprehensible.

The earlier owners/operators of Got.net took the stance that what  
people said on Usenet or on mailing lists was of no interest to them,  
save for a few carefully-spelled-out TOS issues (like spam).

The new owner apparently thinks it's his job to narc out his customers  
to law enforcement and then to tell others who are not even his  
customers that he has done so. Were I the litigious sort, I might  
contemplate suing.

(I haven't quit Got.net yet mainly because I am evaluating options for  
broadband in my rural location. Currently, DSL is about half a mile  
away, so may arrive soon--when it does I expect I will get it.  
Cablemodem is available to the top of my hill, but not down my long  
driveway, and the cable company will not allow me to either string my  
own lines or mount a WiFi or IR or similar atop the telephone pole. (My  
utilities are underground, but were laid when the house was built,  
circa 1976. No cable lines. Which is one reason I got a satellite dish,  
DirecTV, shortly after moving in. And, yes, I have looked at satellite  
broadband options like DirectLink...not impressive at all.)  And the  
"Pringles can" approach is not something I want to spend my time  
engineering or debugging.)

My hunch is that Frederickson and Got.net have been forwarding copies  
of some of my e-mail to "law enforcement," which would have put them in  
violation of the ECPA, except that after 9/11 and the Patriot Act and  
all these actions are now considered just good corporate citizenship.

--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 13:45:43 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 13:45:43 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19 
In-Reply-To: <167.2951791c.2d063797@aol.com>
References: <167.2951791c.2d063797@aol.com>
Message-ID: <DFD7394F-29C7-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 12:22 PM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 12/8/2003 2:46:37 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> timcmay at got.net writes:
>
>> So, you are free to be "Matt Gaylor, Activist!" and to try to get
>> articles published in "Liberty" or "Gold Currency Times" or wherever
>> you get published, but I have other things I'd rather be doing.
>>
>> Preaching to me that I ought to be sacrificing my time for the
>> betterment of some skatepunks by publishing in "Piercing Magazine" is
>> the silliest kind of altruistic thinking.
>>
>
> No Tim, not altruistic. My reason for wanting you to write is a 
> selfish one.
> Self preservation.  You are able to tie technology into the bigger 
> picture,
> and you do have something valuable to say.  You already sacrifice your 
> time in
> pointless diatribes about the good ole' days on CP-  I'm just making a 
> plea
> that you do something more useful-
>

You need to read my long, long essay in "True Names," then. This is 
more widely available than anything I would waste my time doing for 
"Body Peircing" or "Skate," even if I wanted to.

As for writing for "Reason," they haven't asked, and their editorial 
focus is increasingly statist. Cf. Cathy Young's quote at the bottom of 
this post.

As for my diatribes here, the references to the archives and to how 
Sarath shouldn't be posting homework questions and all, well, these 
take very, very little of my time.

I spend much more time trying to get XEmacs to do a smarter job of 
recognizing Haskell keywords!

(And thinking how the integrated development environment I had nearly 
20 years ago with my Symbolics Lisp Machine, with integrated debuggers, 
browsers, inspectors, and an editor (Zmacs) was so far ahead of 
anything I can now get with any combination of Emacs, XEmacs, OCaml, 
Mozart/Oz, or Haskell. The one good and integrated environment I have, 
that is not proprietary to some company, is Squeak, the Smalltalk 
environment. But for various reasons I am not doing Squeak at this 
time...lazy evaluation is the kind of executable mathematics that is 
where it's at, as we old farts used to say.)

More will change, and _has_ changed, by writing code than by trying to 
convince the nosering set that they should be learning Perl or Python. 
And it's not as if there isn't a vast sea of material already out there 
at everyone's fingertips!

One of the reasons I don't place high value on writing "new" articles 
anymore, unless new topics come up, is that I believe strongly that an 
article written a year ago, or five years ago, is just as meaningful as 
a "current" article (which may actually have been written earlier, pace 
the usual delays). This is closely-related to my reaction to people 
attempting to predict "future" stock prices: I'm more interested--to 
the extent I ever am in such schemes--in the behavior on past series, 
which can then be quickly tested. A subtle point, but an important one.

So if I get interested in some topic--let's pick Haskell and crypto, to 
stick with this example--I will spend literally several hours per day 
for several weeks reading from the vast number of articles and postings 
which have been written on the subjects. This search takes me off into 
a bunch of different directions.

And this is the way to do it, not get on sci.crypt and ask some 
question like "Hey, has anyone ever tried Haskell here?" And not 
getting on the Haskell mailing list and asking if anyone has every used 
it for crypto. The answers are already out there, possibly a few months 
old, but so what?

Now when we started (ObOldFartMode: On), no one had much discussed 
things like "the dining cryptographers problem." So people like me and 
Hal Finney and a few others spent many hours a week writing articles 
linking the problem to things like digital money and anonymous 
remailers.

Why should any of us rewrite those same articles today?

(I also spent many thousands of hours working on the FAQ which 
everybody else was complaining about but which no one who volunteered 
to do it was either qualified to do it or was committed enough to get 
beyond the usual two-page kind of summary. My version, the one I chose 
to write, I dubbed the Cyphernomicon. It is widely available and Google 
has no problem finding parts of it. One need not even download and read 
the whole thing. Just type in something like "timed-release crypto" and 
off you go. Those who want it, can get it. Those who still don't know 
how to use Google or other engines are preterite anyway.)

I'm not sure what it is Matt thinks I need to be doing for the good of 
the herd. Writing a weekly column in "Newsweek" so that the great 
unwashed masses will learn about the importance of crypto? Writing a 
monthly column in "Skatepunk" or in Starbucks' in-house newsletter 
about prime numbers and bit commitment?

Laughable, for various reasons.

News flash: I have no desire to write on a deadline. I write when I 
feel like writing. And a good chunk of what I write gets spidered by 
Google. What can be more satisfying than that?


--Tim May

Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec  8 13:55:29 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 13:55:29 -0800
Subject: 
In-Reply-To: <1070918634.3fd4ebeaa190d@mail.nullify.org>
References: <1070918634.3fd4ebeaa190d@mail.nullify.org>
Message-ID: <3CA4E04A-29C9-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 1:23 PM, Keith Ray wrote:

> who
> end
>
>

It might help if you sent these requests to the corresponding 
administrivia/majordomo/etc. sits instead of to the list distributions.

(But probably not.)


--Tim May


--Tim May
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize 
Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of 
conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are 
peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams




From billy at dadadada.net  Mon Dec  8 11:01:07 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (BillyGOTO)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 14:01:07 -0500
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <20031208104604.A11414@slack.lne.com>
References: <3FD4A74B.7B6A3208@cdc.gov>
  <20031208104604.A11414@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <20031208190107.GA30189@mail.dadadada.net>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:46:04AM -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 08:31:07AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>  
> > The advantage of eg Yahoo groups (and presumably blogs)
> > is their moderation; the lack thereof enabled spammers to
> > bulldoze the commons of usenet.   Inevitable.  
> 
> I've been hearing about blog-spamming lately, and I've
> seen spammers attack web boards as well.

The venerable "Matt's Script Archive" guestbook.pl
seems to be a spam target.

One victim:

	http://www.takedown.com/guestbook




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Mon Dec  8 11:08:06 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 14:08:06 EST
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
Message-ID: <14f.27a2ef7c.2d062616@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/7/2003 10:58:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
timcmay at got.net writes:

> My generation was very active, on all sides. The droids born after 
> about 1980 are mainly followers. Probably what the nose rings are for.
> 

Hey Tim, why don't you continue your activism and make an attempt to get your 
writing into more places where generation X might find it. If they are truly 
droids surely you with your grand intellect could be become their pied piper, 
leading their revolution.

You might feel better venting to the cloistered culture here on CP, but what 
good does that do?

Regards,  Matt-




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Dec  8 11:24:17 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 14:24:17 -0500
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F84KufVma0osA9000194f6@hotmail.com>

OK...let's say I receive a photo that I expected to contain stegoed 
information on it,  but then find that there's nothing I can retrieve using 
the likely methods or software.

Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it was 
sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted in 
transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever?

Now I know pretty much nothing about this subject, but I would suppose that 
de-stegoing a photo must like some kind of spatial spectral fingerprint that 
should be visible after the photo is FFT'd (is there freeware software out 
there?).

Now I IMAGINE that a sophisticated interceptor could substitute 'believable' 
de-stego-ing noise so that it would look like the photo never had any stego 
in the first place. OR...is this actually 'impossible' to do perfectly?

And then, what if the interceptor tried to put an alternate message in there 
instead? Is there a way to tell that there was originallya different message 
there?

My assumption first of all is that nothing was done to prepare the photo 
against these possibilities. A simple stego message was placed without real 
thought about whether it might be intercepted and altered.

-TD

_________________________________________________________________
Take advantage of our best MSN Dial-up offer of the year  six months 
@$9.95/month. Sign up now! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Mon Dec  8 12:09:10 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 15:09:10 EST
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
Message-ID: <91.36c8cfbe.2d063466@aol.com>


[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type message/rfc822]




From declan at well.com  Mon Dec  8 13:09:24 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 15:09:24 -0600
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <20031208173424.83436.qmail@web40605.mail.yahoo.com>; from
  morlockelloi@yahoo.com on Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 09:34:24AM -0800
References: <3FD3F519.2080704@charter.net>
  <20031208173424.83436.qmail@web40605.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20031208150924.A17389@baltwash.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 09:34:24AM -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > I've been wondering why I havent seen more discussion on
> > wireless networking (802.11a/b/g) and anon/mix /dark nets.
> > Is this a subject of interest to anyone?  I am curious what
> > kinds of work has been done in this area...
> 
> Check the archives.

I think I've been guilty of this too, but (as someone else in this thread
pointed out), it's not a terribly useful suggestion. The archives are
not well-organized, and a URL would be helpful.

Does anyone have a reasonably complete cypherpunks archive available
for FTP?  Perhaps I could host them on my server and let Google index
them. That might be useful.

-Declan




From declan at well.com  Mon Dec  8 13:15:18 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 15:15:18 -0600
Subject: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
In-Reply-To: <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>; from
  timcmay@got.net on Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 01:59:26PM -0800
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
  <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>

On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 01:59:26PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> This actually fits in with something Lessig is widely known for, his 
> "technology-custom-law" trichotomy (*).
> 
> (* He may call it something different...I haven't checked in a while. 

I was reading some of David Friedman's articles over the weekend and
noticed that he also used the same trichotomy, predating Lessig.

> "I'm sorry that Tim is being a bother again. He has a long history of
> being obnoxious and threatening. So far, he has not broken any laws. We 
> have talked to the authorities about him on numerous occasions. They 
> have chosen to watch but not act.  Please feel free to notify me if he 
> does anything that is beyond rude and actually violates any laws and I 
> will immediately inform the authorities."
> 
> Thank You
> Don Frederickson  (co-owner and CEO of got.net, Santa Cruz)

When did Don Fredderickson write this?

-Declan




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Mon Dec  8 12:22:47 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 15:22:47 EST
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19 
Message-ID: <167.2951791c.2d063797@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/8/2003 2:46:37 PM Eastern Standard Time,
timcmay at got.net writes:

> So, you are free to be "Matt Gaylor, Activist!" and to try to get
> articles published in "Liberty" or "Gold Currency Times" or wherever
> you get published, but I have other things I'd rather be doing.
>
> Preaching to me that I ought to be sacrificing my time for the
> betterment of some skatepunks by publishing in "Piercing Magazine" is
> the silliest kind of altruistic thinking.
>

No Tim, not altruistic. My reason for wanting you to write is a selfish one.
Self preservation.  You are able to tie technology into the bigger picture,
and you do have something valuable to say.  You already sacrifice your time in
pointless diatribes about the good ole' days on CP-  I'm just making a plea
that you do something more useful-

Regards, Matt Gaylor-




From keith at nullify.org  Mon Dec  8 13:23:54 2003
From: keith at nullify.org (Keith Ray)
Date: Mon,  8 Dec 2003 15:23:54 -0600
Subject: No subject
Message-ID: <1070918634.3fd4ebeaa190d@mail.nullify.org>

who
end




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec  8 16:27:38 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 16:27:38 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <20031208020624.D05FF2323C9@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <3FD4A67A.10295.A1ADB68@localhost>

    --
On 7 Dec 2003 at 21:06, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> many here likely would not be happy if I called myself
> libertarian, because I feel that corporations are titanic
> forces unfriendly to the vast majority of human beings and
> unworthy of human liberty.

Everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive,
bureaucratic, inefficient, etc.   No one more so than the
management advisers to big corporations.

Trouble is when you say they are unworthy of liberty, the
implication is let us transfer power to something a great deal
bigger.

This is the "big tobacco' rhetoric -- a restriction supposedly
on corporations must always necessarily manifest as
restrictions on individual people, and usually, as in the case
of the "big tobacco' rhetoric, it was quite obviously the
intent of those using this rhetoric to impose restrictions on
individual people.  Those using this rhetoric believe they know
better than other people what is good for those other people,
and intend to whack those other people for their own good.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     h0PDSIpmiXP6g+EXs3how/E0TY9et8gJKr2+nS0w
     4z3+n+3NXrRvBDk0BaUUE8TzqII22OrrXWgqmSfhP




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec  8 16:27:38 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 16:27:38 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <65130C7E-2932-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FD4A67A.1339.A1AD969@localhost>

    --
Tim May:
> >> And, as many have noted, very few of the "kids" today are 
> >> libertarians (either small L or large L).

James A. Donald:
> > When you were a teenager, everyone thought that Ho Chi Minh 
> > was the greatest, had a picture of Che Guevera on their 
> > wall, and thought the Soviet Union was going to win.

Tim May
> Nonsense. "Everyone" did not think this. Far from it. YAF was 
> going strong back then.

Well, not everyone, but that was surely the way the wind was 
blowing. The Che Guevera poster symbolizes that era.

In "austin powers", they make the spy sound sixties by 
depicting him as expecting the victory of the Soviet Union, and 
perhaps rather favoring that outcome.   If they had him quote 
Ayn Rand, he would not have sounded sixties.

When the mass media want to cash in on nostalgia for the 
sixties and early seventies, it is the young commies they 
remember.

> Still think most of the baldies of today, with rings through 
> their noses, marching against Coca Cola and Intel and Big 
> Business, and arguing for affirmative action are "more 
> libertarian"?

Go to the mall:  observe the mall rats.   See any baldies or
nose rings? (Come to think of it, you probably would, but I do
not.)

Nip down to that park in San Jose where all the young people
get their drugs.  See any baldies or nose rings?

You are further out of it than Doonesbury.

The leadership of the Death-to-coca-cola crowd are old farts. 
These days Chomsky needs an interpeter.  The 
could-pass-as-young pinko activists of the sixties are still in 
the business as old fart pinko activists of today.   And if the 
same is true of the libertarian party, well it has been walking 
dead for some considerable time, but its death does not reflect 
the health of libertarianism. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     kHn9sx1THFU+pOMZQFj1k0jU7RnUtA877TClsJYB
     4KSl9qDarOhEujymWANpT3Le2YbPsr5NOMfIblUzm




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Mon Dec  8 15:06:51 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 17:06:51 -0600
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <20031209025607.65064.qmail@web40603.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20031208150924.A17389@baltwash.com>
  <20031209025607.65064.qmail@web40603.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20031208230651.GA3262@cybershamanix.com>

   '92-'94 here: http://www.cybershamanix.com/punk.html

 with a link to the later stuff here: 

http://cypherpunks.venona.com/


On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 06:56:07PM -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > Does anyone have a reasonably complete cypherpunks archive available
> > for FTP?  Perhaps I could host them on my server and let Google index
> > them. That might be useful.
> 
> There are only two live ones. Someone knows more ?
> 
> The second one is FTP-able:
> 
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cypherpunks-lne-archive/
> 
> http://lists.lab.net/archive/cypherpunks-exploder/
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> end
> (of original message)
> 
> Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
> http://photos.yahoo.com/

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec  8 17:32:32 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 17:32:32 -0800
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <3FD4B5B0.27070.A564625@localhost>

On 8 Dec 2003 at 13:17, Tim May wrote:

> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF
> -8&safe=off&threadm=220820032357238678%25timcmay%40removethis.got.net&
> rn um=1&prev=/
> groups%3Fq%3Dfrederickson%2Bgot%2Btim%26hl%3Den%26lr%3Dlang_en%26ie%3D
> UT F-8%26oe%3DUTF
> -8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3D220820032357238678%2525timcmay%2540removethis
> .g ot.net%26rnum%3D1>
> 
> Searching GG on "don frederickson got tim" is maybe more reliable than
> pasting this URL.

For long urls, compress with tinuyurl.com

http://tinyurl.com/yc3s




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Dec  8 14:34:59 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 17:34:59 -0500
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
Message-ID: <BAY7-F11GUtOWaUgOEe0001a301@hotmail.com>

Tim May wrote...

"I consider Don Frederickson despicable, and stupid. To not bother  before 
understanding the context of the thread and say, basically,  "Yes, we have 
narced out this customer to law enforcement, but they are  just watching" is 
reprehensible."

Well, I saw the got.net quote before and that brief sample seemed to 
indicate something entirely different to me. First of all, it says they've 
'talked to the authorities about him' seems allows for the possibility of 
having been contacted BY said authorities. Second, it points out "he hasn't 
broken any laws"...third it says "please notify me when he actually breaks 
the law..."...that's kind of a nice, business-smart "fuck off" as I see it.

In other words, the guy seems to acknowledge that he doesn't like a lot of 
Tim May's philosophies, but he won't even think about doing anything unless 
Mr May personally murders someone or whatever. In other words, he's saying 
he's going to support Tim May's free speech, but he's saying it in a way 
that won't cause him to end up in Guantanamo.

But then again, that's the only quote I've seen...


-TD



>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>CC: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
>Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 13:17:22 -0800
>
>On Dec 8, 2003, at 1:15 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>
>>On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 01:59:26PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
>>>This actually fits in with something Lessig is widely known for, his
>>>"technology-custom-law" trichotomy (*).
>>>
>>>(* He may call it something different...I haven't checked in a while.
>>
>>I was reading some of David Friedman's articles over the weekend and
>>noticed that he also used the same trichotomy, predating Lessig.
>>
>>>"I'm sorry that Tim is being a bother again. He has a long history of
>>>being obnoxious and threatening. So far, he has not broken any laws.  We
>>>have talked to the authorities about him on numerous occasions. They
>>>have chosen to watch but not act.  Please feel free to notify me if he
>>>does anything that is beyond rude and actually violates any laws and I
>>>will immediately inform the authorities."
>>>
>>>Thank You
>>>Don Frederickson  (co-owner and CEO of got.net, Santa Cruz)
>>
>>When did Don Fredderickson write this?
>>
>>-Declan
>>
>
>
>You can Google Groups for any of the unique text to find it, and the  
>context.
>
>Or, here's the thread (search on my name for the exact spot, or go to  
>August 22nd):
>
><http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF 
>-8&safe=off&threadm=220820032357238678%25timcmay%40removethis.got.net&rn 
>um=1&prev=/ 
>groups%3Fq%3Dfrederickson%2Bgot%2Btim%26hl%3Den%26lr%3Dlang_en%26ie%3DUT 
>F-8%26oe%3DUTF 
>-8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3D220820032357238678%2525timcmay%2540removethis.g 
>ot.net%26rnum%3D1>
>
>Searching GG on "don frederickson got tim" is maybe more reliable than  
>pasting this URL.
>
>(If you are asking did Don write this on or about the 22nd?, I assume  so, 
>of course, as this is when this "Kal" nym was foaming and  threatening to 
>get my account yanked and have the cops raid my house.)
>
>It happened in one of the "movies" groups (rec.arts.current-movies),  when 
>the thread was on DVD copy protection and the (claimed) illegality  of 
>making DVDs of movies.
>
>I explained how I was cheerfully making an average of a DVD a day of my  
>favorite current movies.
>
>A couple of "nyms" went ballistic and foamed that they had forwarded my  
>"admissions" to the RIAA and how I would face civil penalties and jail  
>time, oh my!
>
>Then one of them claimed he had arranged to have my account yanked, for  
>"violation of the DMCA." He claimed he had sent copies of my "criminal"  
>admissions to Got.net, to the RIAA, to "law enforcement" (shudder!),  and 
>so on.
>
>The owner of Got.net replied to him and the above got posted (not by  me).
>
>I consider Don Frederickson despicable, and stupid. To not bother  before 
>understanding the context of the thread and say, basically,  "Yes, we have 
>narced out this customer to law enforcement, but they are  just watching" 
>is reprehensible.
>
>The earlier owners/operators of Got.net took the stance that what  people 
>said on Usenet or on mailing lists was of no interest to them,  save for a 
>few carefully-spelled-out TOS issues (like spam).
>
>The new owner apparently thinks it's his job to narc out his customers  to 
>law enforcement and then to tell others who are not even his  customers 
>that he has done so. Were I the litigious sort, I might  contemplate suing.
>
>(I haven't quit Got.net yet mainly because I am evaluating options for  
>broadband in my rural location. Currently, DSL is about half a mile  away, 
>so may arrive soon--when it does I expect I will get it.  Cablemodem is 
>available to the top of my hill, but not down my long  driveway, and the 
>cable company will not allow me to either string my  own lines or mount a 
>WiFi or IR or similar atop the telephone pole. (My  utilities are 
>underground, but were laid when the house was built,  circa 1976. No cable 
>lines. Which is one reason I got a satellite dish,  DirecTV, shortly after 
>moving in. And, yes, I have looked at satellite  broadband options like 
>DirectLink...not impressive at all.)  And the  "Pringles can" approach is 
>not something I want to spend my time  engineering or debugging.)
>
>My hunch is that Frederickson and Got.net have been forwarding copies  of 
>some of my e-mail to "law enforcement," which would have put them in  
>violation of the ECPA, except that after 9/11 and the Patriot Act and  all 
>these actions are now considered just good corporate citizenship.
>
>--Tim May

_________________________________________________________________
Cell phone switch rules are taking effect  find out more here. 
http://special.msn.com/msnbc/consumeradvocate.armx




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Dec  8 14:53:54 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 17:53:54 -0500
Subject: Anti-globalization
Message-ID: <BAY7-F86VCSHdgPJyoM0001a35a@hotmail.com>

The anti-globalization protests are a good example of something 
misunderstood by Libertarian old-farts. On some levels, these protests have 
a libertarian character...anti-globalization is not really about eliminating 
free trade per se, but eliminating "free trade", which is really just the 
selective and forceful application of free-trade ideas by the US and its 
cronies, in support of the "American Century" or, in other words, the "Iraq 
is better off now then under Saddam" approach to international relations.

The current political clime is slowly being pushed in the vague direction of 
lefitst statism-lite, but only because of a philosophical vaccum and because 
the US has successfully portrayed itself as the embodiment of free-market, 
Lassaiz Faire capitalism.

However, I don't see the strong support for Soviet or Maoist-style state 
control these days...these are vaguely romantic notions once in a while, but 
they don't have any deep ideological support like they might have in the 
60s.

-TD


>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
>Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:07:06 -0800
>
>On Dec 8, 2003, at 12:11 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:
>
>>At 07:55 PM 12/7/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>>>The Libertarian Party started at about this time, in 1972, and nearly all 
>>>of the volunteers, spear carriers, etc. were in their 20s. This is very 
>>>well known.
>>>
>>>(And today most of the LP volunteers and spear carriers are in their 40s 
>>>and 50s. A correlation here.)
>>
>>Yes, and one of the LP's problems is that we've largely turned into old 
>>farts there also....
>
>Indeed.
>
>I can imagine a bunch of possible reasons for this development. In no 
>particular order:
>
>* In the 1950s and 60s, the effects of Rand and Heinlein were pervasive. 
>Many college kids in the 60s were reading "Atlas Shrugged." (I won't get 
>into how badly it's written, except to say I devoured it in 2 days in 1968, 
>when I was 16, and quoted from it to all who would listen in the next 
>couple of years. But I haven't been able to read it _since_. I can't get 
>past about page 10 before throwing it down. It's strong propaganda, but 
>badly written.)
>
>* The mood of the 50s and 60s was actually one of nearly boundless 
>possibilities for the future, at least in America. Not because of 
>socialists in Congress and JFK, but because of a booming economy, 
>technology, and all the usual things of the time. The generation which 
>entered the work economy in the 1960s through the early 1980s is the 
>wealthiest generation in history...especially those who did so in Silicon 
>Valley or similar areas.
>
>(My implication being that things were different for the generation which 
>came of age much later, with more of a sense of limited horizons, dead-end 
>jobs at Starbucks making lattes for Yuppies, etc. Maybe if I were 25, 
>working for $9 an hour at Starbucks, I'd shave my head and look like a 
>refugee from the Apple "1984" commercial too.)
>
>* A lot of these folks, the ones who came of age in the 60s and 70s, were 
>enthusiastic libertarians. Some of them joined the Libertarian Party, most 
>of them dislike government drug laws and redistribution of their income, 
>and so on.
>
>* A lot of the younger folks I see interviewed describe "income inequality" 
>and "discrimination" and "globalization" as the serious problems the world 
>and America face. They may favor drug legalization, as libertarians do, but 
>they certainly aren't sympathetic to most laissez-faire, "survival of the 
>fittest" libertarianism.
>
>
>A couple of folks here have followed-up in this latest thread with claims 
>that the old farts, especially me, quash discussion of new theories, new 
>outlooks.
>
>Hey, this is an anarchy. I have absolutely no power whatsoever to quash 
>_anything_ related to this list!
>
>When we were a young list, but when I was still an old fart by most 
>standards (I was 40 in 1992), we didn't need any permission or approval to 
>post what we wished. And some of the folks then were even older than me 
>(Sandy Sandfort, Arthur Abraham, maybe Jude Milhon...).
>
>And new subscribers and young people who join the list today are perfectly 
>free to make good contributions. I recall few such newcomers, however. (One 
>of them was Dave Molnar, now a grad student in CS/something at Berkeley, 
>interested in many of the issues we are interested in. He was not 
>"censored" by the old farts when he had something interesting to say.)
>
>Bottom line is that this crap about how the old farts are suppressing the 
>young guns is bullshit. If someone has something to say, they should say 
>it. They may not get a positive response to calls for passing new laws to 
>raise taxes "on the wealthy," or to break up Microsoft, or to tell people 
>what kind of software they can write, but that's because the underlying 
>philosophy of the list is what it is: call it libertarian, call it 
>anarcho-capitalist, call it whatever, but don't call it "there ought to be 
>a law" sentiment.
>
>
>--Tim May
>"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a 
>monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into 
>you." -- Nietzsche

_________________________________________________________________
Our best dial-up offer is back.  Get MSN Dial-up Internet Service for 6 
months @ $9.95/month now! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From mdpopescu at yahoo.com  Mon Dec  8 08:30:47 2003
From: mdpopescu at yahoo.com (Marcel Popescu)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 18:30:47 +0200
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312071754510.29758-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <1070893610.28580.113.camel@marvin.home>
Message-ID: <05f601c3bda8$a2be9420$726e9cd9@mark>

From: "Brian C. Lane" <bcl at brianlane.com>

> Clay Shirky has some good thoughts on this in his essay 'The Group Is
> Its Own Worst Enemy', found at
> http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

"So we're back, and we're taking wizardly fiat back, and we're going to do
things to run the system. We are effectively setting ourselves up as a
government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the
place was falling apart."

Interesting motivation for setting up a government.

Mark




From mfidelman at civicnet.org  Mon Dec  8 15:41:21 2003
From: mfidelman at civicnet.org (Miles Fidelman)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 18:41:21 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F86VCSHdgPJyoM0001a35a@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> However, I don't see the strong support for Soviet or Maoist-style state
> control these days...these are vaguely romantic notions once in a while, but
> they don't have any deep ideological support like they might have in the
> 60s.

I don't know about that.  Today's corporate oligarchy behaves an awful lot
like the old Soviet oligarchy.  Just the names and titles are different.




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Mon Dec  8 18:56:07 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 18:56:07 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
In-Reply-To: <20031208150924.A17389@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <20031209025607.65064.qmail@web40603.mail.yahoo.com>

> Does anyone have a reasonably complete cypherpunks archive available
> for FTP?  Perhaps I could host them on my server and let Google index
> them. That might be useful.

There are only two live ones. Someone knows more ?

The second one is FTP-able:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cypherpunks-lne-archive/

http://lists.lab.net/archive/cypherpunks-exploder/



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From declan at well.com  Mon Dec  8 17:53:33 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 19:53:33 -0600
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <3FD4A67A.1339.A1AD969@localhost>; from jamesd@echeque.com
  on Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800
References: <3FD37C38.4228.58DC70C@localhost>
  <65130C7E-2932-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <3FD4A67A.1339.A1AD969@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031208195333.A19766@baltwash.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
> the business as old fart pinko activists of today.   And if the 
> same is true of the libertarian party, well it has been walking 
> dead for some considerable time, but its death does not reflect 
> the health of libertarianism. 

The latest issue of Liberty Magazine (which I have started reading 
again) has an excellent article by Bradford about the death of the
Libertarian Party. Uses the California election as a tool for analysis,
or dissection.

-Declan




From cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com  Mon Dec  8 16:54:47 2003
From: cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com (Tim Meehan)
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2003 19:54:47 -0500
Subject: Marijuana once again legal in Ontario, Canada
Message-ID: <s77atvsjif8e7uvvcuvf56k7ivfa88m38a@4ax.com>

An unforeseen consequence of government incompetence.

http://ontario.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=25324

TORONTO - Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis is happy to
inform consumers that, because of Health Canada's failure to implement
constitutional Medical Marijuana Access Regulations, wide-open marijuana
legalization is back in Ontario! 

"The police will likely still have their 'business as usual' public relations
line, but since Health Canada has defied the order of the Ontario Court of
Appeal by not allowing a grower to supply multiple patients, as ordered, the
MMAR is unconstitutional," said Tim Meehan, communications director of OCSARC. 

"Because it's unconstitutional, that means that according to the Parker decision
by the same court in 2000, the possession of marijuana law is dead once again." 

OCSARC reminds people that while they might still be arrested and prosecuted by
police and prosecutors who refuse to acknowledge the status of the law, they may
seek substantial financial compensation later. "This is a notice to police that
while they do have the power to arrest harmless marijuana smokers, they will be
doing so at their own peril. Cannabis consumers will not allow themselves to be
treated as second class citizens, and many will be armed with legal information
and representation in case the harassment continues," said Meehan. 

OCSARC (Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis) is a
Toronto-based organization working to end prohibition and promote reasonable and
responsible regulation and quality assurance in the cannabis market.




From declan at well.com  Mon Dec  8 18:04:46 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 20:04:46 -0600
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <DFD7394F-29C7-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>; from
  timcmay@got.net on Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 01:45:43PM -0800
References: <167.2951791c.2d063797@aol.com>
  <DFD7394F-29C7-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031208200446.B19766@baltwash.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 01:45:43PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> You need to read my long, long essay in "True Names," then. This is 
> more widely available than anything I would waste my time doing for 
> "Body Peircing" or "Skate," even if I wanted to.
> 
> As for writing for "Reason," they haven't asked, and their editorial 
> focus is increasingly statist. Cf. Cathy Young's quote at the bottom of 
> this post.

I disagree. I went to a Reason gathering in Washington last Thursday
and found the staffers there definitely not statist.

But they were Cato-type libertarians. This is not meant to be critical
of the Cato Institute. What I mean is that the folks at the Reason
event worked at Cato and other groups like IHS, CEI, AEI, and so on --
groups that have adopted a mode of advocacy that is more academic and
scholarly than activist.

Instead of saying:
Fuck big government.

They'll say:
As decades of scholarly work in the public choice arena has shown,
government entitlement programs at the federal level result in
continued inefficiencies and rent-seeking.

It's a matter of how you say it. I don't know if that crowd is as
interested in the edgy kind of state-wrecking disruptive technologies
(that will have a greater long-term impact).

-Declan




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Mon Dec  8 23:13:56 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 23:13:56 -0800 (PST)
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <171E4264-29B4-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031209071356.48236.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


Asking questions is part of learning. Unless one
learns how is he expected to participate and make once
in a while intelliget discussions? 

Give noobs some space and time to learn and over time
they will contribute to the list.

I think when I was a kid, it took me quite a few
months to learn to walk. I beleive you also learned to
walk taking as much time as did. But nobody chopped
off my leg or your leg when we couldn't walk.


Sarath.



--- Tim May <timcmay at got.net> wrote:

> As for you, I have dumped on you because most of
> your posts to the list 
> look a lot like you are asking for help on a
> homework problem or have 
> just semi-randomly pulled an example out of a crypto
> or algebra book 
> and have decided to "participate" in the list by
> asking if anyone knows 
> the answer to some puzzle.
> 
> "hi,
> 
> Table shown is completed to define 'associative'
> binary operation * on S={a,b,c,d}.
> ...
> So can (a*d)*d=a*(d*d)=d considered as associative
> over * for this case as per definition?"
> 
> and
> 
> "hi,
> 
> If we are to convert a k-bit integer n to a base b
> number,it takes us O(log n) if the base b is a power
> ...
> Is there an algorithm with time complexity O(log n)
> which allows such conversion to base b ,when b is
> not
> a power of 2?"
> 
> are just two of your more recent examples.
> 
> Now if you had told us you were implementing a
> crypto system for use in 
> India (where I think you are from...), and had run
> into a tough 
> problem, these might be interesting for people to
> comment on.
> 
> A more fruitful sort of post might be for you to

> But to post snippets of problems out of textbooks is
> NOT participation 
> in the topics of the list. Think about it.
>I wish you no ill-will, but you should find ways to
>participate which 
>suggest you are actually reading what others are
>saying and giving your 
>own views or responses to them.




__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From pcapelli at capelli.org  Mon Dec  8 21:37:11 2003
From: pcapelli at capelli.org (Pete Capelli)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 00:37:11 -0500
Subject: Marijuana once again legal in Ontario, Canada
References: <s77atvsjif8e7uvvcuvf56k7ivfa88m38a@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <000401c3be16$81106880$0e0f4b18@warehouse>

Yeah - might want to hold off on that for now ...

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1070925607028&call_pageid=968332188492

-p

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Meehan" <cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com>
To: <cypherpunks at lne.com>
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 7:54 PM
Subject: Marijuana once again legal in Ontario, Canada


> An unforeseen consequence of government incompetence.
>
> http://ontario.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=25324
>
> TORONTO - Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis is
happy to
> inform consumers that, because of Health Canada's failure to implement
> constitutional Medical Marijuana Access Regulations, wide-open marijuana
> legalization is back in Ontario!
>
> "The police will likely still have their 'business as usual' public
relations
> line, but since Health Canada has defied the order of the Ontario Court of
> Appeal by not allowing a grower to supply multiple patients, as ordered,
the
> MMAR is unconstitutional," said Tim Meehan, communications director of
OCSARC.
>
> "Because it's unconstitutional, that means that according to the Parker
decision
> by the same court in 2000, the possession of marijuana law is dead once
again."
>
> OCSARC reminds people that while they might still be arrested and
prosecuted by
> police and prosecutors who refuse to acknowledge the status of the law,
they may
> seek substantial financial compensation later. "This is a notice to police
that
> while they do have the power to arrest harmless marijuana smokers, they
will be
> doing so at their own peril. Cannabis consumers will not allow themselves
to be
> treated as second class citizens, and many will be armed with legal
information
> and representation in case the harassment continues," said Meehan.
>
> OCSARC (Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis) is a
> Toronto-based organization working to end prohibition and promote reasonab
le and
> responsible regulation and quality assurance in the cannabis market.




From nobody at cryptorebels.net  Mon Dec  8 15:47:27 2003
From: nobody at cryptorebels.net (edo)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 00:47:27 +0100
Subject: (No Subject)
Message-ID: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>

Lne is on dialup? Wow.

Anyhow, I'm a newbie who has been lurking a while. Privacy concerns and what
intelligent people think about it is what got me on this list.With the USA
becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... The sheen on the
illusion of liberty here will wear thin soon, IMHO.People think that they enjoy
liberty here because they can buy a gun. Yes the libertarians can claim that
the guns protect them, and Afganistan and Iraq have been demonstrations of
how it prevents a hostile takeover (just like someones sig about an RPG a day...)
What good does it do inside the USA unless civil war breaks out? How does it
protect the war protestors in NYC or those in Miami? 

I don't oppose guns, but just want to point out that the govt has been rapidly
diminishing our civil liberties despite all the guns...

As far as I'm concerned, true anonymity in finacial affairs (and secure communication
channels) is the only real method open to peacefully combat the all seeing,
all powerful government. I'm sure the interest in this will first focus on
things like e-gold when common people see their life savings evaporate as the
dollar continues its plunge. Any one with thoughts on this? Of course only
a small percentage of the general public will be bright enough to see that
a fiat currency does not last forever... and is dependent on the ever increasing
projection of power by a nation state, which is not a stable sort of situation.The
majority of them will want federal bailouts etc.

What I'm curious about is digital currencies. Can anyone speak about the Digital
Monetary Trust or DMT? I'm sorry I have not read the last upteen years of mail
archives, but I'm interested in what people think NOW about Orlin Grabbe, DMT,
e-gold etc. Anyone with anonymous or otherwise stories? People who've been
part of the battle? 

Sorry for the ramble, but the most interesting comment recently was about David
Chaums patents expiring soon... any word on its potential impact?

Peace and liberty.




From shields at msrl.com  Mon Dec  8 20:37:44 2003
From: shields at msrl.com (Michael Shields)
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 04:37:44 +0000
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <3FD4B5B0.27070.A564625@localhost> (James A. Donald's
  message of "Mon, 8 Dec 2003 17:32:32 -0800")
References: <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
  <3FD4B5B0.27070.A564625@localhost>
Message-ID: <87ad62sj1j.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com>

In message <3FD4B5B0.27070.A564625 at localhost>,
"James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
>> Searching GG on "don frederickson got tim" is maybe more reliable than
>> pasting this URL.
>
> For long urls, compress with tinuyurl.com
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yc3s

If you do that, you have to rely on both the Google URL not changing
and on tinyurl not going away.
-- 
Shields.




From jya at pipeline.com  Tue Dec  9 04:57:18 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 04:57:18 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <19cbc165820c3d24f8f8b9f324c94fdd@dizum.com>
References: <20031209071356.48236.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
  <171E4264-29B4-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <E1ATedz-0000bo-00@hall.mail.mindspring.net>

Nomen Nescio wrote:

>I find it strange that some people here so often wants to 
>intimidate those that dares to ask some questions. 
>Eric put it very well in his post about dicksizewar. Very 
>true indeed.
>
>I find it very *l*a*m*e* to all the time tell people to RTFM 
>when something comes up that happened to be have 
>been dealt with like five years ago.

Brain rot is the cause of impatience with what is mistakenly
perceived to be repetition of old stuff. But brain rot leads
to wars which pointlessly kill young people by the thousands, 
so watch out believing what the brain pre-dead spout as
wisdom.

Old battles refought by subservience to faulty memory is
what got us into Iraq, only the latest conceit of wise ones
who ache to impose their will on the world, deep inside
understanding they are dying and will never accomplish
what they set out to do years before.

This accounts for the vainglorious repetition of past
accomplishments, and worse, aggrieved insults, real 
or fanciful (again, failing memory mixes the two with 
truth abandoned).

Fortunately most of the pre-dead don't have access to
the levers of power and go to the grave without a blip,
save grossing out grandkids with tales of doom and
gloom.

Still, if you put up with the grey-matter meltdown you
might get your hands on the mattress savings -- and
all the near dead stuff war booty for the endless trip
upcoming, being certain their enemies will pursue
for all eternity as they will the bastards that kept them
from glorious immortal recognition.

Eternally Young sez history sucks, history in the
making moreso. Lose perspective or you're doomed
to die before your time.

Reason is death welcomed.




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 09:36:58 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 09:36:58 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <20031209071356.48236.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20031209071356.48236.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4A542102-2A6E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 8, 2003, at 11:13 PM, Sarad AV wrote:

> hi,
>
>
> Asking questions is part of learning. Unless one
> learns how is he expected to participate and make once
> in a while intelliget discussions?

1. You never contribute anything that indicates you have actually 
learned.

2. Your questions, such as the ones I gave as examples of your recent 
ones, are phrased as if they were lifted directly from algebra and 
number theory books.

The conclusions are obvious. You are either a bot or a noob.

>
> Give noobs some space and time to learn and over time
> they will contribute to the list.

Yep, a noob, whatever that is.

Start contributing or leave. You've been posting textbook paragraphs 
and asking us to fill in the next line for way too many months.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 09:39:47 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 09:39:47 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <E1ATedz-0000bo-00@hall.mail.mindspring.net>
References: <20031209071356.48236.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
  <171E4264-29B4-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <E1ATedz-0000bo-00@hall.mail.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <AF1A289A-2A6E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 4:57 AM, John Young wrote:

> Nomen Nescio wrote:
>
>> I find it strange that some people here so often wants to
>> intimidate those that dares to ask some questions.
>> Eric put it very well in his post about dicksizewar. Very
>> true indeed.
>>
>> I find it very *l*a*m*e* to all the time tell people to RTFM
>> when something comes up that happened to be have
>> been dealt with like five years ago.
>
> Brain rot is the cause of impatience with what is mistakenly
> perceived to be repetition of old stuff. But brain rot leads
> to wars which pointlessly kill young people by the thousands,
> so watch out believing what the brain pre-dead spout as
> wisdom.

PLONK.

I've had it with years of these e.e. cummings bits of zero content.

--Tim May




From declan at well.com  Tue Dec  9 07:45:33 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 09:45:33 -0600
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <3FD4A67A.10295.A1ADB68@localhost>; from jamesd@echeque.com
  on Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800
References: <20031208020624.D05FF2323C9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <3FD4A67A.10295.A1ADB68@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031209094533.A25062@baltwash.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
> Everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive,
> bureaucratic, inefficient, etc.   No one more so than the
> management advisers to big corporations.

I'm not sure I'd agree that big corporations are oppressive. How?
I once worked at Xerox and had a splendid time. Didn't feel "oppressed"
at all.

As for bureaucratic and inefficient, perhaps, but I've seen 50-people
organizations devolve quite well. I suppose it all depends on your
frame of reference. If you mean, "I can find perceived
inefficiencies," I'm sure you can. But if they become too inefficient,
well, over time competitors will rise to take advantage of those
inefficiencies. Xerox can be an example here as well. This is just
common sense.

-Declan




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Tue Dec  9 06:52:28 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 09:52:28 EST
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
Message-ID: <1e0.15278f64.2d073bac@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/8/2003 8:27:05 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
declan at well.com writes:

> >As for writing for "Reason," they haven't asked, and their editorial 
> >focus is increasingly statist. Cf. Cathy Young's quote at the bottom of 
> >this post.
> 
> I disagree. I went to a Reason gathering in Washington last Thursday
> and found the staffers there definitely not statist.
> 

Reason has improved mightily after Nick Gillespie took over from Postrel as 
editor. After the Cathy Young statement I raised holy hell with Reason and to 
their credit both David Nott (President, Reason Foundation) and Mike Alissi 
(Publisher) both wrote me and promised, which they delivered, pro encryption 
articles.

Around ten years ago I had a heated argument with one of the deep pocketed 
Trustees of the Reason Foundation about what I considered the magazine's 
divergence from libertarian thought. He basically said that if the magazine went into 
a more overtly libertarian direction, they'd lose subscribers-  I thought 
then that was bs, and even let my subscription lapse.  I resubscribed a couple of 
years ago and have found the magazine much improved.

Regards,  Matt Gaylor-




From nobody at dizum.com  Tue Dec  9 01:00:01 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Tue,  9 Dec 2003 10:00:01 +0100 (CET)
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <20031209071356.48236.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <171E4264-29B4-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <19cbc165820c3d24f8f8b9f324c94fdd@dizum.com>

I find it strange that some people here so often wants to intimidate those that dares to ask some questions. Eric put it very well in his post about dicksizewar. Very true indeed.

I find it very *l*a*m*e* to all the time tell people to RTFM when something comes up that happened to be have been dealt with like five years ago.




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 10:48:34 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 10:48:34 -0800
Subject: Strong Crypto is about the Burnoff of Useless Eaters
In-Reply-To: <20031209094533.A25062@baltwash.com>
References: <20031208020624.D05FF2323C9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <3FD4A67A.10295.A1ADB68@localhost>
  <20031209094533.A25062@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <4AC3A141-2A78-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 7:45 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>> Everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive,
>> bureaucratic, inefficient, etc.   No one more so than the
>> management advisers to big corporations.
>
> I'm not sure I'd agree that big corporations are oppressive. How?
> I once worked at Xerox and had a splendid time. Didn't feel "oppressed"
> at all.
>
> As for bureaucratic and inefficient, perhaps, but I've seen 50-people
> organizations devolve quite well. I suppose it all depends on your
> frame of reference. If you mean, "I can find perceived
> inefficiencies," I'm sure you can. But if they become too inefficient,
> well, over time competitors will rise to take advantage of those
> inefficiencies. Xerox can be an example here as well. This is just
> common sense.
>

Indeed, the fact that James Donald starts off with the chestnut that 
"everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive, blah blah" fits 
with his earlier comment that everyone in the 60s supported Ho Chi Minh 
and had posters of Che Guevarra on their walls.

Maybe in _his_ world, this was so. Many of the former leftists now on 
the list have claimed that they have left their leftie baggage 
behind...others have not even made this claim, saying they remain 
committed to "social justice" (a code phrase for using force to take 
the property of some to redistribute it to others).

I say that in most cases, "once a leftist, always a leftist." The taint 
of thinking in terms of "social justice" never fully leaves them, hence 
the nattering about "big corporations as oppressors" and "monopolies" 
and "fair trade, not free trade." It's just socialism in another guise.


More to the point, this shows why the libertarians and futurists who 
started having meetings and a mailing list as the "Cypherpunks" really 
do have nothing to do with the "anti-globalists" and "big corporations 
are oppressive" people of today. I don't recall any of the attendees in 
1992 claiming they were "forced" to use Sun computers (which many of 
them were doing), or Unix (ditto), or Intel (some of them), or Apple (a 
few of us). True, we hated the software patent which had been granted 
to RSA, but this is an issue of patent and intellectual property issues 
(and software patents had just started to be granted only a few years 
earlier, marking a change in how things had been done for centuries in 
America and most of the developed world). Arguing that the RSA 
algorithm should not have been patentable is not the same as lefties 
arguing for social justice and restrictions on who one can buy or sell 
from!

Intel is a very big corporation. If people don't want to buy their 
flash memories and support chips and microprocessors, they are not 
forced to. Apple is a big corporation...ditto. Microsoft is a big 
corporation...ditto (and yes, it is easily done...I do it). (I don't 
any of my work on either Intel processors or Microsoft products...I do 
own a copy of Microsoft Office, but I rarely use it, and could quite 
easily _never_ use it.)

Coca-Cola is a big, global corporation. Don't like Coke? Don't drink 
it. Don't like sugar being fed to kids via Coke? Mount an advertising 
campaign about the dangers of sugar water. Don't like the idea of Coke 
being introduced into China and thus corrupting a billion Chinese? The 
anti-globalists want governments to step in and interfere with choices. 
They are social planners.

And so on, with Ford, Siemens, Toyota, Daimler-Benz, Olivetti, Great 
Wall Computer Company, Red Hat, Costco, AMD, Aerosptatiale, Procter and 
Gamble, Boeing, etc.

Nattering about patents and copyright is a secondary issue. Nothing 
Microsoft currently "owns" as intellectual property (and I am putting 
"owns" in quotes because I'm not claiming that their ownership claim is 
either valid, is supported by anarcho-capitalists, or would survive in 
a strong crypto world) stops _me_ in any way from doing what I am 
doing. As I said, I don't use either Intel or Microsoft products. 
(Ironically, some government agencies now _require_ that submissions 
and contractees use Microsoft products! The same too-powerful 
government which tried to use the legal system to break up 
Microsoft--and only succeeded in collecting a shakedown tax of billions 
of dollars to be spent by the burrowcrats!--is requiring the use of MS 
Office. The City of Sunnyvale, to name one example, requires that all 
members of the public, and corporations, submitting items to City 
Council meetings must present them as PowerPoint files.)

Nor does Intel's 83% market share of the desktop/laptop microprocessor 
market stop alternatives. Intel has an 83% market share because people 
buy that many desktop and mobile systems. Duh. No one is holding a gun 
to their heads (the anti-globalist lefties, including many here on this 
list, argue otherwise...they are wrong). People are free to buy 
processors from Motorola, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, AMD, Thompson, TI, etc. I 
watched Intel's competitors try to wrest control of Intel's dominance 
in several ways:

-- there was the Japanese TRON project, massively-funded by the 
Japanese government and supported by NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba, 
and all of the other giants of the Japanese chip industry (remember 
when the Japanese were seen as 1- feet tall and invincible and how they 
would swallow up Intel as well as Pebble Beach?)

-- there was the consortium of DEC, MIPS, Compaq, and a bunch of other 
companies to come up with the "industry-standard alternative" to Intel, 
AMD, Harris, and others in the x86 camp. (BTW, where were the antitrust 
regulators when this collusive attempt to drive a wedge into Intel's 
dominance was being hatched? Answer: government ignores what it chooses 
to ignore and persecutes what it chooses to persecute.)

-- and each of Intel's direct competitors were, without the collusions 
above, fighting intensely to displace Intel. Had one of them succeeded, 
as easily might have been case in some alternate history, the 
anti-globalist lefties would now be arguing for the break-ups of 
Motorola and Sun so that poor little Intel and Microsoft could be given 
a fighting chance.


And so on, for all of the examples. Don't like Ford? Don't buy from 
Ford. Think McDonald's is "too global"? Don't eat at McDonald's.

Companies are not permanent. They rise and fall, they come and go. In 
fact, of the Dow 30 Industrials, the very measure of Giant Corporation 
capitalism, take a look at how many of those on the list several 
decades ago are still on the list.

Twenty years ago the anti-globalists (such as they were back then, 
before lefties discovered this as their new raison d'etre) would have 
been nattering about the need to break up Digital Equipment 
Corporation, which utterly dominated the corporate minicomputer market 
(crushing the likes of Data General and even IBM, which was seen as a 
dinosaur). But DEC got absorbed in Compaq, a company which barely 
existed back then, and then Compaq got absorbed into H-P, which is 
struggling.

Joseph Schumpeter called this the process of "creative destructionism," 
the process of companies forming, evolving, dissipating, dissolving, 
the surviving staff and ideas (memes) forming new companies, new 
ensembles. Long after Boeing and Airbus are gone, new aircraft and 
spacecraft companies will form. Long after Intel and IBM are gone, new 
electronics and nanotech companies will form.

The difference between corporations and governments is vast. 
Governments don't give choices. Governments don't allow competition. 
Governments enslave people and send them to fight wars with other 
governments.

That the "anti-globalists" have lost sight of this and are instead 
holding their silly rallies and marches to "stop job export to China" 
and "force a living wage" and "break up Microsoft" shows they have 
nothing whatsoever in common with what strong crypto and untraceable 
communication and digital money will do. The official protests against 
the WTO natter about unfair wage practices in the so-called developing 
world, but the real issue is just what it has always been with 
protectionism.



News flash to all the lefties on this list who think these technologies 
will somehow bring about the socialist paradise they want to see: 
strong crypto means no government goon can take money from those who 
work and save and give it to others who failed to study, work, and 
save. Programs like "welfare/AFDC/WICC/social programs" boondoggles. It 
may mean, if we are lucky, the death and burn-off of tens of millions 
of useless eaters.

This will be a GOOD THING.

Of course, those who choose to participate in the new digital economy 
will do well. To paraphrase the saying, "On the Net, no one knows 
you're colored."

This is what strong crypto and a "True Names" world means. Do the math.

For all the lefties here, you should've known this for years and years. 
Enough of us have talked about it. And it was obvious to me in the 
early days (which predate CP by several years, of course (cf. the 
"Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," 1988) that strong crypto would usher in a 
world where no liberal traitor like John Kennedy could steal my money 
to send to some negroes in Washington so they could buy more malt 
liquor and breed more "chilluns."

Good riddance to bad rubbish. The Crypto Revolution will burn off tens 
of millions of useless eaters.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 11:50:20 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 11:50:20 -0800
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <20031208025451.GB31948@pglaf.org>
References: <CD94B950-290C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <E1AT9Qg-0005IG-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>
  <20031208025451.GB31948@pglaf.org>
Message-ID: <EBAE6D9F-2A80-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 7, 2003, at 6:54 PM, Greg Newby wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 07:37:26PM -0800, John Young wrote:
>> ...
>> What I like about the ring-in-the-flesh crowd is their pleasure in
>> grossing out the stodgers. Makes me wish I still had that knack
>> instead of only the memories.
>
> Hey, John -- wear some of that shit, and I promise to be grossed out.
>
> But seriously, has anyone considered that maybe the problem is Tim
> May?  His hate-filled ignorance is a real impediment to anyone who
> might otherwise be interested in "the cause."  His spews are pretty
> distasteful, and to him, anyone who didn't start cp a zillion years
> ago is just an ankle biter come-lately.

Fuck off and die, along with all of your fellow travellers.

You have contributed _nothing_ here.

>
> I've only been on the list for 3 years, but I'd say that things were a
> lot more interesting before (In-) Choat jumped ship.

In your three years here, nothing.

>
> And a big "fuck you, too" to anyone who thinks otherwise.
>   -- Greg
>

I  hope you and your family are some of the first of the tens of 
millions who will die in the Great Burnoff of Useless Eaters.


--Tim May
"Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose,  is somehow morally superior to a woman 
explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"




From mellon at pobox.com  Tue Dec  9 02:19:52 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 12:19:52 +0200
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <87ad62sj1j.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com>
References: <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
  <3FD4B5B0.27070.A564625@localhost>
  <87ad62sj1j.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com>
Message-ID: <20031209101952.GA12674@pobox.com>

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:37:44AM +0000, Michael Shields wrote:
> In message <3FD4B5B0.27070.A564625 at localhost>,
> "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
> >> Searching GG on "don frederickson got tim" is maybe more reliable than
> >> pasting this URL.
> >
> > For long urls, compress with tinuyurl.com
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/yc3s
> 
> If you do that, you have to rely on both the Google URL not changing
> and on tinyurl not going away.

I usually convert a Google Groups URL to a query using only the 
Message-ID: before posting it publicly. E.g. in the case of the message Tim May referred to, that'd be
http://groups.google.com/groups?oe=UTF-8&as_umsgid=%3C220820032357238678%25timcmay%40removethis.got.net%3E

Then the URL won't be _too_ long, and if Google changes the URL 
scheme or is replaced by some other archve, you've got the original 
Message-ID, the best identifier you could hope for.

--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 12:20:07 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 12:20:07 -0800
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F88FWfBnjgX5jj0001dbd5@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F88FWfBnjgX5jj0001dbd5@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <1495A174-2A85-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 9:39 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Well, I wouldn't apply the word "oppressive" across the board to the 
> cultures of big companies, but the fact is that modern American 
> coporate culture more often than not imitates a top-down, 'statist' 
> culture that is so universal we rarely recognize it.

Yes, a company/corporation/enterprise is owned by its owner(s). 
Sometimes that owner is a single person, sometimes the owners are a 
family, sometimes the original owners sold pieces of ownership to other 
people. Sometimes the net result is that millions of individuals own 
small pieces of the company.

In any case, either the single owner or the small group of owners or 
the large group of owners then chooses some method by which decisions 
are reached on what products to sell, how to make them, and so on.

The difference with government is that we do not have "polycentric" 
governments. We have a single entity, a single "corporation," which 
brooks no competition, which brooks little or no "shareholder dissent."

Many here miss this point and focus on the superficial aspect that 
corporations typically have a hierarchy and that this hierarchy 
supposedly makes them like governments. Yes, in this respect. But the 
tens of thousands of corporations, the ability to form new 
partnerships, new companies, new corporations, and for some of these 
entities to become as large as past corporate giants, is what makes all 
the difference.

>
> For instance, high-level strategic decisions are made almost entirely 
> in the vacuum of power. And often, that's appropriate. But many times, 
> the actual people who do the work and know the most about the subject 
> are completely out of the loop. Silicon Valley at its best operates in 
> a very different way...companies are far more driven from the 
> product/technology/service perspective, instead of imagining that 
> balance sheets can make a Lucent into a Cisco. (And at its best, if 
> some hot engineers along with a couple of useful management types feel 
> strongly enough about a missed opportunity, they just split off and 
> start doing it.)

Having worked at the largest Silicon Valley company, I can assure you 
that its management methods and its corporate set up is not nearly as 
different from the Rest of Business as you fantasize that it is.

And being a shareholder in a bunch of non-Silicon Valley companies, I 
can also assure you that their 'high-level strategic decisons" are NOT 
"made almost entirely in the vacuum of power."

Sure, some non-SV companies make colossal mistakes. So do a lot of SV 
companies--I could launch into a list of the Big Errors of the past 20 
years, but why bother?

History gets written by the winners. So people know about Intel, but 
not about AMI or Monolithic Memories or Intersil. So people know about 
Apple, but not about Convergent or Fortune Systems or Processor 
Technology. So people know about Sun, but not about Apollo or Daisy or 
MAD Computer.

>
>
> Retail is the absolute worst. FOr whatever reason (and I don't believe 
> it has anything to do with competitiveness), big CD or Book chains 
> never empower or reward employees on their ability to purchase books 
> for their store that sell well. In fact, almost zero real purchasing 
> decisions are done locally.

This is silly, socialist nonsense. I know some of the book buyers at 
the "Borders" store in Santa Cruz (the very one that the "anti-bigness" 
lefties tried to ban from opening in Santa Cruz). Not only do they have 
a "local authors" section which is larger than the similar section at 
the "local" bookstore, but they have a sophisticated system for 
re-ordering books based on sales. If a title sells, they know it. And 
can order replacements.

So, what's missing? Local authors?--check. Books that sell?--check. A 
wider selection of books than the 'locally-owned" store?--check. The 
selection of books at the Borders in Santa Cruz is wider than the 
selection at the other bookstore. For example, history, or the Greek 
and Roman classics. I was looking for a book on the pre-Socratic 
philosophers recently (Heraclitus and that cohort). The locally-owned 
bookstore (which I like a lot, by the way) had a small selection of 
classsics, less than a shelf or two. No pre-Socratic philosophy that I 
could find.

So I went down the street to Borders. A floor to ceiling (well, top of 
their shelves, which are tall) selection of books on the Greeks and 
Romans, including two of the standards on the pre-Socratics, plus a 
couple of books just on Heraclitus.

An experience I've had many times. Borders usually has it, the smaller 
bookstores (in Aptos, Watsonville, Capitola, and S. Cruz) tell me "No, 
but we can order it for you." Gee, I can order it myself, too.

Now tell me that Borders is deficient in selection?

And the Barnes and Noble stores I sometimes go to over in the Valley 
are vast collections of books as well.

This is the real reason why the smaller stores are complaining. Exactly 
what was heard 60 years ago when "supermarkets" came to town and the 
small grocery stores faced competition. Exactly what was heard 30 years 
ago when Wal-Mart and their type came to town and the small "five and 
dime" stores faced competition.

Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, 
they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what 
their owners want them to do.

>
> But nobody seems to notice...we're completely used to being passive 
> cogs in a big, fat machine-state. So in a sense, it's gone way beyond 
> 'repression'...no need for that rat-cage around our heads anymore.
>

You silly Bolshies are obviously on the wrong list if you think strong 
crypto is going to help your cause.

Feh.

--Tim May


--Tim May
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the 
expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Tue Dec  9 09:39:51 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 12:39:51 -0500
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F88FWfBnjgX5jj0001dbd5@hotmail.com>

Well, I wouldn't apply the word "oppressive" across the board to the 
cultures of big companies, but the fact is that modern American coporate 
culture more often than not imitates a top-down, 'statist' culture that is 
so universal we rarely recognize it.

For instance, high-level strategic decisions are made almost entirely in the 
vacuum of power. And often, that's appropriate. But many times, the actual 
people who do the work and know the most about the subject are completely 
out of the loop. Silicon Valley at its best operates in a very different 
way...companies are far more driven from the product/technology/service 
perspective, instead of imagining that balance sheets can make a Lucent into 
a Cisco. (And at its best, if some hot engineers along with a couple of 
useful management types feel strongly enough about a missed opportunity, 
they just split off and start doing it.)

But the best of Sillicon Valley is a rare exception. Most of the time "they" 
make decisions and people who are the technical experts must merely quietly 
implement those decisions. It's interesting to imagine what would have 
happened to Lucent if, for instance, the employees could have voted on the 
acquisition of Chromatis. They would have quickly realized that they were 
getting a raw $3B deal on a mediocre product, AND that they already had 
something equivalent ready in-house.

Retail is the absolute worst. FOr whatever reason (and I don't believe it 
has anything to do with competitiveness), big CD or Book chains never 
empower or reward employees on their ability to purchase books for their 
store that sell well. In fact, almost zero real purchasing decisions are 
done locally.

But nobody seems to notice...we're completely used to being passive cogs in 
a big, fat machine-state. So in a sense, it's gone way beyond 
'repression'...no need for that rat-cage around our heads anymore.

-Tyler Durden

>From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>To: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>CC: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
>Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 09:45:33 -0600
>
>On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 04:27:38PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
> > Everyone agrees that big corporations are oppressive,
> > bureaucratic, inefficient, etc.   No one more so than the
> > management advisers to big corporations.
>
>I'm not sure I'd agree that big corporations are oppressive. How?
>I once worked at Xerox and had a splendid time. Didn't feel "oppressed"
>at all.
>
>As for bureaucratic and inefficient, perhaps, but I've seen 50-people
>organizations devolve quite well. I suppose it all depends on your
>frame of reference. If you mean, "I can find perceived
>inefficiencies," I'm sure you can. But if they become too inefficient,
>well, over time competitors will rise to take advantage of those
>inefficiencies. Xerox can be an example here as well. This is just
>common sense.
>
>-Declan

_________________________________________________________________
Take advantage of our best MSN Dial-up offer of the year  six months 
@$9.95/month. Sign up now! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 12:51:58 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 12:51:58 -0800
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <20031209200735.GA15279@pobox.com>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
  <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
  <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312091343270.20984@panix3.panix.com>
  <20031209200735.GA15279@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <8789EE07-2A89-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 12:07 PM, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 01:57:00PM -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>>> Then one of them claimed he had arranged to have my account yanked, 
>>> for
>>> "violation of the DMCA." He claimed he had sent copies of my 
>>> "criminal"
>>> admissions to Got.net, to the RIAA, to "law enforcement" (shudder!),
>>> and so on.
>>
>> I gather that the denizens of alt.video.dvd have yet to read the 
>> Betamax
>> case.  Perhaps they should expand their reading before they opine on 
>> the
>> state of IP law.
>
> He was just trolling, being intentionally vague so that they'd assume
> he was copying from one DVD to another. Which they did, and which they
> raved about.
>
> There isn't any profound insight to be derived from a tired old picture
> of a newsgroup being provoked by trolling.

No, not a conventional troll.

Disinformation was being spread about how "making a copy of something" 
is the "same as stealing." Some of the apologists for DMCA were saying 
that anyone who copies a CD is the same as a shoplifter.

I casually volunteered that I made an average of one DVD of a Hollywood 
movie per day.

The kneejerks by the apologists for DMCA were illuminating, including 
the claim that the RIAA would be "investigating" this as a case of 
piracy. Frankly, I had hope for one of the several hundred lawsuits the 
RIAA has been tossing out like confetti (including to people who have 
never owned a computer...sounds like some due diligence malpractice 
cases are in order). Even better would be a process server trespassing 
on my property...no point in having a pig farm if you have nothing to 
throw to the pigs.

The revelation that Don Frederickson is one of those who needs to be 
dealt with eventually was rewarding.


--Tim May
"You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher 
moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know 
that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael 
Shirley




From frissell at panix.com  Tue Dec  9 10:57:00 2003
From: frissell at panix.com (Duncan Frissell)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 13:57:00 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com> 
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net> 
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net> 
  <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
  <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312091343270.20984@panix3.panix.com>

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> It happened in one of the "movies" groups (rec.arts.current-movies),
> when the thread was on DVD copy protection and the (claimed) illegality
> of making DVDs of movies.
>
> I explained how I was cheerfully making an average of a DVD a day of my
> favorite current movies.
>
> A couple of "nyms" went ballistic and foamed that they had forwarded my
> "admissions" to the RIAA and how I would face civil penalties and jail
> time, oh my!
>
> Then one of them claimed he had arranged to have my account yanked, for
> "violation of the DMCA." He claimed he had sent copies of my "criminal"
> admissions to Got.net, to the RIAA, to "law enforcement" (shudder!),
> and so on.

I gather that the denizens of alt.video.dvd have yet to read the Betamax
case.  Perhaps they should expand their reading before they opine on the
state of IP law.

This is one of several times that the readers of Tim's posts have reported
him to the authorities.  I recall the Santa Cruz sherrif's office call of
the early '90s occaisioned by a simple admission that Tim legally posessed
weapons at home.

I'm constantly amazed by the things that people think are illegal that
aren't.

Reporting people to the authorities is such an impolite thing to do.  In a
less enlightened era it would have led to an unfortunate breach of the
peace.  If you have a problem with someone's behavior speak to him nicely,
first.  And make damned sure that he's doing something wrong before you
complain.

Remember -- "Since Sodomy is a Virtue, can anything be a Vice?"

DCF




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 15:05:29 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 15:05:29 -0800
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
Message-ID: <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 12:59 PM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> Tim's whine (complaint) withstanding, I just got the January issue of 
> Reason
> in the mail and of interest is Mike Godwin's interview of Bruce 
> Sterling-
> Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future 
> (p 42-50).
> It's worth a read.
>
> Regards,  Matt-
>
>

All of you creeps complaining about my "whines" and "rants" should find 
a list to your liking. Perhaps a few of them could spring from this 
list:

--the Bolshies could create a "Crypto Progressives" list or somesuch, 
and could explain earnestly (though dishonestly) that strong crypto 
will make people of color happier.

--the appeasers who want to work with Cato, Cathy Young, the EFF, the 
CPSR, and other Washington "get along by going along" people could call 
themselves "Crypto Enthusiasts for Social Responsibility," or somesuch 
term which renders unto Caesar that which is CESRs.

Since Eric Murray has expressed distaste with my views, and says he is 
also looking to stop hosting the lne.com node, perhaps these groups can 
be distributed from his node.

As for you, Gaylor, you subscribe for a while, contribute nothing, 
vanish from the list for a couple of years, then resubscribe and 
immediately start ranting that I am not doing enough for the cause.


Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.


--Tim May

Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Tue Dec  9 12:59:04 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 15:59:04 EST
Subject: Speaking of Reason
Message-ID: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>

Tim's whine (complaint) withstanding, I just got the January issue of Reason 
in the mail and of interest is Mike Godwin's interview of Bruce Sterling- 
Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future (p 42-50). 
It's worth a read.

Regards,  Matt-




From declan at well.com  Tue Dec  9 14:20:20 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 16:20:20 -0600
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>; from
  nobody@cryptorebels.net on Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100
References: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>
Message-ID: <20031209162020.A27522@baltwash.com>

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, true anonymity in finacial affairs (and
> secure communication channels) is the only real method open to
> peacefully combat the all seeing [etc.]

We have anonymity in Web browsing (more or less, thanks to Lance &
co). It's not NSA-proof, but it's probably subpoena-proof.

We have anonymity in email thanks to remailers (to the extent they're
still around).

We have anonymity in publishing, and to some extent, document
retrieval, thanks to Freenet.

We have anonymity in one-way communications/dead drops thanks to
remailers gatewayed to Usenet newsgroups (if any still even do that).

We do not have anonymity in financial transactions. In fact, we have
less anonymity than we did a decade ago, thanks to amendments to the
Bank Secrecy Act and the USA Patriot Act. And the OECD's efforts in
this area too. Instead of a Chaum or Brands payment system, we ended
up with ebay/Paypal -- which has made clear its policy of intimate
cooperation with police.

Strong anonymity in online financial transactions is something like a
linchpin in deploying better strong anonymity solutions in other areas
because people like to get paid for developing and maintaining such
systems, especially if they are in any way controversial. The problem
IMHO is obtaining an interface with the banking/financial system,
probably the most-regulated industry in the U.S.

-Declan




From wmo at rebma.pro-ns.net  Tue Dec  9 14:47:01 2003
From: wmo at rebma.pro-ns.net (Bill O'Hanlon)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 16:47:01 -0600
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
In-Reply-To: <20031208072219.A9126@slack.lne.com>
References: <20031208082121.20527.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
  <20031208072219.A9126@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <20031209224701.GA49370@rebma.pro-ns.net>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 07:22:19AM -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
> 
> I'm getting tired of running the list.  As it is now it doesn't provide
> much value and I could use my time for something else.  Could someone
> please set up another node?  I'll send you all my scripts etc.  But I
> won't maintain it on a machine you provide, you'll have to do it.
> Maybe some of our list members from the government would like
> to step forward with some homeland security $$. :-)
> 


Eric hasn't formally abdicated, but let me remind everyone and the archives
that there's an alternative node, cypherpunks at ds.pro-ns.net, that runs in a
substantially similar way to Eric's.  It even uses some or most of the same
scripts that Eric uses on lne.com.

(The functionality that we're referring to here is that spam is mostly kept off
list by only allowing posts from members of the list plus known anonymous
remailers, known members of other nodes, etc.  Posts that don't make it
initially get forwarded by the node owners, and then posts from that user make
it automatically from then on.)

The ds.pro-ns.net node is hosted at the ISP that I own, so it doesn't suffer
from any dialup connectivity issues.

(I volunteered to take over for Eric in private email.  He suggested that
I remind everyone of the alternative, first.)

-Bill




From ericm at lne.com  Tue Dec  9 16:57:07 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 16:57:07 -0800
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>; from
  timcmay@got.net on Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 03:05:29PM -0800
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 03:05:29PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

> Since Eric Murray has expressed distaste with my views

I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
near the keyboard very often.   

> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.

Ok, bye!
<plonk>

Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ killfile)




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Tue Dec  9 17:57:50 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 17:57:50 -0800
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <20031209200735.GA15279@pobox.com>
References: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312091343270.20984@panix3.panix.com>
  <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
  <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
  <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312091343270.20984@panix3.panix.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031209175644.028e3da0@idiom.com>

At 10:07 PM 12/9/2003 +0200, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
>He was just trolling, being intentionally vague so that they'd assume
>he was copying from one DVD to another. Which they did, and which they
>raved about.

Tim?  Trolling?  No, they'd yank his Ontology license if he did that
(and yes, someone already threatened to try that....
Santa Cruz liberals seem to have as bad a problem with jerking knees
as the police state folks do.)




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec  9 19:04:36 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 19:04:36 -0800
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <967BB220-2ABD-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 4:57 PM, Eric Murray wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 03:05:29PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
>
>> Since Eric Murray has expressed distaste with my views
>
> I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
> On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
> When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
> these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
> near the keyboard very often.
>
>> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.
>
> Ok, bye!
> <plonk>
>
> Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ 
> killfile)
>


I hope he killfiles me in his lne.com files, as I am fed up with these 
Bolshies, fellow travellers, censors, and "why haven't you done more 
for the Cause!" whiners.


--Tim May




From doreillyi at sympatico.ca  Tue Dec  9 16:43:50 2003
From: doreillyi at sympatico.ca (Declan O'Reilly)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 19:43:50 -0500
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <20031210001837.GA16848@pobox.com>
References: <BAY7-F86VCSHdgPJyoM0001a35a@hotmail.com>
  <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
  <20031209213628.GA15892@pobox.com>
  <20031209192246.3c2f5083.doreillyi@sympatico.ca>
  <20031210001837.GA16848@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <20031209194350.333082e3.doreillyi@sympatico.ca>

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 02:18:37 +0200
Anatoly Vorobey <mellon at pobox.com> wrote:

> That was a rhetorical question. In the "old Soviet oligarchy", you
> would get into real trouble for publicly speaking against it. In 
> "today's corporate oligarchy", this is obviously not true. Therefore
> the comparison is flawed, and it's not at all true that "just the names
> and titles are different".
> 
> --
> avva


Oops , my bad

Thanks Anatoly

Declan O'Reilly




From cripto at ecn.org  Tue Dec  9 12:15:33 2003
From: cripto at ecn.org (Anonymous)
Date: Tue,  9 Dec 2003 21:15:33 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
Message-ID: <046054c60f93ff65a0288fca5d6ad732@ecn.org>

Let's look at some real-world metric of cpunkish issues:

1. Surveillance and data harvesting.

The main reason many "joined" cpunks (including me) was the issue of wide-spread surveillance and sophistication of data harvesting that computer networks enabled. I could protect my traffic no problemo. And I couldn't care less if some moronic consumer/sheeple type could not. That was not the issue. The issue was that government(s) (there used to be more than one in old times) had too good take on the pulse of the population, and would make less mistakes due to this feedback.

Well, they succeeded and cpunks miserably failed.

There was no way to jam the crypto down the throats of the unwashed. Today most of them keep their e-mails and http pages on disks that belong to LEA-friendly corps - there is no need to intercept - all TLA needs to do is search.

There is more data harvesting today than ever before. It's not even mentioned any more. It's not a news item or a sexy maillist topic.

2. Crypto tools

Widely available. This is a big success. One can readily download PGP or ssh.

Seldom used. I don't count "protect-your CC # with SSL" kind of use.

Only NSA knows, but I'd guess that the number of PGP users is pretty stable in the last decade. The biggest win of the government was removing surveillance from the focus.

My guess is that all the early fuzz about crypto tools was fear that they will be widely used. When it became obvious that it will not happen the fuzz stooped.

ECHELON? ITAR? No one even bothers to mention these any more. But you can safely assume that *all* mail traffic through MAE nodes is archived, along with google queries and that most net users have "files" with histories of search strings and similar. I would be disappointed with the waste of my tax dollars/euros/pounds if this is not the case.

The only way out is new communication technology. Internet is too old and has been completely coopted. We need the Next Thing, now. I don't know what it is but these things seem to come up quite regularly.

So forget about Internet doing anything for the cpunk agenda. Tune in the Next.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Tue Dec  9 18:34:30 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 21:34:30 -0500
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F21iVFAAO2G6Dn0001f971@hotmail.com>

Tim May wrote...

"This is silly, socialist nonsense. I know some of the book buyers at the 
"Borders" store in Santa Cruz (the very one that the "anti-bigness" lefties 
tried to ban from opening in Santa Cruz). Not only do they have a "local 
authors" section which is larger than the similar section at the "local" 
bookstore, but they have a sophisticated system for re-ordering books based 
on sales. If a title sells, they know it. And can order replacements."


Nothing particularly socialist about my original statement. I was trying to 
point out how the knee-jerk mimicry of top-down structures prevented even 
big companies from making as much money as they could, by awarding and 
leveraging local talent and information.  It would be nice to think that 
part of Border's success is from doing some of this. As for the small, 
independent bookstores, I personally helped trounce one in particular...the 
owner was not only a know-it-all DICK he really wasn't a very good 
businessman. He tried to tell his customers that they should want what he 
was selling and it didn't work. (Every now and then I'd try to send a 
customer or two his way to get the kind of books the Central Office wouldn't 
let us carry, and on several occasions the reply was "No thank you, I'm 
never shopping THERE again...").

So I'm not advocating 'requiring' big retail companies to get smarter, nor 
am I advocating non-shopping at the big Borders and Barnes and Nobles. My 
point was that a lot of corporate cultures blindly mimic hierarchies even 
when that's not appropriate, because it just about the only social model 
anyone's ever experienced.


>And being a shareholder in a bunch of non-Silicon Valley companies, I can 
>also assure you that their 'high-level strategic decisons" are NOT "made 
>almost entirely in the vacuum of power."

Well, I'm thinking of the Lucents, Nortels and Alcatels of the world. Oh, 
and all the big old financial houses as well. Those two sectors I can claim 
some decent familiarity with (I too am a shareholder in various companies). 
When Lucent bought Chromatis, or when Sandy Weil told Jack Grubman to uppe 
his rating on AT&T or...well, these major, corporation-shaking decisions 
were pretty much made in a vacuum of power. There's no way shareholders 
could give the thumbs-down to those absurd deals, or even (really) chuck out 
those responsible.

Of course, you'll argue that the shareholders could vote with their feet 
until something was done, but that's besides the point. The point here is 
that shareholders, Boardmembers, and upper management alike are so used to 
an environment where little or no feedback is possible that something like 
this happens so often. I'm not saying "there should be a law"...it's a 
cultural thing, and the culture sucks, because we're used to being told what 
to do by somebody else who's "in charge".


>You silly Bolshies are obviously on the wrong list if you think strong 
>crypto is going to help your cause.


Not so fast my fine, crypto-fascist friend. Let's look at Grubman. At the 
time Sandy Weil gave him his marching orders he probably had (at least) 10s 
of millions of dollars-worth of immature Citigroup options. You can also bet 
he was paying out the friggin WAZOO for whatever upper-east-side space he 
had (as well as whatever East Hampton 'bungalo' he had). So in a way, he was 
on the hook, and stood to make a hell of a lot more on the AT&T deal. So he 
probably didn't really WANT to put lipstick on that pig, but he didn't have 
a lot of choice. (OK, he had plenty of choice, but that's a different 
matter...)

Now let's say some kind of really sophisticated blacknet were available, 
able to support even short-selling and whatnot. In that case Grubman might 
have secretly shorted the AT&T deal and then given Sandy the finger, all the 
while preserving his tattered (but then still-salvagable) reputation as at 
least an "honest" pump-and-dump analyst, while being able to keep himself 
afloat in high-end hookers and other goodies (that's what I would have 
done!).

>From this perspective, crypto would have allowed enough holes to be punched 
in the deal so that real market forces could tear it apart like pirana, 
which is what should have happened.

-TD

_________________________________________________________________
Winterize your home with tips from MSN House & Home. 
http://special.msn.com/home/warmhome.armx




From mellon at pobox.com  Tue Dec  9 12:07:35 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 22:07:35 +0200
Subject: Got.net and its narcing out of its customers
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312091343270.20984@panix3.panix.com>
References: <6.0.0.22.2.20031205092507.02d7d7f0@mail.well.com>
  <3EFD45E8-277E-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <8A858E4E-2785-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031206015356.GC4450@clueinc.net>
  <7564DC7B-2837-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031208151518.B17389@baltwash.com>
  <E9BD53BA-29C3-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <Pine.NEB.4.58.0312091343270.20984@panix3.panix.com>
Message-ID: <20031209200735.GA15279@pobox.com>

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 01:57:00PM -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote:
> > Then one of them claimed he had arranged to have my account yanked, for
> > "violation of the DMCA." He claimed he had sent copies of my "criminal"
> > admissions to Got.net, to the RIAA, to "law enforcement" (shudder!),
> > and so on.
> 
> I gather that the denizens of alt.video.dvd have yet to read the Betamax
> case.  Perhaps they should expand their reading before they opine on the
> state of IP law.

He was just trolling, being intentionally vague so that they'd assume
he was copying from one DVD to another. Which they did, and which they 
raved about.

There isn't any profound insight to be derived from a tired old picture
of a newsgroup being provoked by trolling.

--
avva




From mellon at pobox.com  Tue Dec  9 12:20:07 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 22:20:07 +0200
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>
References: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>
Message-ID: <20031209202007.GA15332@pobox.com>

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote:
> With the USA
> becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... 

That's a pretty silly thing to say.
Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the
world?

> As far as I'm concerned, true anonymity in finacial affairs (and secure communication
> channels) is the only real method open to peacefully combat the all seeing,
> all powerful government.

You can't combat an all-powerful government, because it's all-powerful. 
And you can't manage anonimity against an all-seeing government, because
it is all-seeing.

--
avva




From mellon at pobox.com  Tue Dec  9 13:36:28 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 23:36:28 +0200
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
References: <BAY7-F86VCSHdgPJyoM0001a35a@hotmail.com>
  <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
Message-ID: <20031209213628.GA15892@pobox.com>

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 06:41:21PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
> 
> > However, I don't see the strong support for Soviet or Maoist-style state
> > control these days...these are vaguely romantic notions once in a while, but
> > they don't have any deep ideological support like they might have in the
> > 60s.
> 
> I don't know about that.  Today's corporate oligarchy behaves an awful lot
> like the old Soviet oligarchy.  Just the names and titles are different.

Do you expect to get in real trouble for publicly saying that?

--
avva




From rah at shipwright.com  Tue Dec  9 20:44:39 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 23:44:39 -0500
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
Message-ID: <p0602041bbbfc54b47cdd@[66.149.49.5]>

At 3:59 PM -0500 12/9/03, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
>Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling

Green = Red.

Bruce Sterling is, for all intents and purposes, a commie.

"Veridian", my ass.


Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From roy at rant-central.com  Tue Dec  9 20:46:47 2003
From: roy at rant-central.com (Roy M. Silvernail)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 23:46:47 -0500
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <200312092346.47096.roy@rant-central.com>

On Tuesday 09 December 2003 19:57, Eric Murray wrote:

> Ok, bye!
> <plonk>
>
> Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ killfile)

Shit, mine too.  I really don't get what's happened to Tim.  He used to be a 
great resource.  Now he's even forgotten how to troll well.

<shrug>




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Dec 10 00:19:38 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 00:19:38 -0800
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <200312092346.47096.roy@rant-central.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
  <200312092346.47096.roy@rant-central.com>
Message-ID: <98B89B26-2AE9-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 9, 2003, at 8:46 PM, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:

> On Tuesday 09 December 2003 19:57, Eric Murray wrote:
>
>> Ok, bye!
>> <plonk>
>>
>> Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ 
>> killfile)
>
> Shit, mine too.  I really don't get what's happened to Tim.  He used 
> to be a
> great resource.  Now he's even forgotten how to troll well.
>

Good riddance. You've never contributed an iota to this list.

--Tim May




From rah at shipwright.com  Wed Dec 10 05:26:22 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:26:22 -0500
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com> 
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <p0602042bbbfccde6e558@[66.149.49.5]>

At 4:57 PM -0800 12/9/03, Eric Murray wrote:
>I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
>On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
>When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
>these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
>near the keyboard very often.
>
>> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.
>
>Ok, bye!
><plonk>
>
>Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ killfile)

To quote a famous flying squirrel, that trick never works. Tried it myself
a few times over the years, and one usually misses too much of what this
list is for, as you noted yourself, above.

Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin
Skippy, too.

Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it,
can be useful. Try it, you'll like it.

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From declan at well.com  Wed Dec 10 06:41:37 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:41:37 -0600
Subject: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
In-Reply-To: <20031210125907.GA19742@pobox.com>; from mellon@pobox.com
  on Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:59:07PM +0200
References: <20031210115624.GN4452@leitl.org>
  <20031210125907.GA19742@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <20031210084137.A754@baltwash.com>

This robots.txt issue was exaggerated by leftist crtitics of the
administration. (This is not a general defense of the White House,
just a statement of fact.) The Bush WH.gov server has a special Iraq
section where press releases, speeches, etc. are reposted in a
different HTML template. The WH only wants the "master" copy indexed
and not the duplicate copy in the second template. Hence the apparent
weirdness in robots.txt.

I have not found any skullduggery going on, though I suppose it
wouldn't hurt to keep a copy of the Iraq section for "diff" purposes
just in case.

-Declan


On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:59:07PM +0200, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:56:24PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > Can somebody with a webspider crawl these documents, and put it up
> > on the web?
> > 
> > 	http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
> 
> All or nearly all of them are duplicates of same documents
> elsewhere in the directory tree; "X/text/" and "X/iraq/" are
> supposed to be copies of "X/", with images removed in the first 
> case. I suspect that downloading them all would just confirm that.
> 
> --
> avva




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec 10 05:53:49 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:53:49 EST
Subject: Speaking of Reason
Message-ID: <a7.39bfc3d8.2d087f6d@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/9/2003 6:12:26 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
timcmay at got.net writes:

> As for you, Gaylor, you subscribe for a while, contribute nothing, 
> vanish from the list for a couple of years, then resubscribe and 
> immediately start ranting that I am not doing enough for the cause.
> 
> 
> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.
> 

It's interesting to note you keep track of subscription patterns.  "Fuck you 
dead", hmmm, I suppose that's better then your old refrain of threatening to 
shoot someone. Do you feel self-censored, afraid of the authorities, or just 
don't want to get your got.net account yanked?

My point about Reason Magazine is your inability to understand that the 
magazine has improved.

Regards,  Matt-




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec 10 05:54:47 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:54:47 EST
Subject: Speaking of Reason
Message-ID: <1d8.1643a7ec.2d087fa7@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/9/2003 11:58:23 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
rah at shipwright.com writes:

> Green = Red.
> 
> Bruce Sterling is, for all intents and purposes, a commie.
> 
> "Veridian", my ass.
> 

My thoughts exactly.

Regards,  Matt-




From rah at shipwright.com  Wed Dec 10 07:19:33 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 10:19:33 -0500
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <20031210135836.GA20032@pobox.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com> 
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net> 
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com> 
  <p0602042bbbfccde6e558@[66.149.49.5]>
  <20031210135836.GA20032@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <p0602043fbbfce8e839ea@[66.149.49.5]>

At 3:58 PM +0200 12/10/03, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
>So what you're saying is that we need a remote-plonk mechanism to insert
>oneself into another person's killfile (merely entertaining this thought
>makes me a loathsome Bolshie, I'm sure).

Yup. On both counts. :-).

Seriously, in IM, like AIM, for instance, you can do that kind of thing
already. Well, you can not appear on someone's buddy list as logged on,
anyway, but you get the same result, since it's P2P, and they can't talk to
you if they can't see you.

As for getting into someone's killfile on purpose, I leave that as an
exercise for the reader. As a famous commie utopian sang once "it's easy if
you try..."

Of course, if you "Imagine" in one hand, and shit in the other, it's easy
to see what you have more of...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 10 10:37:27 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 10:37:27 -0800
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <p0602041bbbfc54b47cdd@[66.149.49.5]>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3FD6F767.18539.3154D2@localhost>

    --
 On 9 Dec 2003 at 23:44, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> At 3:59 PM -0500 12/9/03, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
> >Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling
>
> Green = Red.
>
> Bruce Sterling is, for all intents and purposes, a commie.
>
> "Veridian", my ass.

Veridian green is entryist, not commie.  The watermelons would 
perceive it as right entryist, or libertarian entryist.

The standard green viewpoint is that if socialism retarded the 
advance of technology and lowered everyone's standard of 
living, that is actually a good thing.   The Veridian green 
viewpoint is pro capitalist, and pro progress.

As living standards rise, we are going to spend more on
intangibles and natural beauty, and the interesting question is
how to do this in a capitalist, hi-tech, framework. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     epHuXfKEnvIeemvmqgSFKseszn18SOm2XFpS1gtE
     4dfA1f4lhc/Li4gceOzMvAQ8PDBLWJdfsG1+aFlm0




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 10 10:37:27 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 10:37:27 -0800
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>
Message-ID: <3FD6F767.15234.315522@localhost>

    --
On 9 Dec 2003 at 0:47, edo wrote:
> What I'm curious about is digital currencies. Can anyone
> speak about the Digital Monetary Trust or DMT? I'm sorry I
> have not read the last upteen years of mail archives, but I'm
> interested in what people think NOW about Orlin Grabbe, DMT,
> e-gold etc.

An e-gold account is a gold demoninated, offshore account.

Same for Pecunix, which has been more recently audited, has
better security provisions -- it provides for PGP based login,
etc.  It is less widely accepted than e-gold, but provides a
better deal.  Did I mention it has been more recently audited.
And just in case you missed it, e-gold has not been audited for
a while.

None of these accounts provide Chaumian anonymity, which means
they can track identity, which means they must track identity,
which costs them.

However one can withdraw, and deposit, physical gold, which
actually is anonymous, and provides a physical mix, since one
gold atom looks very like another. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     gFHr0U97wM1IeLX9SRCadMi2qoG+8FaaFXSdMlnB
     41xSX7dI0Au/V2pVkuLX2tYRDvsRZ76g3jqqc7NYe




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 10 08:07:29 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 11:07:29 -0500
Subject: Tim May is Free!
Message-ID: <BAY7-F61E7uhWowVu9F0002224c@hotmail.com>

"I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
>On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
>When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
>these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
>near the keyboard very often."

I dunno...sometimes his racism and child-killing and "fuck them deads" seem 
to be fairly logical consequences of his basic philosophies. In fact, Tim 
May can only be truly free after every other human being in the world is 
dead...

(Fade to wavy fluctuations of the visual field)

The time is 2023, and Tim May finally figures out how to release a plague of 
nanobots that kill every human being in the world but himself.

Now we see Tim May driving a Hummer over the rolling hills of No Cal, on his 
weekly excursion to view the piles of dead bodies on the outskirts of San 
Fransisco. He stops by a 7-11, picking up some supplies, and tosses a 
handful of pennies onto the counter, in front of the skeleton of the counter 
boy. "That's what the market can bare, my friend, and then some," he says 
with a sly grin.

Arriving at the outskirts of San Fransisco he drives up to a tall hill, 
where some bodies are visible in the foreground, and downtown San Fransisco 
is visible in the distance. Complete silence pervades.

Raising his fist in the air he shouts at the top of his lungs: "SODOMITES! 
NEGROS! STATISTS! BOLSHIES! I'M FREE, DO YOU HEAR ME! FREEEEEE!"

Today he needs to re-gas the small powerplant that keeps his server farm 
alive. He decided to open his own Cypherpunks node, to which he posts on a 
regular basis. He's been issuing a stream of posts on "Darwinian 
Implications of Humanocide", and on how Darwinian evolution will eventually 
create a species much more advanced and free than the one he killed off.

-TD




>From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Speaking of Reason
>Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:26:22 -0500
>
>At 4:57 PM -0800 12/9/03, Eric Murray wrote:
> >I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
> >On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
> >When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
> >these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
> >near the keyboard very often.
> >
> >> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.
> >
> >Ok, bye!
> ><plonk>
> >
> >Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ 
>killfile)
>
>To quote a famous flying squirrel, that trick never works. Tried it myself
>a few times over the years, and one usually misses too much of what this
>list is for, as you noted yourself, above.
>
>Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin
>Skippy, too.
>
>Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it,
>can be useful. Try it, you'll like it.
>
>Cheers,
>RAH
>
>--
>-----------------
>R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
>The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
>44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
>"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
>[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
>experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

_________________________________________________________________
Get holiday tips for festive fun. 
http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx




From bram at bitconjurer.org  Wed Dec 10 11:29:18 2003
From: bram at bitconjurer.org (Bram Cohen)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 11:29:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Codecon 2004 CFP - Just a few days left
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0312101127360.8337-100000@zen.eds.org>

CodeCon 3.0
February 20-22, 2004
San Francisco CA, USA
www.codecon.org

Call For Papers

CodeCon is the premier showcase of active hacker projects. It is an
excellent opportunity for developers to demonstrate their work and keep
abreast of what's going on in their community.

All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally open
source. Presenters must be one of the active developers of the code in
question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code.

CodeCon strongly encourages presenters from non-commercial and academic
backgrounds to attend for the purposes of collaboration and the sharing of
knowledge by providing free registration to workshop presenters and
discounted registration to full-time students.

We hereby solicit papers and demonstrations.

    * Papers and proposals due: December 15, 2003
    * Authors notified: January 1, 2004

Possible topics include, but are by no means restricted to:

    * community-based web sites - forums, weblogs, personals
    * development tools - languages, debuggers, version control
    * file sharing systems - swarming distribution, distributed search
    * security products - mail encryption, intrusion detection, firewalls

Presentations will be a 45 minutes long, with 15 minutes allocated for
Q&A. Overruns will be truncated.

Submission details:

Submissions are being accepted immediately. Acceptance dates are November
15, and December 15. After the first acceptance date, submissions will be
either accepted, rejected, or deferred to the second acceptance date.

The conference language is English.

Ideally, demonstrations should be usable by attendees with 802.11b
connected devices either via a web interface, or locally on Windows,
UNIX-like, or MacOS platforms. Cross-platform applications are most
desirable.

Our venue will be 21+.

If you have a specific day on which you would prefer to present, please
advise us.

To submit, send mail to submissions at codecon.org including the following
information:

    * Project name
    * url of project home page
    * tagline - one sentence or less summing up what the project does
    * names of presenter(s) and urls of their home pages, if they have any
    * one-paragraph bios of presenters (optional)
    * project history, no more than a few sentences
    * what will be done in the project demo
    * major achievement(s) so far
    * claim(s) to fame, if any
    * future plans

Program Chair: Bram Cohen
General Chair: Len Sassaman

Program Committee:

    * Bram Cohen
    * Len Sassaman
    * Jonathan Moore
    * Jered Floyd
    * Brandon Wiley
    * Jeremy Bornstein

Sponsorship:

If your organization is interested in sponsoring CodeCon, we would love to
hear from you. In particular, we are looking for sponsors for social meals
and parties on any of the three days of the conference, as well as
sponsors of the conference as a whole, prizes or awards for quality
presentations, scholarships for qualified applicants, and assistance with
transportation or accommodation for presenters with limited resources. If
you might be interested in sponsoring any of these aspects, please contact
the conference organizers at codecon-admin at codecon.org.

Press policy:

CodeCon strives to be a conference for developers, with strong audience
participation. As such, we need to limit the number of complimentary
passes for non-developer attendees. Press passes are limited to one pass
per publication, and must be approved prior to the registration deadline
(to be announced later). If you are a member of the press, and interested
in covering CodeCon, please contact us early by sending email to
press at codecon.org. Members of the press who do not receive press-passes
are welcome to participate as regular conference attendees. Questions:

If you have questions about CodeCon, or would like to contact the
organizers, please mail codecon-admin at codecon.org. Please note this
address is only for questions and administrative requests, and not for
workshop presentation submissions. 




From mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at  Wed Dec 10 03:56:21 2003
From: mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at (privacy.at Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 12:56:21 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Type III Anonymous message
Message-ID: <0de0afc1fce3c9d7e4597f3fcc1ddc26@remailer.privacy.at>

-----BEGIN TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE-----
Message-type: plaintext

Tim,

I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION 
FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS...

-----END TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE-----




From eugen at leitl.org  Wed Dec 10 03:56:24 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 12:56:24 +0100
Subject: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
Message-ID: <20031210115624.GN4452@leitl.org>

Can somebody with a webspider crawl these documents, and put it up
on the web?

	http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at  Wed Dec 10 04:13:09 2003
From: mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at (privacy.at Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:13:09 +0100 (CET)
Subject: members
Message-ID: <f97a19aa2f891d65269f21050a21c4dd@remailer.privacy.at>

Hello

I'm curious. You say the list got some 400+ members right now and that's only the lne node too. Can you provide some statistics on the users? How many addresses are .gov? Any valid TLA addresses in there?!




From juicy at melontraffickers.com  Wed Dec 10 13:28:31 2003
From: juicy at melontraffickers.com (A.Melon)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:28:31 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
Message-ID: <cd9b477dc10714b8d94c1de4549ce348@melontraffickers.com>

Tyler Durden (camera_lumina at hotmail.com) wrote on 2003-12-08:
> Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it was
> sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted in
> transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever?

Hardly, given the simple fact that well-encrypted content is
indistinguishable from noise.




From fb at intldef.org  Wed Dec 10 10:43:10 2003
From: fb at intldef.org (FB`)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:43:10 -0500
Subject: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
References: <20031210115624.GN4452@leitl.org> 
  <20031210125907.GA19742@pobox.com> <20031210084137.A754@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <008301c3bf4d$77d2da40$1901a8c0@ybsweb>

I really would expect that preventing *spiders* (some spiders, even) using
the *publicly accessible* robots.txt would be a pretty horribly ineffective
form of "skullduggery"... can think of 10 things to do that are easier, more
effective and less of a potential pr fiasco...

see http://shock-awe.info/archive/000965.php

FB`



From fb at intldef.org  Wed Dec 10 10:46:09 2003
From: fb at intldef.org (FB`)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:46:09 -0500
Subject: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
Message-ID: <00a901c3bf4d$e8e9cf90$1901a8c0@ybsweb>

I really would expect that preventing *spiders* (some spiders, even) using
the *publicly accessible* robots.txt would be a pretty horribly ineffective
form of "skullduggery"... can think of 10 things to do that are easier, more
effective and less of a potential pr fiasco...

see http://shock-awe.info/archive/000965.php

FB`



From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 10 14:07:33 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:07:33 -0800
Subject: alt.anonymous.messages
In-Reply-To: <20031210162207.GA20511@pobox.com>
References: <20031209162020.A27522@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <3FD728A5.32118.F23612@localhost>

    --
On 10 Dec 2003 at 18:22, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic.
> Google Groups says they have a bit more than 200 messages in
> it on December 9, for example. I assume nearly all of it is
> from remailers posting to Usenet (or remailers sending mail
> to mail2news gateways), otherwise there's little point of
> using it.

You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of
alt.anonymous.messages.  If someone posts directly to
alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he
is posting to.  (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to
always download all new messages) 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     zMY49IWQvar+nBxNmFDbRihngyDWi30UIYQY9NAh
     4rVDPJdqGIjPUeycOPjbn3AbW2+7fZ0HFzy2xQEeX




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 10 14:13:59 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:13:59 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
In-Reply-To: <N1-fRahz5iv@SAFe-mail.net>
Message-ID: <3FD72A27.21904.F8189D@localhost>

    --
On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
> E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in
> checking account holder identification, so if you use an
> effective proxying means (e.g., an open Wi-Fi hotspot) to
> create and access your accounts you are pretty safe.  If you
> fund you accounts using money orders, you may be safe
> (depending on whether you've employed others to purchase the
> money orders or your physical identity is being captured at
> the money order agent during the transaction).

Some people offer a cash to e-gold service.

Deposit a bundle of notes in their account, they will sell you
e-gold.   You use the low order bits of the amount as an ID.

Deposit small used notes in the US, withdraw gold in asia.

> ALTA/DMT does have a certain degree of un-linkability in that
> once accounts are deleted all db references in the system to
> that account are also deleted from all ALTA/DMT dbs.

Trust us.  Would we lie to you? 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     9P+3EaOU5V9RRtuNGi0n0/2XlM5S3RxLGzOoIMh7
     4Imw9MND4w22DnR2n6tOp834DoLrSedKMdIsQGxwn




From dog3 at eruditium.org  Wed Dec 10 11:51:53 2003
From: dog3 at eruditium.org (cubic-dog)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:51:53 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Decline of the Cypherpunks list...Part 19
In-Reply-To: <3FD4A67A.1339.A1AD969@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312101448030.5584-100000@ns.eruditium.org>

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> SNIP 
> In "austin powers", they make the spy sound sixties by 
> depicting him as expecting the victory of the Soviet Union, and 
> perhaps rather favoring that outcome.   If they had him quote 
> Ayn Rand, he would not have sounded sixties.
> 
> When the mass media want to cash in on nostalgia for the 
> sixties and early seventies, it is the young commies they 
> remember.

That's because the sixties commies sold out as quickly
as they could when they were no longer threatened with
compulsory military service. 
The sixties commies are the worst of the "how much
is enough" crowd out there whipping slave kids harder
to make more nikes and gap clothing.

The folks doing the heinlen/randian ranting haven't sold
out yet.




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 10 04:59:07 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:59:07 +0200
Subject: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
In-Reply-To: <20031210115624.GN4452@leitl.org>
References: <20031210115624.GN4452@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <20031210125907.GA19742@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:56:24PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Can somebody with a webspider crawl these documents, and put it up
> on the web?
> 
> 	http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

All or nearly all of them are duplicates of same documents
elsewhere in the directory tree; "X/text/" and "X/iraq/" are
supposed to be copies of "X/", with images removed in the first 
case. I suspect that downloading them all would just confirm that.

--
avva




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Wed Dec 10 12:19:56 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:19:56 -0500
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <N1-fRahz5iv@SAFe-mail.net>

At 10:37 AM 12/10/2003, James A. Donald wrote:
    --
On 9 Dec 2003 at 0:47, edo wrote:
>> What I'm curious about is digital currencies. Can anyone
>> speak about the Digital Monetary Trust or DMT? I'm sorry I
>> have not read the last upteen years of mail archives, but I'm
>> interested in what people think NOW about Orlin Grabbe, DMT,
>> e-gold etc.

...snip..

>None of these accounts provide Chaumian anonymity, which means
>they can track identity, which means they must track identity,
which costs them.

>However one can withdraw, and deposit, physical gold, which
actually is anonymous, and provides a physical mix, since one
gold atom looks very like another. 

E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in checking account holder identification, so if you use an effective proxying means (e.g., an open Wi-Fi hotspot) to create and access your accounts you are pretty safe.  If you fund you accounts using money orders, you may be safe (depending on whether you've employed others to purchase the money orders or your physical identity is being captured at the money order agent during the transaction).

Although ALTA/DMT doesn't support blinded tokens, it does support tokens. http://www.orlingrabbe.com/dmt_bearercert.htm

ALTA/DMT does have a certain degree of un-linkability in that once accounts are deleted all db references in the system to that account are also deleted from all ALTA/DMT dbs.  This means if value is transferred from account A to Account B and subsequently Account A is deleted all traces of the transaction should be unlinked from Account B.  It also means if you delete an account with a balance, accidently or otherwise, the money is gone.

Two e-gold exchange agents have announced either formally or informally that they will now transact with ALTA/DMT.  I beleive thay both accept money orders for fuding.  Money can be withdrawn using e-gold and/or ATM cards either directly supporting ALTA/DMT (https://www.liquidprivacy.net/) or e-gold.




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 10 05:58:36 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:58:36 +0200
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <p0602042bbbfccde6e558@[66.149.49.5]>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
  <p0602042bbbfccde6e558@[66.149.49.5]>
Message-ID: <20031210135836.GA20032@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 08:26:22AM -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin
> Skippy, too.
> 
> Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it,
> can be useful. Try it, you'll like it.

So what you're saying is that we need a remote-plonk mechanism to insert
oneself into another person's killfile (merely entertaining this thought
makes me a loathsome Bolshie, I'm sure).

--
avva




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Wed Dec 10 17:31:41 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 17:31:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F1153TZHRWQdqd00023eff@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20031211013141.30446.qmail@web40604.mail.yahoo.com>

> If you spatially fft a random photo, you'll find that the image detail 
> energy largely occupies certain bands. These are not the bands that stego 
> uses (or so I assume...it really can't be otherwise). The stego-able 
> spectrum will indeed be noise, but this noise will have a certain spectrum.

There is an obvious solution here ... you don't modulate into the noise band.
You modulate the base bits. The image visibly changes but only possession of
the original can prove that. Of course, it would have to be pictures of sand,
grass, water, crowd from above.



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Wed Dec 10 18:20:55 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 18:20:55 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
In-Reply-To: <N1-fjHOurmk@SAFe-mail.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031210180323.028e4a58@idiom.com>

On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
 > E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in
 > checking account holder identification

Unfortunately, they also don't due much if any due diligence in
identifying themselves in messages to real or potential customers,
so it's extremely difficult to determine if I've gotten any
administrative messages that really _were_ from them
as opposed to the N fraudsters sending out mail asking you to
log in to e-g0ld.com or whatever fake page lets them steal
your egold account number and password so they can drain your balance.

A policy of PGP-signing all their messages using a key
that's published on their web pages would be a good start,
though it's still possible to trick some fraction of people
into accepting the wrong keys.  For now, my basic assumption
is that any communications I receive that purport to be from them
are a fraud, and it's frustrating that there's no good mechanism
for reporting that to e-gold.

At 07:08 PM 12/10/2003 -0500, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
>-------- Original Message --------
>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:13:59 -0800
>
> > On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote: ...
> > > ALTA/DMT does have a certain degree of un-linkability in that
> > > once accounts are deleted all db references in the system to
> > > that account are also deleted from all ALTA/DMT dbs.
> >
> > Trust us.  Would we lie to you?
>
>This info was obtained from discussions with the developers,
>experiments with the system and examination of the code.

You can't tell if the code you're examining is the real code,
or whether it will continue to be the real code in the future.

You can't tell if the system is making backups of its databases.

You can't tell if the experiments you're making with their system
are really detecting that there's no information stored,
or merely that it's not telling _you_ where they stored it.

You can't tell if they're stashing session keys somewhere
for the Echelon folks to correlate with their wiretap data.

You can't distinguish whether any system is sufficiently advanced or
merely a rigged demo, nor can you tell which one this system is.

You can't tell from discussions with the developers whether they're
lying to you, at least unless they're bad at it.

You can't tell from experiments with the system that
did in fact pay you the money that they should have
whether they'll always do so in the future.

You can't tell from extremely detailed experiments where
they give you the root passwords to all their machines
and let you watch the bits go in and out whether
all future transactions will be handled the same way
or whether they're just stringing you along until there's
enough real money in the system or enough money from real suspects
that the owners or various monkeys on their back want to
rip off or rat out.

You're back to trusting them.  I don't know them,
so I don't know if they're trustable, but there are people
in this business who are, as well as others who aren't.

You can tell whether you've given them any real information,
and if the system doesn't collect it, it can't rat you out.
But otherwise, it's basically trust.




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 10 08:22:07 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 18:22:07 +0200
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <20031209162020.A27522@baltwash.com>
References: <a57d5957249032b24aae7e71c451df58@cryptorebels.net>
  <20031209162020.A27522@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <20031210162207.GA20511@pobox.com>

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:20:20PM -0600, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> We have anonymity in Web browsing (more or less, thanks to Lance &
> co). It's not NSA-proof, but it's probably subpoena-proof.
> 
> We have anonymity in email thanks to remailers (to the extent they're
> still around).
> 
> We have anonymity in publishing, and to some extent, document
> retrieval, thanks to Freenet.
> 
> We have anonymity in one-way communications/dead drops thanks to
> remailers gatewayed to Usenet newsgroups (if any still even do that).

alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic. Google Groups
says they have a bit more than 200 messages in it on December 9, for
example. I assume nearly all of it is from remailers posting to Usenet
(or remailers sending mail to mail2news gateways), otherwise there's
little point of using it.

--
avva




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Wed Dec 10 18:36:59 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 18:36:59 -0800
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F1153TZHRWQdqd00023eff@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031210182702.028dd000@idiom.com>

At 07:12 PM 12/10/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
>If you spatially fft a random photo, you'll find that the image detail 
>energy largely occupies certain bands. These are not the bands that stego 
>uses (or so I assume...it really can't be otherwise). The stego-able 
>spectrum will indeed be noise, but this noise will have a certain spectrum.
>
>Stego, done well, will I assume try to mimic this noise, but there may be 
>problems. If the message is encrypted, then merely loading that message 
>into the photo will, I assume, NOT result in a noise spectrum that looks 
>like real noise. So you'll need some kind of chopper or spectrum-spreader 
>I guess.

If you're asking whether something has added stego rather than
original picture noise, and how to detect it, that's one thing.

But if you're asking whether something used to have added stego,
and that stego has now been removed, and how to detect _that_
that's a much harder question.
- There was an original.
- Then there was an original with stegobits added.
- Then there was an original with something different done to the previous 
stego image.

The MITM isn't going to be able to restore the original bits,
but they could replace the stego bits with various kinds of noise,
or with different stego bits using the same stego system,
or using a different stego system, but how can you tell?
If they've replaced the message with a different message
using the same stego system, and the system gives you a method for
determining who a message is from and who it's to,
then maybe you can tell whether the new message is for you or not
and whether it's from whoever you expected it to be from or not, if you knew.

If they've used a different stego system, or if you're using a
stego system that's very good, you're back to the question of
determining whether the message you received was a message
that has somebody else's stego in it.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Wed Dec 10 16:08:59 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 19:08:59 -0500
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <N1-fjHOurmk@SAFe-mail.net>

-------- Original Message --------
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
Apparently from: owner-cypherpunks at minder.net
To: cypherpunks at lne.com
Subject: Re: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:13:59 -0800

>     --
> On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
> > If you
> > fund you accounts using money orders, you may be safe
> > (depending on whether you've employed others to purchase the
> > money orders or your physical identity is being captured at
> > the money order agent during the transaction).
> 
> Some people offer a cash to e-gold service.

Though this is mostly discovered through direct communications, for obvious reasons.
> 
> Deposit a bundle of notes in their account, they will sell you
> e-gold.   You use the low order bits of the amount as an ID.

Others have used the serial number of one of the bills submitted (e.g., the one highlighted with a yellow marker).

> 
> > ALTA/DMT does have a certain degree of un-linkability in that
> > once accounts are deleted all db references in the system to
> > that account are also deleted from all ALTA/DMT dbs.
> 
> Trust us.  Would we lie to you? 

This info was obtained from discussions with the developers, experiments with the system and examination of the code.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 10 16:12:30 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 19:12:30 -0500
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F1153TZHRWQdqd00023eff@hotmail.com>

Well, that sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's got to be a lot 
more discussion before I'm convinced.

Remember that psuedorandom or encrypted data has a certain noise spectrum. 
This noise spectrum is extremely different based on what PRBS one is 
using...PRBS 2^23-1 looks completely different from other 'noise' (and 
remember noise is a relative term).

If you spatially fft a random photo, you'll find that the image detail 
energy largely occupies certain bands. These are not the bands that stego 
uses (or so I assume...it really can't be otherwise). The stego-able 
spectrum will indeed be noise, but this noise will have a certain spectrum.

Stego, done well, will I assume try to mimic this noise, but there may be 
problems. If the message is encrypted, then merely loading that message into 
the photo will, I assume, NOT result in a noise spectrum that looks like 
real noise. So you'll need some kind of chopper or spectrum-spreader I 
guess.

If no chopper's used, however, I'm guessing that stego-ed 'noise' doesn't 
look like true photo noise. If the photo has been de-stegoed stupidly (ie, 
by writing a random message in its place), that noise won't look like photo 
noise. So it seems to me that you'd need a sophisticated agent to make the 
de-steoed photo look like it never had stego. In other words, if the FBI are 
your man-in-the-middle, then you'll be able to detect that the photo was 
de-stegoed. If the NSA is your man-in-the-middle, you might not be able to 
tell.

Any of you TLA lurkers wanna come in on a remailer and set me straight?

-TD





>From: "A.Melon" <juicy at melontraffickers.com>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
>Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:28:31 -0800 (PST)
>
>Tyler Durden (camera_lumina at hotmail.com) wrote on 2003-12-08:
> > Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it was
> > sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted 
>in
> > transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever?
>
>Hardly, given the simple fact that well-encrypted content is
>indistinguishable from noise.

_________________________________________________________________
Dont worry if your Inbox will max out while you are enjoying the holidays.  
Get MSN Extra Storage!  http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Dec 10 19:31:58 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 19:31:58 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031210180323.028e4a58@idiom.com>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031210180323.028e4a58@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <93117B9E-2B8A-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 10, 2003, at 6:20 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
> > E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in
> > checking account holder identification
>
> Unfortunately, they also don't due much if any due diligence in
> identifying themselves in messages to real or potential customers,
> so it's extremely difficult to determine if I've gotten any
> administrative messages that really _were_ from them
> as opposed to the N fraudsters sending out mail asking you to
> log in to e-g0ld.com or whatever fake page lets them steal
> your egold account number and password so they can drain your balance.
>
> A policy of PGP-signing all their messages using a key
> that's published on their web pages would be a good start,
> though it's still possible to trick some fraction of people
> into accepting the wrong keys.  For now, my basic assumption
> is that any communications I receive that purport to be from them
> are a fraud, and it's frustrating that there's no good mechanism
> for reporting that to e-gold.
>

I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify 
information with an E-gold account (which I never recall establishing, 
by the way).

If I ever determine that E-Gold personnel have faked an account on my 
behalf, or are complicit in any way with stealing from me, I will of 
course think that killing their children, their parents, and them is 
moral.

E-gold was never even slightly interesting to me for reasons I talked 
about a few years ago--the notion that a bar of gold moving between 
shelves in someone's hotel room in Barbados or Guyana or wherever is 
equivalent to untraceability is silly Randroid idol-worship raised to 
the fourth power.

The scandals reported--and not meaniingfully rebutted--several years 
ago confirm to me the whole thing is some Randroid fantasy built on 
sand.


--Tim May


--Tim May
"Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little 
bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now 
racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events 
following 9/11/2001




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Wed Dec 10 16:56:33 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 19:56:33 -0500
Subject: alt.anonymous.messages
Message-ID: <N1-rH8K4tZV@SAFe-mail.net>

From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
> 
> You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of
> alt.anonymous.messages.  If someone posts directly to
> alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he
> is posting to.  (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to
> always download all new messages) 

Or access Usenet via a satellite feed.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Wed Dec 10 17:39:29 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 20:39:29 -0500
Subject: alt.anonymous.messages
Message-ID: <N1-tePXfbbL@SAFe-mail.net>

-------- Original Message --------
From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon at pobox.com>
> > You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of
> > alt.anonymous.messages.  If someone posts directly to
> > alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he
> > is posting to.  (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to
> > always download all new messages) 
> 
> Oh, that's true of course; but the adversary would be able to know
> that you posted something (given that he's monitoring your traffic). 
> That's already something, and frequently more than you'd want to
> give away. 

Use your laptop and random open Wi-Fi hotspots (esp. a consumer's) for such sensitive communication.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Wed Dec 10 18:37:15 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 21:37:15 -0500
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <N1-HufPhbcC@SAFe-mail.net>

-------- Original Message --------
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com>
> On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
>  > E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in
>  > checking account holder identification
> 
> Unfortunately, they also don't due much if any due diligence in
> identifying themselves in messages to real or potential customers,
> so it's extremely difficult to determine if I've gotten any
> administrative messages that really _were_ from them
> as opposed to the N fraudsters sending out mail asking you to
- > log in to e-g0ld.com or whatever fake page lets them steal
> your egold account number and password so they can drain your balance.

Actually they do.  Sort of at http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/alert.html
- Never click hypertext links in HTML formatted e-mail to access your account. 
- Confirm that you are on the e-gold website before entering your e-gold passphrase into either a logon form or a payment authorization form (see note below about e-gold shopping cart interface): 
- Verify the address/location/URL starts with: https://www.e-gold.com/ 
- Verify that the site certificate is issued by VeriSign to www.e-gold.com 

> 
> A policy of PGP-signing all their messages using a key
> that's published on their web pages would be a good start,
> though it's still possible to trick some fraction of people
> into accepting the wrong keys.  

Too few customers would know what to do with such a key.

>For now, my basic assumption
> is that any communications I receive that purport to be from them
> are a fraud, and it's frustrating that there's no good mechanism
> for reporting that to e-gold.

They know about most of the fraudulent emails circulating. They don't want to hear about them from customers because it would exhaust what customer service resources they have.  

I have never received an email from e-gold following my account creation confirmation and I beleive its their policy not to send emails for just this reason.




From measl at mfn.org  Wed Dec 10 20:10:03 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:10:03 -0600 (CST)
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <20031209202007.GA15332@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote:
> > With the USA
> > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... 
> 
> That's a pretty silly thing to say.
> Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the
> world?

It's not silly at all: look again.  He said "becoming".  And it is.  Fast.
It's *long* past time for the inhabitants here to have taken up arms and
blown holes in a *lot* of Federal heads.

Just a few hundred dead federal goons, spread over a relatively short period
(~6 months), where the attacks were obviously coordinated, made against
officers enforcing particularly rancid unconstitutional laws (say the federal
tax code), and without discoverable perpetrators, would result in an almost
instantaneous shortage of officers available to enforce such uncontitutional
laws - the survivors would simply refuse.

Long fucking overdue.

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

Father, you are a great and mighty God. Help our governments to remember the
lessons of our history and to appreciate the purpose of your son Jesus. Teach
our representatives not to be so arrogant as to speak in one way, but doing
another, for surely this not the way of truth. Help us to understand that
your will is not death but life, not the darkness of hatred but the light of
friendship in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Merle Harton, Jr.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 10 22:11:08 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:11:08 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
In-Reply-To: <N1-HufPhbcC@SAFe-mail.net>
Message-ID: <3FD799FC.17577.2ACF3AE@localhost>

    --
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com>
> For now, my basic assumption is that any communications I
> receive that purport to be from them are a fraud, and it's
> frustrating that there's no good mechanism for reporting that
> to e-gold.

e-gold advises that any communications you receive that purport
to be from e-gold *are* fraud.

All ethical businesses in the e-gold economy advise that they
will *never* send email except in direct response to a user
action.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     utxfwVH+WjHFMzwvPoUKgYhjj1jzD93VN85zg63G
     4ADCPEMq8/RiyMmoP6fKrwG57q467HW4khlY/GNjQ




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 10 20:40:19 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 23:40:19 -0500
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <1FE315B8-2B94-11D8-BB4F-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 10-Dec-03, at 11:10 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
>
> Just a few hundred dead federal goons, spread over a relatively short 
> period
> (~6 months), where the attacks were obviously coordinated, made against
> officers enforcing particularly rancid unconstitutional laws (say the 
> federal
> tax code), and without discoverable perpetrators, would result in an 
> almost
> instantaneous shortage of officers available to enforce such 
> uncontitutional
> laws - the survivors would simply refuse.
>
> Long fucking overdue.
>

Of course the little thing you are overlooking is that if this would 
happen the Spinmeisters would manage to turn it into another terrorist 
treat (which in a strict sense it is) and yank even more civil rights.

And knowing the majority of people: they just happily go along.

Or differently: This would backfire.... Badly.


- -- 
Michael

On the internet, no one can see the meds you take.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP9f1N2lCnxcrW2uuEQIhdgCffEQLxYuHw5uUsUNWOiGcbksx/1EAoInz
XvbIEIQ6YfSU34g/xsRT+OnU
=wON0
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec 10 21:26:02 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 00:26:02 EST
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <141.1e666b6f.2d0959ea@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/10/2003 10:34:22 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
timcmay at got.net writes:

> I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify 
> information with an E-gold account (which I never recall establishing, 
> by the way).
> 
> If I ever determine that E-Gold personnel have faked an account on my 
> behalf,

You're a moron Tim. Everybody here probably gets the scammers messages, I get 
e-gold and paypal cons on regular basis-  E-gold never advertised itself as 
anything other than what it is, a bailee. What e-gold is really good is for is 
micropayments and I have personally found it good for making payments 
internationally.

I know the principals involved, and I've personally viewed one of their 
vaults and the gold, etc. is really there.

Regards,  Matt-




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 10 14:40:25 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 00:40:25 +0200
Subject: alt.anonymous.messages
In-Reply-To: <3FD728A5.32118.F23612@localhost>
References: <20031209162020.A27522@baltwash.com>
  <3FD728A5.32118.F23612@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031210224025.GA22194@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:07:33PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>     --
> On 10 Dec 2003 at 18:22, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> > alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic.
> > Google Groups says they have a bit more than 200 messages in
> > it on December 9, for example. I assume nearly all of it is
> > from remailers posting to Usenet (or remailers sending mail
> > to mail2news gateways), otherwise there's little point of
> > using it.
> 
> You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of
> alt.anonymous.messages.  If someone posts directly to
> alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he
> is posting to.  (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to
> always download all new messages) 

Oh, that's true of course; but the adversary would be able to know
that you posted something (given that he's monitoring your traffic). 
That's already something, and frequently more than you'd want to
give away. 

I did inspect a few random messages and they all came from remailers.

--
avva




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Thu Dec 11 00:03:35 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 03:03:35 -0500
Subject: Two interesting communication privacy tools
Message-ID: <N1-MudncWyZ@SAFe-mail.net>

1. Invisiblog http://invisiblog.com/ lets you publish a weblog using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network. You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to us. You don't have to trust us, because we'll never know who you are. 

2. File-Exchange https://www.meshmx.com/fe/ allows you to exchanging files with other people without giving away your identity or harming your privacy.
Furthermore it is so simple that you need nothing else but a web browser. No need for special software, hardware, resources etc. 

How to use it? 
You simply upload a file through the front end and get back an "access-key". This key can be send to any other person
by email, instant-messaging or IIP. Anyone who has that key can download the file again by entering the key into the front end....
By default the file will render unaccessible one hour after it had been uploaded.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Thu Dec 11 00:04:26 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 03:04:26 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <N1-01eaDwJB@SAFe-mail.net>

From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl at mfn.org>
> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote:
> > > With the USA
> > > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... 
> > 
> > That's a pretty silly thing to say.
> > Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the
> > world?
> 
> It's not silly at all: look again.  He said "becoming".  And it is.  Fast.
> It's *long* past time for the inhabitants here to have taken up arms and
> blown holes in a *lot* of Federal heads.
> 
> Just a few hundred dead federal goons, spread over a relatively short period
> (~6 months), where the attacks were obviously coordinated, made against
> officers enforcing particularly rancid unconstitutional laws (say the federal
> tax code), and without discoverable perpetrators, would result in an almost
> instantaneous shortage of officers available to enforce such uncontitutional
> laws - the survivors would simply refuse.
> 
> Long fucking overdue.

At first it seems that there isn't much one person or even a few can do 
about this, but I'm no longer so sure.  The politics and power of government is, in the end, always dispensed from the end of a gun.  For this reason very few citizens even consider contending with the government for political purposes until they fell there is little choice.


Nothing less than a guerilla war seems necessary to restore something akin to the original constitutional balance in the U.S.  But where to recruit these people?  My suggestion: the terminally ill.  

Many TI come to the table with a 'gift', the certainty of impending death and for some the possibility of fearlessness for physical harm or imprisonment. While the majority of the TI will not see any reason to buck the system in their final days (ideological disagreement, fear for the effect on their families, lack the health, resources, skills or mentality for such a ' final adventure ') I did some back of the envelope calculations that show that more than 100 people die in the U.S. every day who could fill the bill.

I've coined the term Zombie Patriots to signify the TI who volunteer to give their last full measure to the American Restoration.  Operating alone or in small groups they could form the backbone of an American Civil Liberties Army.

ZPs need an education in how to create a personal plan of action and acquire the needed skills and resources (Paladin Press where are you when we need you).  A Domestic American Patriot Family Fund may also be desired.




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Thu Dec 11 02:57:50 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 04:57:50 -0600
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <3FD88DCA.9030706@students.bbk.ac.uk>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <p0602041bbbfc54b47cdd@[66.149.49.5]>
  <3FD6F767.18539.3154D2@localhost> <20031211094503.C9543@baltwash.com>
  <3FD88DCA.9030706@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <20031211105750.GA11155@cybershamanix.com>

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 03:31:22PM +0000, ken wrote:
> Declan McCullagh wrote:
> 
> >I don't know what "entryist" means. It might be helpful to define
> >your terms.
> 
> Really?
> 
> That's odd.
> 
> Taking you at your word it means someone who joins (i.e. enters) 
> a political party or another organisation in order to take it over 
> and change it to their own point of view.

   Usually secretly, and usually more than one person. It's a practice carried
out by both right and left. 


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Thu Dec 11 08:56:25 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 08:56:25 -0800
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F45IiGXix4A2Dr000266d0@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031211085536.028ff450@idiom.com>

At 09:22 AM 12/11/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
>Ken wrote...
>
>"Tyler Durden's"
>
>GET them damn quote marks offa my name, or I'm comin' over there to stomp 
>your pasty-white British ass!!!!!
>
>Ahem.

Definitely.  He should've written
         "Tyler Durden"'s
instead ;-)




From pcapelli at capelli.org  Thu Dec 11 06:16:39 2003
From: pcapelli at capelli.org (Pete Capelli)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:16:39 -0500
Subject: (No Subject)
References: <20031209202007.GA15332@pobox.com> 
  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <20031211133412.GA25912@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <026601c3bff1$684f31f0$0e0f4b18@warehouse>

This reminds me of that old saw about the fellow who falls off a 100 story
building:

"Floor 75, everythings still okay"
"Floor 50, still lookin good"
"Floor 25, situation nominal"
"Floor 5, feeling fine"

Unfortunately, there were some communication issues after he past floor 1.
We're still waiting for his final report.

Article III is the only one left in the bill of rights that is still adhered
to.  The others get dragged out every once in awhile, like an old general
who has outlived his usefulness and is now just a relic of past glory.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anatoly Vorobey" <mellon at pobox.com>
To: <cypherpunks at lne.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 8:34 AM
Subject: Re: (No Subject)

> No, it's silly because he said "becoming". Had he said "is", it would've
> been criminally stupid.
>
> For example, the US has a long, long, long, long way to go before
> becoming anything remotely like North Korea, in terms of
> totalitarianism. Of course, North Korea is a radical example; there are
> many countries much more totalitarian than the US and extremely likely
> to remain so in any foreseeable future. All the Patriot Acts and
> increased surveillance and whatever else has been happening in the US
> lately is a drop in the ocean of difference between the
> US and those other countries, in that respect.
>
> --
> avva




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 11 09:21:58 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:21:58 -0800
Subject: cypherpunks discussions
Message-ID: <3FD8A7B6.6DBE6984@cdc.gov>

At 11:24 AM 12/8/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>No, I think few topics on the Cypherpunks list are taken private.
>
>My reasons are two-fold: First, to get them to stop lurking and
>participate. Second, to work up the energy to compose an essay (or
>mini-essay, whatever), I need some motivation. I am not energetic about

It can also be imprudent, as in a free trip to a grand jury in a distant

land, possibly with you fronting the govt the money for the trip.

All to hear you mention the Bill of Rights, repeatedly, of course.

Neophytes are encouraged to look up Jim Bell, Declan, John Young, etc.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Dec 11 06:22:48 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:22:48 -0500
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F45IiGXix4A2Dr000266d0@hotmail.com>

Ken wrote...

"Tyler Durden's"

GET them damn quote marks offa my name, or I'm comin' over there to stomp 
your pasty-white British ass!!!!!

Ahem.

As for Tim May's replies to my original post, he seems to have 
misenterpreted most of the basic gist of it. My basic point was that 
corporate culture (as you say) basically imitates a monarchy (or other very 
'statist' structures) and as a result often prevents them from utilizing 
their resources properly.

It would be nice to think of Borders as a counter-example, and I'd LIKE to 
believe that utilizing their talent-on-the-floor has helped them do so well 
here in the US. (Though these mega-Barnes-and-Nobles may have dented their 
numbers in the last few years...)

-TD


>From: ken <bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Is Matel Stalinist?
>Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:56:31 +0000
>
>Tim May quoted Tyler Durden who wrote:
>
>>>Well, I wouldn't apply the word "oppressive" across the board to the 
>>>cultures of big companies, but the fact is that modern American coporate 
>>>culture more often than not imitates a top-down, 'statist' culture that 
>>>is so universal we rarely recognize it.
>
>Well, yes. Most big corporations are in effect constitutional monarchies. 
>Decisions are made by bureaucrats  with some oversight or direction 
>provided by the "king" (CEO in some places, significant shareholders in 
>others). When it all goes totally pear-shaped owners (or more likely, the 
>banks) step in.
>
>[...]
>
>>The difference with government is that we do not have "polycentric" 
>>governments. We have a single entity, a single "corporation," which brooks 
>>no competition, which brooks little or no "shareholder dissent."
>
>Yes, but in practice a lot of big companies are just like that. Whatever 
>the paper ownership decisions tend to be made by a few large corporate 
>owners, often banks, insurance companies, pension funds and the like; 
>themselves run by officers and managers who share interests with the 
>managers who run the company they own. The situation is in some ways 
>analogous to "it doesn't matter who you vote for: the government always 
>gets in".   In most large corporations the chain of responsibility back to 
>individual owners is so long and so flexible that there is little real 
>control.
>
>Small business is different of course. You make money or you go broke.  
>Very direct feedback.
>
>>Many here miss this point and focus on the superficial aspect that 
>>corporations typically have a hierarchy and that this hierarchy supposedly 
>>makes them like governments. Yes, in this respect. But the tens of 
>>thousands of corporations, the ability to form new partnerships, new 
>>companies, new corporations, and for some of these entities to become as 
>>large as past corporate giants, is what makes all the difference.
>
>Emotional reactions & gut feelings about this point are one of the things 
>that make people happier with one political camp or another.
>
>The state-socialism that you Americans call "liberal"  tends to be 
>supported by people who feel that their governments are more responsive to 
>their needs or wants than corporations are. Conservatives US-style 
>libertarians are likely to feel happier with corporations than government.  
>The "anti-globalisation" crows and European-style left anarchists & 
>old-style non-Marxist socialists dislike both equally.
>
>If I was cynical, or a Marxist, I'd say that it has a lot to do with having 
>money. People whose wealth makes up a larger share of the whole than their 
>vote does are more likely to feel happy about corporations than  they are 
>about representative government.
>
>OK, it's before noon and I've only had one cup of tea, so I'm cynical.
>
>[...]
>
>>Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, they 
>>buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what their 
>>owners want them to do.
>
>Yes, but, it might be that a corporation makes more money for its owners by 
>centralising and systematising and reducing the local autonomy of business 
>units. It's a lot easier to manage a thousand identical stores than a 
>hundred unique ones. So from "Tyler Durden's"'s POV there might be more 
>responsiveness from an independent  store than a chain.
>
>Though like you said, that doesn't seem to apply to books.  Might to food 
>though.

_________________________________________________________________
Winterize your home with tips from MSN House & Home. 
http://special.msn.com/home/warmhome.armx




From declan at well.com  Thu Dec 11 07:45:03 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:45:03 -0600
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <3FD6F767.18539.3154D2@localhost>; from jamesd@echeque.com
  on Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 10:37:27AM -0800
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <p0602041bbbfc54b47cdd@[66.149.49.5]>
  <3FD6F767.18539.3154D2@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031211094503.C9543@baltwash.com>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 10:37:27AM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
> Veridian green is entryist, not commie.  The watermelons would 
> perceive it as right entryist, or libertarian entryist.

I don't know what "entryist" means. It might be helpful to define
your terms.

> The standard green viewpoint is that if socialism retarded the 
> advance of technology and lowered everyone's standard of 
> living, that is actually a good thing.   The Veridian green 
> viewpoint is pro capitalist, and pro progress.

If that is true, why can't it simply be called "capitalist?"

I suspect because actual capitalists would have some problems with it.

-Declan




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 11 09:49:32 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:49:32 -0800
Subject: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
Message-ID: <3FD8AE2B.2B69C871@cdc.gov>

I'd suggest "wget" for spidering sites.  It can be told to ignore
.robots files.  It is
good for mirroring sites which you suspect may be taken down.  Win/Unix
versions
available.




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Thu Dec 11 01:56:31 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:56:31 +0000
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
In-Reply-To: <1495A174-2A85-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <BAY7-F88FWfBnjgX5jj0001dbd5@hotmail.com>
  <1495A174-2A85-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <3FD83F4F.8070308@students.bbk.ac.uk>

Tim May quoted Tyler Durden who wrote:

>> Well, I wouldn't apply the word "oppressive" across the board to the 
>> cultures of big companies, but the fact is that modern American 
>> coporate culture more often than not imitates a top-down, 'statist' 
>> culture that is so universal we rarely recognize it.

Well, yes. Most big corporations are in effect constitutional 
monarchies. Decisions are made by bureaucrats  with some oversight 
or direction provided by the "king" (CEO in some places, 
significant shareholders in others). When it all goes totally 
pear-shaped owners (or more likely, the banks) step in.

[...]

> The difference with government is that we do not have "polycentric" 
> governments. We have a single entity, a single "corporation," which 
> brooks no competition, which brooks little or no "shareholder dissent."

Yes, but in practice a lot of big companies are just like that. 
Whatever the paper ownership decisions tend to be made by a few 
large corporate owners, often banks, insurance companies, pension 
funds and the like; themselves run by officers and managers who 
share interests with the managers who run the company they own. 
The situation is in some ways analogous to "it doesn't matter who 
you vote for: the government always gets in".   In most large 
corporations the chain of responsibility back to individual owners 
is so long and so flexible that there is little real control.

Small business is different of course. You make money or you go 
broke.  Very direct feedback.

> Many here miss this point and focus on the superficial aspect that 
> corporations typically have a hierarchy and that this hierarchy 
> supposedly makes them like governments. Yes, in this respect. But the 
> tens of thousands of corporations, the ability to form new partnerships, 
> new companies, new corporations, and for some of these entities to 
> become as large as past corporate giants, is what makes all the difference.

Emotional reactions & gut feelings about this point are one of the 
things that make people happier with one political camp or another.

The state-socialism that you Americans call "liberal"  tends to be 
supported by people who feel that their governments are more 
responsive to their needs or wants than corporations are. 
Conservatives US-style libertarians are likely to feel happier 
with corporations than government.  The "anti-globalisation" crows 
and European-style left anarchists & old-style non-Marxist 
socialists dislike both equally.

If I was cynical, or a Marxist, I'd say that it has a lot to do 
with having money. People whose wealth makes up a larger share of 
the whole than their vote does are more likely to feel happy about 
corporations than  they are about representative government.

OK, it's before noon and I've only had one cup of tea, so I'm cynical.

[...]

> Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, 
> they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what 
> their owners want them to do.

Yes, but, it might be that a corporation makes more money for its 
owners by centralising and systematising and reducing the local 
autonomy of business units. It's a lot easier to manage a thousand 
identical stores than a hundred unique ones. So from "Tyler 
Durden's"'s POV there might be more responsiveness from an 
independent  store than a chain.

Though like you said, that doesn't seem to apply to books.  Might 
to food though.




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 11 10:18:55 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:18:55 -0800
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <3FD8B50F.98D90E3E@cdc.gov>

At 03:04 AM 12/11/03 -0500, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
>Nothing less than a guerilla war seems necessary to restore something
akin to the original constitutional balance in the U.S.  But where to
recruit these people?  My suggestion: the terminally ill.
>
>Many TI come to the table with a 'gift', the certainty of impending
death and for some the possibility of fearlessness for physical harm or
imprisonment.

Of course your idea has merit, both on a personal and govt payback
level.  But you can get more, and fitter soldiers:
Simply convince some healthy folks that an "afterlife" exists.  And that
by doing worthy acts
you do well there.  Religion is a terrorist weapon after all.

----
What would a palestinian bastard on a stick do?




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 11 10:26:16 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:26:16 -0800
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?   (and Anonymity)
Message-ID: <3FD8B6C8.6676C00@cdc.gov>

At 06:22 PM 12/10/03 +0200, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
>On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:20:20PM -0600, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>> We have anonymity in Web browsing (more or less, thanks to Lance &
>> co). It's not NSA-proof, but it's probably subpoena-proof.
>>
>> We have anonymity in email thanks to remailers (to the extent they're

>> still around).
>>
...
>
>alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic.

One could count some fraction of all the *.binaries.* on usenet
as anonymous communications (via stego), but then you'd have to know
how many are stego'd, and that is the game after all.


At 02:24 PM 12/8/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
>Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it
was
>sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted
in
>transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever?

Yes.  Trivially, If your correspondent told you, but that's out of
band.  Otherwise,
If there *remains* info which was not washed out "in transit", then that

would be an inband way.  Maybe all the pictures with a red flower
in them are carriers, and this content isn't washed out.  Maybe its a
more subtle crypto-watermark, independent of the stego'd message.

>Now I know pretty much nothing about this subject, but I would suppose
that
>de-stegoing a photo must like some kind of spatial spectral fingerprint
that
>should be visible after the photo is FFT'd (is there freeware software
out
>there?).

1. How do you know the signature of the unaltered carrier-medium?
E.g., have you measured the LSBit noise from my camera recently?
Under which lighting conditions?

2. Don't you think I can measure the properties of my carrier and shape
the stego'd info to match?   (This does get into an arms race over what
properties to measure.)

>Now I IMAGINE that a sophisticated interceptor could substitute
'believable'
>de-stego-ing noise so that it would look like the photo never had any
stego
>in the first place. OR...is this actually 'impossible' to do perfectly?

You don't just put your message in the LSBits or whatever.  You
compress,
encrypt, and possibly redundantly code them.  Then you shape the noise
to match the bits you're replacing.


>And then, what if the interceptor tried to put an alternate message in
there
>instead? Is there a way to tell that there was originallya different
message
>there?

Depends on the coding.

>My assumption first of all is that nothing was done to prepare the
photo
>against these possibilities.

Just make sure you did the original analog recording and destroy the
original after you stego it.  Best also if you never post unstego'd
messages
so the Adversary can't measure your raw carrier.

A simple stego message was placed without real
>thought about whether it might be intercepted and altered.

You shouldn't stego life-critical messages without proper training in
the use of your tools.
(That training may vary with personality, see _Silk and Cyanide_.  Some
like "why",
some like "do this".)

-----
"You can have democracy when you vote for the people we approve of"
King George to the Colony of Iraq




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Thu Dec 11 02:35:16 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:35:16 +0000
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <p0602042bbbfccde6e558@[66.149.49.5]>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com> 
  <2E7551A8-2A9C-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031209165707.A24546@slack.lne.com>
  <p0602042bbbfccde6e558@[66.149.49.5]>
Message-ID: <3FD84864.7090201@students.bbk.ac.uk>

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> At 4:57 PM -0800 12/9/03, Eric Murray wrote:
> 
>>I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
>>On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
>>When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
>>these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
>>near the keyboard very often.
>>
>>
>>>Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.
>>
>>Ok, bye!
>><plonk>
>>
>>Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ killfile)
> 
> 
> To quote a famous flying squirrel, that trick never works. Tried it myself
> a few times over the years, and one usually misses too much of what this
> list is for, as you noted yourself, above.

Truth, maybe unfortunate truth.

Of the list mails I've bothered to keep locally, Tim's are a 
larger proportion than anyone else's.


> Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin
> Skippy, too.
> 
> Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it,
> can be useful. Try it, you'll like it.




From eugen at leitl.org  Thu Dec 11 02:06:02 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:06:02 +0100
Subject: alt.anonymous.messages
In-Reply-To: <N1-tePXfbbL@SAFe-mail.net>
References: <N1-tePXfbbL@SAFe-mail.net>
Message-ID: <20031211100602.GO13099@leitl.org>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 08:39:29PM -0500, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
> Use your laptop and random open Wi-Fi hotspots (esp. a consumer's)
> for such sensitive communication.

Make sure you set your WiFi NIC MAC to something random before, and that your
MUA is not leaking bits into the headers.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Dec 11 11:36:03 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:36:03 -0800
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
In-Reply-To: <3FD83F4F.8070308@students.bbk.ac.uk>
References: <BAY7-F88FWfBnjgX5jj0001dbd5@hotmail.com>
  <1495A174-2A85-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <3FD83F4F.8070308@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <4171FC42-2C11-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 11, 2003, at 1:56 AM, ken wrote:
>
>> Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, 
>> they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what 
>> their owners want them to do.
>
> Yes, but, it might be that a corporation makes more money for its 
> owners by centralising and systematising and reducing the local 
> autonomy of business units. It's a lot easier to manage a thousand 
> identical stores than a hundred unique ones. So from "Tyler 
> Durden's"'s POV there might be more responsiveness from an independent 
>  store than a chain.
>
> Though like you said, that doesn't seem to apply to books.  Might to 
> food though.
>

I doubt it applies to food, either.

If my local grocery store runs low on "Spam," say, they will order 
more. This is why they track items with POS terminals and UPC labels 
(largely replacing the inventory people who used to be seen in the 
aisles counting items and entering them into a small computer or, 
earlier, onto an inventory log sheet).

It makes no sense to "lump" or "consolidate" all of the stores into one 
lump calculation and then issue order to "send more Spam in this amount 
to each store." Not only does it not make sense, but clearly this would 
cause pileups at _some_ stores (too much Spam) and shortages at _other_ 
stores (still not enough Spam, even with the latest "send more Spam to 
all stores" order. The fact that neither shortages nor pileups (that I 
can see) are apparent at any of the stores I visit, and that all of 
them use UPC and POS methods for _all_ sales of ordered products, is 
consistent with the reorder method described earlier.

I repeat: the "despised by anti-capitalists" Borders store has a deeper 
and broader inventory of books than the "cherished by Greens and 
locals" locall-owned bookstore. And they also use UPC and POS and 
reorder books dynamically.

(For another list I've been discussing lazy evaluation languages, like 
Miranda and Haskell, and like Scheme can be "forced" to do, and the 
similarities between demand-driven evaluation of partial results and 
the obviously demand-driven inventory practices of modern businesses is 
striking. There's an essay here for some political thinker, along the 
lines of Phil Salin's "Wealth of Kitchens" essay drawing parallels 
between free markets and object-oriented systems.)

--Tim May




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 11 11:54:33 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:54:33 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy
In-Reply-To: <93117B9E-2B8A-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031210180323.028e4a58@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <3FD85AF9.12698.59ECD80@localhost>

    --
On 10 Dec 2003 at 19:31, Tim May wrote:
> I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify 
> information with an E-gold account (which I never recall 
> establishing, by the way).

These are messagers from scammers.  e-gold never sends out 
email.

> E-gold was never even slightly interesting to me for reasons 
> I talked about a few years ago--the notion that a bar of gold 
> moving between shelves in someone's hotel room in Barbados or 
> Guyana or wherever is equivalent to untraceability is silly 
> Randroid idol-worship raised to the fourth power.

Every atom of gold is identical to every other atom of gold.
There is only one stable isotope.

E-gold does not provide untraceability -- but gold does. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     sxD6FejwJO/bYQH9Fbek/lB3u1uXGOqk+YI57Vuk
     4FLAcei7iIdGUWnXrQjBihOx2iKvPSrxZE2pKApjM




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Thu Dec 11 09:07:06 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 12:07:06 EST
Subject: Speaking of Reason
Message-ID: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/11/2003 10:04:04 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
declan at well.com writes:

> If that is true, why can't it simply be called "capitalist?"
> 
> I suspect because actual capitalists would have some problems with it.


Sterling makes a comment betraying what Ludwig Von Mises called the 
anti-capitalist mentality when he quipped to Godwin: "Sure, we hate Exxon because 
they're huge and they're everywhere."

Sterling is a capitalist in the same way that Brin is a libertarian. I think 
what it is, both are uncomfortable with really labeling what their true 
ideology is and therefore feel some need to candy coat their statism.

Regards,  Matt Gaylor-




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Dec 11 12:24:35 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 12:24:35 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy
In-Reply-To: <3FD85AF9.12698.59ECD80@localhost>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031210180323.028e4a58@idiom.com>
  <3FD85AF9.12698.59ECD80@localhost>
Message-ID: <0991B5EF-2C18-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 11, 2003, at 11:54 AM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 10 Dec 2003 at 19:31, Tim May wrote:
>> I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify
>> information with an E-gold account (which I never recall
>> establishing, by the way).
>
> These are messagers from scammers.  e-gold never sends out
> email.
>
>> E-gold was never even slightly interesting to me for reasons
>> I talked about a few years ago--the notion that a bar of gold
>> moving between shelves in someone's hotel room in Barbados or
>> Guyana or wherever is equivalent to untraceability is silly
>> Randroid idol-worship raised to the fourth power.
>
> Every atom of gold is identical to every other atom of gold.
> There is only one stable isotope.
>
> E-gold does not provide untraceability -- but gold does.

Where tax authorities get people is in the transfer _in to_ and _out 
of_ certain kinds of accounts, be they Cayman Island or Swiss bank 
accounts, whatever. The issue with opening a Swiss bank account and 
wiring money into it, or depositing Federal Reserve Notes into it has 
NOTHING to do with FRNs having serial numbers and hence being 
traceable. The issue is with their own reporting to the IRS (these 
days) and to stops in place to stop the wiring of said money or the 
transport of said FRNs.

What *form* the "item of value" is inside the bank, be it gold bars or 
Spanish doubloons or stacks of $20 bills or diamonds, is unimportant. 
In fact, for all intents and purposes the "item of value" inside the 
bank can be marks in a ledger book, which is effectively the situation 
today.

(It is true that what is stored inside a bank, be it gold coins or 
Federal Reserve Notes, becomes important if and when enough depositors 
ask for their money in that particular form. But this is an issue of 
believing the bank does in fact store gold dust or doubloons or FRNs, 
not anything about the intrinsic untraceability of such things!)

In other words, any bank except for "U-Stor-It-Yourself" safe deposit 
systems, is basically a black box with beliefs by I/O users about how 
likely it is to behave according to its specifications.

That some of the gold fetishists here keep perpetuating this deep 
misunderstanding of the issues is...unsurprising.


--Tim May




From s.schear at comcast.net  Thu Dec 11 12:30:06 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 12:30:06 -0800
Subject: Cryptophone delivers source
In-Reply-To: <20031211131459.GZ13099@leitl.org>
References: <20031211131459.GZ13099@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031211122537.04f75808@mail.comcast.net>

At 05:14 AM 12/11/2003, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>http://www.cryptophone.de/html/downloads_en.html

Perhaps a small point, but unless I'm mistaken they didn't offer the 
Windows client source.  I think both should have been give as compromise of 
one side is a compromise of both.

steve 




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Thu Dec 11 10:05:51 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:05:51 -0500
Subject: Dangerous Proxies to Avoid
Message-ID: <N1-D3i5TzbB@SAFe-mail.net>

If you use anonymous proxies it would be wise to save the list below and compare the IP's to make sure you are not surfing in shark-infested waters.

I often use tools to scan for and test 'public' proxies, and other tools to chain or rotate through the best. I'm sure others of us do the same.

This just underscores the need for trustworthy mixes. Single proxies (eg anonymizer.com) only hide IPs from web servers, not from 3rd party observers. They are vulnerable to black bag and legal attacks. Aparently we can safely(?) use JAP again if careful about cascade selection. But this is very slow, and slow discourages one from consistent use....

As for JAP, I used it before Privatesea came up, and i'm back down to it now that privatesea dissapeared. By using cascades that don't end at the Dresden mix, and inserting a single pseudo-public SSL proxy between JAP and the first mix, you're pretty safe. But the performance sucks.

There are no other mix cascades or meshes that I know of. Lots of single proxies, but that's not safe at all. And you are often having to find and setup another when they get hammered down or start blocking the public.


                  An updated list, current as of 5 October:


                  6.*.*.* : Army Information Systems Center
                  21.*.*.* : US Defense Information Systems Agency
                  6.*.*.* : Army Information Systems Center
                  21.*.*.* : US Defense Information Systems Agency
                  22.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  26.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  29.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  30.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  49.*.*.* : Joint Tactical Command
                  50.*.*.* : Joint Tactical Command
                  55.*.*.* : Army National Guard Bureau
                  22.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  26.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  29.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  30.*.*.* : Defense Information Systems Agency
                  49.*.*.* : Joint Tactical Command
                  50.*.*.* : Joint Tactical Command
                  55.*.*.* : Army National Guard Bureau
                  62.0-30.*.* :
                  64.224.*.* :
                  64.225.*.* :
                  64.226.*.* :
                  195.10.* :
                  199.121.4.* - 199.121.253.* Naval Air Systems Command, VA (NETBLK-NALC-P3)
                  204.34.*.* - 204.34.254.0 Navy Environmental Preventive Medicine (NET-NEPMU6-BUMED)
                  205.96-103.* :
                  207.30-120.* :
                  207.60-61.* : FBI Linux server used to trap scanners
                  209.35.*.* :
                  210.124*.* - Korean
                  212.143 * Israeli government ISP -- dont try those ranges!!
                  212.149.* Israeli government ISP -- dont try those ranges!!
                  212.179.* Israeli government ISP -- dont try those ranges!!
                  212.199 012.* Israeli government ISP -- dont try those ranges!!
                  213.8.*.* Israeli government ISP -- dont try those ranges!!
                  216.248.*.* VERY DANGEROUS
                  216.25.* VERY DANGEROUS
                  216.94.*.*
                  216.25.* : VERY DANGEROUS
                  216.247.* : VERY DANGEROUS
                  217.6.*.* : VERY DANGEROUS
                  155.7.*.* : American Forces Information (NET-AFISHQ-NET1)
                  155.8.*.* : U.S. ArmyFort Gordon (NET-GORDON-NET5)
                  155.9.*.* : United States Army Information Systems Command (NET-LWOOD-NET2)
                  155.74.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP2)
                  155.75.*.* : US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP3)
                  155.76.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP4)
                  155.77.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP5)
                  155.78.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP6)
                  155.79.*.* : US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP7)
                  155.80.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP
                  155.81.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP9)
                  155.82.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP10)
                  155.83.*.* : US Army Corps of Enginers (NET-CEAP11)
                  155.84.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP12)
                  155.85.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP13)
                  155.86.*.* : US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP14)
                  155.87.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP15)
                  155.88.*.* : PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP16)
                  155.178.*.* : Federal Aviation Administration (NET-FAA)
                  155.213.*.* : USAISC Fort Benning (NET-FTBENNNET3
                  155.214.*.* : Director of Information Management (NET-CARSON-TCACC )
                  155.215.*.* : USAISC-FT DRUM (NET-DRUM-TCACCIS)
                  155.216.*.* : TCACCIS Project Management Office (NET-FTDIX-TCACCI)
                  155.217.*.* : Directorate of Information Management (NET- EUSTIS-EMH1)
                  155.218.*.* : USAISC (NET-WVA-EMH2)
                  155.219.*.* : DOIM/USAISC Fort Sill (NET-SILL-TCACCIS)
                  155.220.*.* : USAISC-DOIM (NET-FTKNOX-NET4)
                  155.221.*.* : USAISC-Ft Ord (NET-FTORD-NET2)
                  128.47.*.* : Army Communications Electronics Command (NET-TACTNET)
                  128.50.*.* : Department of Defense (NET-COINS)
                  128.51.*.* : Department of Defense (NET-COINSTNET)
                  128.56.*.* : U.S. Naval Academy (NET-USNA-NET)
                  128.63.*.* : Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (NET-BRL-SUBNET)
                  128.80.*.* : Army Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) (NET-CECOMNET)
                  128.98.*.* to 128.98.255.255: Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (NET-DERA-UK)
                  128.154.*.* : NASA Wallops Flight Facility (NET-WFF-NET)
                  128.155.*.* : NASA Langley Research Center (NET-LARC-NET)
                  128.156.*.* : NASA Lewis Network Control Center (NET- LERC)
                  128.157.*.* : NASA Johnson Space Center (NET-JSC-NET)
                  128.158.*.* : NASA Ames Research Center (NET-MSFC-NET)
                  128.159.*.* : NASA Ames Research Center (NET-KSC-NET)
                  128.160.*.* : Naval Research Laboratory (NET- SSCNET)
                  128.161.*.* : NASA Ames Research Center (NET-NSN-NET)
                  128.183.*.* : NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NET-GSFC)
                  128.216.*.* : MacDill Air Force Base (NET-CC-PRNET)
                  128.217.*.* : NASA Kennedy Space Center (NET-NASA-KSC-OIS)
                  128.236.*.* : U.S. Air Force Academy (NET-USAFA-NET
                  132.3.*.* to 132.225.*.* Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (NET-AECL-RCNET)
                  134.11.*.* The Pentagon (NET-PENTNET)
                  134.12.*.* NASA Ames Research Center (NET-RIACS-B-NET)
                  134.164.*.* Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station (NET-USAEWESNET)
                  134.165.*.* Headquarters Air Force Space Command (NET-SPACENET1)
                  134.229.*.* Navy Regional Data Automation Center (NET- REGION-PEN1)
                  134.230.*.* Navy Regional Data Automation Center (NET- CONCGY-PENS2)
                  134.232.*.* - 134.232.255.255 U.S. Army, Eu
                  134.5.*.* Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Company (NET-LASC)
                  134.51.*.* Boeing Military Aircraft Facility (NET-BOE-MIL)
                  134.52.*.* Boeing Corporation (NET-BOE-GIS)
                  134.78.*.* Army Information Systems Command-ATCOM (NET-AVTROS-NET)
                  136.149.*.* Air Force Military Personnel Center (NET-AFMPC-LAN)
                  139.142.*.* : 139.142.153.23 : Front end portal of a security network filtering hundreds of client subscription IPs. If you find a vulnerable pub,IIS, SQL, or *nix -- LEAVE IT ALONE


                  FBI's honeypot

                  HoneyNet Project
                  http://project.honeynet.org/
                  Know your Ennemy : HoneyNets
                  http://project.honeynet.org/papers/honeynet/
                  SANS IDS FAQ : What is Honeypot ?
                  http://www.sans.org/newlook/resourc...Q/honeypot3.htm
                  Honey Pots and Intrusion Detection
                  http://www.sans.org/infosecFAQ/intrusion/honeypots.htm
                  The Deception Toolkit
                  http://www.all.net/dtk/index.html
                  An Explanation of Computer Forensic
                  http://www.computerforensics.net/forensics.htm
                  Computer Forensics  An Overview
                  http://www.sans.org/infosecFAQ/incident/forensics.htm
                  The Forensic Challenge
                  http://project.honeynet.org/challenge/
                  Forensic Computer Analysis - An Introduction
                  http://www.ddj.com/articles/2000/0009/0009f/0009f.htm
                  The Coroner Toolkit
                  http://www.fish.com/tct/


                  207.60.*.* : (FBI's honeypot) The Internet Access Company (NETBLK-TIAC-BLK)
                  207.60.2.128 - 207.60.2.255 Abacus Technology (NETBLK-TIAC-ABACUSTC)
                  64.224.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  64.225.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  64.226.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  195.10.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  205.96-103.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  207.30-120.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  207.60-61.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  209.35.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  216.25.* : (FBI's honeypot) INTERLAND --- hosts DoD
                  216.247.* : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.40.211 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.41.173 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.0.2 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.1.1 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.1.4 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.1.5 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.56.107.22 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.0.2 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.159.33.56 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  212.56.107.22 : (FBI's honeypot)
                  139.142.*.* : 139.142.153.23 : Front end portal of a security network filtering hundreds of client subscription IPs. If you find a vulnerable pub, IIS, SQL, or *nix -- LEAVE IT ALONE

                  207.60.0.0 - 207.60.255.0 The Internet Access Company (NETBLK-TIAC-BLK)
                  207.60.2.128 - 207.60.2.255 Abacus Technology (NETBLK-TIAC-ABACUSTC)
                  207.60.3.0 - 207.60.3.127 Mass Electric Construction Co. (NETBLK-TIAC-MECC56-2)
                  207.60.3.128 - 207.60.3.255 Peabody Proberties Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-PEABISDN1)
                  207.60.4.0 - 207.60.4.127 Northern Electronics (NETBLK-TIAC-NORTHERELEC)
                  207.60.4.128 - 207.60.4.255 Posternak, Blankstein & Lund (NETBLK-TIAC-PBL56)
                  207.60.5.64 - 207.60.5.127 Woodard & Curran (NETBLK-TIAC-WCPORT)
                  207.60.5.192 - 207.60.5.255 On Line Services (NETBLK-TIAC-ONLINES-1)
                  207.60.6.0 - 207.60.6.63 The 400 Group (NETBLK-TIAC-400T1)
                  207.60.6.64 - 207.60.6.127 RD Hunter and Company (NETBLK-TIAC-RDHUNTER2)
                  207.60.6.128 - 207.60.6.191 Louis Berger and Associates (NETBLK-TIAC-BERISDN)
                  207.60.6.192 - 207.60.6.255 Ross-Simons (NETBLK-TIAC-ROSIMONS)
                  207.60.7.0 - 207.60.7.63 Eastern Cambridge Savings Bank (NETBLK-TIAC-ECSB)
                  207.60.7.64 - 207.60.7.127 Greater Lawrence Community Action Committee (NETBLK-TIAC-GLCAC12
                  207.60.7.128 - 207.60.7.191 Data Electronic Devices, Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-DEDI)
                  207.60.8.0 - 207.60.8.255 Sippican (NETBLK-TIAC-SIPPICAN)
                  207.60.9.0 - 207.60.9.31 Alps Sportswear Mfg Co (NETBLK-TIAC-ALPISDN)
                  207.60.9.32 - 207.60.9.63 Escher Group Ltd (NETBLK-TIAC-ESCHERT1-2)
                  207.60.9.64 - 207.60.9.95 West Suburban Elder (NETBLK-TIAC-WESTISDN)
                  207.60.9.96 - 207.60.9.127 Central Bank (NETBLK-TIAC-CENTRALT)
                  207.60.9.128 - 207.60.9.159 Danick Systems (NETBLK-TIAC-DCS12
                  207.60.9.160 - 207.60.9.191 Alps Sportswear Mfg CO (NETBLK-TIAC-ALPSISDN)
                  207.60.9.192 - 207.60.9.223 BSCC (NETBLK-TIAC-BSCC)
                  207.60.13.16 - 207.60.13.23 Patrons Insurance Group (NETBLK-TIAC-PATRON99)
                  207.60.13.40 - 207.60.13.47 Athera Technologies (NETBLK-TIAC-ATHERA1)
                  207.60.13.48 - 207.60.13.55 Service Edge Partners Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-SERVISDN-2)
                  207.60.13.56 - 207.60.13.63 Massachusetts Credit Union League (NETBLK-TIAC-MCUL384)
                  207.60.13.64 - 207.60.13.71 SierraCom (NETBLK-TIAC-SIER384K)
                  207.60.13.72 - 207.60.13.79 AI/ FOCS (NETBLK-TIAC-AIFOC384)
                  207.60.13.80 - 207.60.13.87 Extreme soft (NETBLK-TIAC-DOWNIE)
                  207.60.13.96 - 207.60.13.103 Eaton Seo Corp (NETBLK-TIAC-EATON)
                  207.60.13.112 - 207.60.13.119 C. White (NETBLK-TIAC-PETROL)
                  207.60.13.120 - 207.60.13.127 Athera (NETBLK-TIAC-ATHERA-2)
                  207.60.13.128 - 207.60.13.135 Entropic Systems, INC (NETBLK-TIAC-ENTRO12
                  207.60.13.136 - 207.60.13.143 Wood Product Manufactureds Associates (NETBLK-TIAC-WOOD56)
                  207.60.13.160 - 207.60.13.167 Jamestown Distribution (NETBLK-TIAC-JAMES56)
                  207.60.13.168 - 207.60.13.175 C&M Computers (NETBLK-TIAC-CRAMB-2 )
                  207.60.13.176 - 207.60.13.183 ABC Used Auto Parts (NETBLK-TIAC-ABC56K)
                  207.60.13.184 - 207.60.13.191 Tomas Weldon (NETBLK-TIAC-TWELDON)
                  207.60.13.192 - 207.60.13.199 Tage Inns (NETBLK-TIAC-TAGE)
                  207.60.13.200 - 207.60.13.207 Control Module Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-CMOD56K)
                  207.60.13.208 - 207.60.13.215 Hyper Crawler Information Systems (NETBLK-TIAC-HCRAWLER)
                  207.60.13.216 - 207.60.13.223 Eastern Bearings (NETBLK-TIAC-EB56K)
                  207.60.13.224 - 207.60.13.231 North Shore Data Services (NETBLK-TIAC-NSDS)
                  207.60.13.232 - 207.60.13.239 Mas New Hampshire (NETBLK-TIAC-MASISDN)
                  207.60.14.0 - 207.60.14.255 J. A. Webster (NETBLK-TIAC-JAWFRT1-2)
                  207.60.15.0 - 207.60.15.127 Trilogic (NETBLK-TIAC-LOGIC384)
                  207.60.16.0 - 207.60.16.255 Area 54 (NETBLK-TIAC-AREA54)
                  207.60.18.0 - 207.60.18.63 Vested Development Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-VESTEDT-2)
                  207.60.18.64 - 207.60.18.127 Conventures (NETBLK-TIAC-CON56-2)
                  207.60.21.0 - 207.60.21.255 Don Law Company (NETBLK-TIAC-DONLAWT1-2)
                  207.60.22.0 - 207.60.22.255 Advanced Microsensors (NETBLK-TIAC-AMS384)
                  207.60.28.0 - 207.60.28.63 Applied Business Center (NETBLK-TIAC-APP56K-2)
                  207.60.28.64 - 207.60.28.127 Color and Design Exchange (NETBLK-TIAC-COLOR-2)
                  207.60.36.8 - 207.60.36.15 Shaun McCusker (NETBLK-TIAC-FINLAY)
                  207.60.36.16 - 207.60.36.23 Town of Framingham (NETBLK-TIAC-INFOSERV)
                  207.60.36.24 - 207.60.36.31 AB Software (NETBLK-TIAC-ABSADSL)
                  207.60.36.32 - 207.60.36.39 Seabass Dreams Too Much, Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-SEABASS)
                  207.60.36.40 - 207.60.36.47 Next Ticketing (NETBLK-TIAC-NT256T1-2)
                  207.60.36.48 - 207.60.36.55 Dulsi (NETBLK-TIAC-DULSI)
                  207.60.36.56 - 207.60.36.63 The Internet Access Company (NETBLK-TIAC-PTIMJ)
                  207.60.36.64 - 207.60.36.71 Maguire Group (NETBLK-TIAC-MAGISDN)
                  207.60.36.72 - 207.60.36.79 Cogenex (NETBLK-TIAC-COGENEX-2)
                  207.60.36.88 - 207.60.36.95 AKNDC (NETBLK-TIAC-AKNDC)
                  207.60.36.96 - 207.60.36.103 McGovern election commitee (NETBLK-TIAC-MCGOVDED)
                  207.60.36.104 - 207.60.36.111 Digital Equipment Corp (NETBLK-TIAC-DECISDN)
                  207.60.36.112 - 207.60.36.119 PTR - Precision Technologies (NETBLK-TIAC-PTREB)
                  207.60.36.120 - 207.60.36.127 Extech (NETBLK-TIAC-EXTECH-2)
                  207.60.36.128 - 207.60.36.135 Manfreddi Architects (NETBLK-TIAC-MANELKUS-2)
                  207.60.36.144 - 207.60.36.151 Parent Naffah (NETBLK-TIAC-PARENT)
                  207.60.36.152 - 207.60.36.159 Darling Dolls Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-EMARTEL)
                  207.60.36.160 - 207.60.36.167 Wright Communications (NETBLK-TIAC-WRIGHT56)
                  207.60.36.168 - 207.60.36.175 Principle Software (NETBLK-TIAC-PRINCIPL)
                  207.60.36.176 - 207.60.36.183 Chris Pet Store (NETBLK-TIAC-CPETDIAL)
                  207.60.36.184 - 207.60.36.191 Fifteen Lilies (NETBLK-TIAC-GREYROSE)
                  207.60.36.192 - 207.60.36.199 All-Com Technologies (NETBLK-TIAC-ALLCOM1-2)
                  207.60.37.0 - 207.60.37.31 Cardio Thoracic Surgical Associates, P. A. (NETBLK-TIAC-HEARTDOC)
                  207.60.37.32 - 207.60.37.63 Preferred Fixtures Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-PREFMFG-2)
                  207.60.37.64 - 207.60.37.95 Apple and Eve Distributors (NETBLK-TIAC-AEDED99)
                  207.60.37.96 - 207.60.37.127 Nelson Copy Supply (NETBLK-TIAC-NCOP56K)
                  207.60.37.128 - 207.60.37.159 Boston Optical Fiber (NETBLK-TIAC-BOSISDN)
                  207.60.37.192 - 207.60.37.223 Fantasia&Company (NETBLK-TIAC-FANTCOMP)
                  207.60.41.0 - 207.60.41.255 Infoactive (NETBLK-TIAC-INFOACT-2)
                  207.60.48.0 - 207.60.48.255 Curry College (NETBLK-TIAC-CURRY)
                  207.60.62.32 - 207.60.62.63 Alternate Power Source (NETBLK-TIAC-APSIS)
                  207.60.62.64 - 207.60.62.95 Keystone Howley-White (NETBLK-TIAC-KEYSTONE-2)
                  207.60.62.128 - 207.60.62.159 Bridgehead Associates LTD (NETBLK-TIAC-BRIDG384)
                  207.60.62.160 - 207.60.62.191 County Supply (NETBLK-TIAC-CS384)
                  207.60.62.192 - 207.60.62.223 NH Board of Nursing (NETBLK-TIAC-NHBNDED99)
                  207.60.64.0 - 207.60.64.63 Diversified Wireless Technologies (NETBLK-TIAC-LAUCHAM)
                  207.60.64.64 - 207.60.64.127 Phytera (NETBLK-TIAC-PHYTERA1)
                  207.60.66.0 - 207.60.66.15 The Network Connection (NETBLK-TIAC-TNC56)
                  207.60.66.16 - 207.60.66.31 Young Refrigeration (NETBLK-TIAC-YRDED135)
                  207.60.66.32 - 207.60.66.47 Vision Appraisal Technology (NETBLK-TIAC-VISIONT1)
                  207.60.66.48 - 207.60.66.63 EffNet Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-EFFNETT1)
                  207.60.66.64 - 207.60.66.79 Entropic Systems Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-ENTRO128-3)
                  207.60.66.80 - 207.60.66.95 Finley Properties (NETBLK-TIAC-FPDED135)
                  207.60.66.96 - 207.60.66.111 Nancy Plowman Associates (NETBLK-TIAC-NPAISDN)
                  207.60.66.112 - 207.60.66.127 Northeast Financial Strategies (NETBLK-TIAC-NFSISDN)
                  207.60.66.128 - 207.60.66.143 Textnology Corp (NETBLK-TIAC-TEXTC0RP)
                  207.60.66.144 - 207.60.66.159 Groton Neochem LLC (NETBLK-TIAC-NEOCHEM)
                  207.60.66.160 - 207.60.66.175 Tab Computers (NETBLK-TIAC-TCSI3)
                  207.60.66.176 - 207.60.66.191 Patrons Insurance (NETBLK-TIAC-PATRON99-2)
                  207.60.66.192 - 207.60.66.207 Chair City Web (NETBLK-TIAC-CHAIR56K)
                  207.60.66.208 - 207.60.66.223 Radex, Inc. (NETBLK-TIAC-RADEXINC )
                  207.60.66.224 - 207.60.66.239 Robert Austein (NETBLK-TIAC-HACTRN)
                  207.60.66.240 - 207.60.66.255 Hologic Inc. (NETBLK-TIAC-HOLOGIC3)
                  207.60.71.64 - 207.60.71.127 K-Tech International Inc. (NETBLK-TIAC-KTECH)
                  207.60.71.128 - 207.60.71.191 Pan Communications (NETBLK-TIAC-PANCOM-2)
                  207.60.71.192 - 207.60.71.255 New England College of Finance (NETBLK-TIAC-NECF56K)
                  207.60.75.128 - 207.60.75.255 Absolve Technology (NETBLK-TIAC-ABSOLVE-2)
                  207.60.78.0 - 207.60.78.127 Extech (NETBLK-TIAC-EXTECH)
                  207.60.78.128 - 207.60.78.255 The Insight Group (NETBLK-TIAC-MFIA)
                  207.60.83.0 - 207.60.83.255 JLM Technologies (NETBLK-TIAC-JLMISDN)
                  207.60.84.0 - 207.60.84.255 Strategic Solutions (NETBLK-TIAC-STRATSOL-2)
                  207.60.94.0 - 207.60.94.15 McWorks (NETBLK-TIAC-MCWORKSS)
                  207.60.94.32 - 207.60.94.47 Rooney RealEstate (NETBLK-TIAC-ROONEY56)
                  207.60.94.48 - 207.60.94.63 Joseph Limo Service (NETBLK-TIAC-JOLIMO56)
                  207.60.94.64 - 207.60.94.79 The Portico Group (NETBLK-TIAC-PORT56K)
                  207.60.94.80 - 207.60.94.95 Event Travel Management Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-EVENT384)
                  207.60.94.96 - 207.60.94.111 Intellitech International (NETBLK-TIAC-IIDED99)
                  207.60.94.128 - 207.60.94.143 Orion Partners (NETBLK-TIAC-ORION56)
                  207.60.94.144 - 207.60.94.159 Rainbow Software Solution (NETBLK-TIAC-RAIN99)
                  207.60.94.160 - 207.60.94.175 Grason Stadler Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-GRASON56)
                  207.60.94.192 - 207.60.94.207 Donnegan System (NETBLK-TIAC-DYST384-2)
                  207.60.95.1 - 207.60.95.255 The Iprax Corp. (NETBLK-TIAC-IPRAX56K)
                  207.60.102.0 - 207.60.102.63 Coporate IT (NETBLK-TIAC-CIT)
                  207.60.102.64 - 207.60.102.127 Putnam Technologies (NETBLK-TIAC-PUTTECH)
                  207.60.102.128 - 207.60.102.191 Sycamore Networks, Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-SYCAISDN)
                  207.60.102.192 - 207.60.102.255 Bostek (NETBLK-TIAC-BOSTEK)
                  207.60.103.128 - 207.60.103.255 Louis Berger and Associates (NETBLK-TIAC-BERGISDN)
                  207.60.104.128 - 207.60.104.191 Hanson Data Systems (NETBLK-TIAC-HHANSON)
                  207.60.106.128 - 207.60.106.255 Giganet Inc. (NETBLK-TIAC-GIGANET-3)
                  207.60.107.0 - 207.60.107.255 Roll Systems (NETBLK-TIAC-ROLLISDN)
                  207.60.108.8 - 207.60.108.15 InternetQA (NETBLK-TIAC-EBENNETT)
                  207.60.111.0 - 207.60.111.31 Reading Cooperative Bank (NETBLK-TIAC-READ56K)
                  207.60.111.32 - 207.60.111.63 Edco collaborative (NETBLK-TIAC-EDCOT1)
                  207.60.111.64 - 207.60.111.95 DTC Communications Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-DTCCOM2)
                  207.60.111.96 - 207.60.111.127 Mike Line (NETBLK-TIAC-MLINE )
                  207.60.111.128 - 207.60.111.159 The Steppingstone Foundation (NETBLK-TIAC-STEP56)
                  207.60.111.160 - 207.60.111.191 Caton Connector (NETBLK-TIAC-CATON118K)
                  207.60.111.192 - 207.60.111.223 Refron, Inc (NETBLK-TIAC-REFRON1 )
                  207.60.111.224 - 207.60.111.255 Dolabany Comm Group (NETBLK-TIAC-DCGDED99)
                  207.60.112.0 - 207.60.112.255
                  207.60.116.0 - 207.60.116.255
                  207.60.122.16 - 207.60.122.23
                  207.60.122.24 - 207.60.122.31
                  207.60.122.32 - 207.60.122.39
                  207.60.122.40 - 207.60.122.47
                  207.60.122.48 - 207.60.122.55
                  207.60.122.56 - 207.60.122.63
                  207.60.122.64 - 207.60.122.71
                  207.60.122.72 - 207.60.122.79
                  207.60.122.80 - 207.60.122.87
                  207.60.122.88 - 207.60.122.95
                  207.60.122.96 - 207.60.122.103
                  207.60.122.104 - 207.60.122.111
                  207.60.127.0
                  207.60.128.0 - 207.60.128.255
                  207.60.129.0 - 207.60.129.255
                  207.60.129.64 - 207.60.129.127
                  207.60.129.128 - 207.60.129.191
                  207.60.129.192 - 207.60.129.255
                  207.30.* - 207.120.*
                  207.60.* - 207.61.*

                  205.96.* - 205.103.*
                  209.35.*
                  216.25.*
                  216.247.* VERY DANGEROUS

                  64.224.*
                  64.225.*
                  64.226.*
                  195.10.*
                  62.0.0.1 - 62.30.255.255


                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.159.33.56
                  212.159.40.211
                  212.159.41.173
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.56.107.22
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.159.33.56
                  212.159.40.211
                  212.159.41.173
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.56.107.22


                  The IP listed below is a fake front end portal of a security network filtering hundreds of client subscription IPs. If you find a vulnerable pub, IIS, SQL, or *nix -- LEAVE IT ALONE.

                  AVOID THIS RANGE: 139.142.*

                  WARNING: Replicon's security team is working close with federal/state and corporate law enforcement. They will let you scan, tag, fill, or overtake the entire system. But you really have no control. They are monitoring you, accepting your every move while they profile you. Your dumbass is on Candid Camera. (The *nix box that you 'overtake' is actually a guided security emulator that runs on NT...) Let 'em record you ploppin' the newest, unrealeased version of Photoshop, Windows, Lightwave. Max, Maya, Cosmo, or others and you (as well as everyone else involved in the operation - from Scanner to Downloader) will be 'profiled' for a very unhappy future....


                  6.*.*.* - Army Information Systems Center
                  21.*.*.* - US Defense Information Systems Agency
                  22.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  26.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  29.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  30.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  49.*.*.* - Joint Tactical Command
                  50.*.*.* - Joint Tactical Command
                  55.*.*.* - Army National Guard Bureau
                  64.224.*.*
                  64.225.*.*
                  64.226.*.*
                  209.35.*.*
                  216.247.*.*
                  216.25.*.* VERY DANGEROUS
                  217.6.*.*
                  155.7.0.0 American Forces Information (NET-AFISHQ-NET1)
                  155.8.0.0 U.S. ArmyFort Gordon (NET-GORDON-NET5)
                  155.9.0.0 United States Army Information Systems Command (NET-LWOOD-NET2)
                  155.74.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP2)
                  155.75.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP3)
                  155.76.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP4)
                  155.77.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP5)
                  155.78.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP6)
                  155.79.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP7)
                  155.80.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP
                  155.81.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP9)
                  155.82.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP10)
                  155.83.0.0 US Army Corps of Enginers (NET-CEAP11)
                  155.84.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP12)
                  155.85.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP13)
                  155.86.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP14)
                  155.87.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP15)
                  155.88.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP16)
                  155.178.0.0 Federal Aviation Administration (NET-FAA)
                  155.213.0.0 USAISC Fort Benning (NET-FTBENNNET3
                  155.214.0.0 Director of Information Management (NET-CARSON-TCACC )
                  155.215.0.0 USAISC-FT DRUM (NET-DRUM-TCACCIS)
                  155.216.0.0 TCACCIS Project Management Office (NET-FTDIX-TCACCI)
                  155.217.0.0 Directorate of Information Management (NET- EUSTIS-EMH1)
                  155.218.0.0 USAISC (NET-WVA-EMH2)
                  155.219.0.0 DOIM/USAISC Fort Sill (NET-SILL-TCACCIS)
                  155.220.0.0 USAISC-DOIM (NET-FTKNOX-NET4)
                  155.221.0.0 USAISC-Ft Ord (NET-FTORD-NET2)
                  128.47.*.* Army Communications Electronics Command (NET-TACTNET)
                  128.50.*.* Department of Defense (NET-COINS)
                  128.51.*.* Department of Defense (NET-COINSTNET)
                  128.56.*.* U.S. Naval Academy (NET-USNA-NET)
                  128.63.*.* Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (NET-BRL-SUBNET)
                  128.80.*.* Army Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) (NET-CECOMNET)
                  128.98.*.* - 128.98.255.255 Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (NET-DERA-UK)
                  128.154.0.0 NASA Wallops Flight Facility (NET-WFF-NET)
                  128.155.0.0 NASA Langley Research Center (NET-LARC-NET)
                  128.156.0.0 NASA Lewis Network Control Center (NET- LERC)
                  128.157.0.0 NASA Johnson Space Center (NET-JSC-NET)
                  128.158.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-MSFC-NET)
                  128.159.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-KSC-NET)
                  128.160.0.0 Naval Research Laboratory (NET- SSCNET)
                  128.161.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-NSN-NET)
                  128.183.0.0 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NET-GSFC)
                  128.216.0.0 MacDill Air Force Base (NET-CC-PRNET)
                  128.217.0.0 NASA Kennedy Space Center (NET-NASA-KSC-OIS)
                  128.236.0.0 U.S. Air Force Academy (NET-USAFA-NET)


                  30.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  49.*.*.* - Joint Tactical Command
                  50.*.*.* - Joint Tactical Command
                  55.*.*.* - Army National Guard Bureau
                  64.224.*.*
                  64.225.*.*
                  64.226.*.*
                  209.35.*.*
                  216.247.*.*
                  216.25.*.*
                  217.6.*.*
                  155.7.0.0 American Forces Information (NET-AFISHQ-NET1)
                  155.8.0.0 U.S. ArmyFort Gordon (NET-GORDON-NET5)
                  155.9.0.0 United States Army Information Systems Command (NET-LWOOD-NET2)
                  155.74.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP2)
                  155.75.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP3)
                  155.76.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP4)
                  155.77.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP5)
                  155.78.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP6)
                  155.79.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP7)
                  155.80.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP
                  155.81.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP9)
                  155.82.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP10)
                  155.83.0.0 US Army Corps of Enginers (NET-CEAP11)
                  155.84.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP12)
                  155.85.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP13)
                  155.86.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP14)
                  155.87.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP15)
                  155.88.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP16)
                  155.178.0.0 Federal Aviation Administration (NET-FAA)
                  155.213.0.0 USAISC Fort Benning (NET-FTBENNNET3
                  155.214.0.0 Director of Information Management (NET-CARSON-TCACC )
                  155.215.0.0 USAISC-FT DRUM (NET-DRUM-TCACCIS)
                  155.216.0.0 TCACCIS Project Management Office (NET-FTDIX-TCACCI)
                  155.217.0.0 Directorate of Information Management (NET- EUSTIS-EMH1)
                  155.218.0.0 USAISC (NET-WVA-EMH2)
                  155.219.0.0 DOIM/USAISC Fort Sill (NET-SILL-TCACCIS)
                  155.220.0.0 USAISC-DOIM (NET-FTKNOX-NET4)
                  155.221.0.0 USAISC-Ft Ord (NET-FTORD-NET2)
                  128.47.0.0 Army Communications Electronics Command (NET-TACTNET)
                  128.50.0.0 Department of Defense (NET-COINS)
                  128.51.0.0 Department of Defense (NET-COINSTNET)
                  128.56.0.0 U.S. Naval Academy (NET-USNA-NET)
                  128.63.0.0 Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (NET-BRL-SUBNET)
                  128.80.0.0 Army Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) (NET-CECOMNET)
                  128.98.0.0 - 128.98.255.255 Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (NET-DERA-UK)
                  128.154.0.0 NASA Wallops Flight Facility (NET-WFF-NET)
                  128.155.0.0 NASA Langley Research Center (NET-LARC-NET)
                  128.156.0.0 NASA Lewis Network Control Center (NET- LERC)
                  128.157.0.0 NASA Johnson Space Center (NET-JSC-NET)
                  128.158.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-MSFC-NET)
                  128.159.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-KSC-NET)
                  128.160.0.0 Naval Research Laboratory (NET- SSCNET)
                  128.161.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-NSN-NET)
                  128.183.0.0 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NET-GSFC)
                  128.216.0.0 MacDill Air Force Base (NET-CC-PRNET)
                  128.217.0.0 NASA Kennedy Space Center (NET-NASA-KSC-OIS)
                  128.236.0.0 U.S. Air Force Academy (NET-USAFA-NET)

                  Don't scan these ranges.....
                  207.60.x.x and 207.61.x.x - FBI Linux servers used to trap scanners

                  64.224.*
                  64.225.*
                  64.226.*
                  195.10.*
                  205.96.* - 205.103.*
                  207.30.* - 207.120.*
                  207.60.* - 207.61.*
                  209.35.*
                  216.25.* <-- VERY DANGEROUS
                  216.247.* <-- VERY DANGEROUS
                  62.0.0.1 - 62.30.255.255


                  Avoid These Ranges:

                  64.224.*
                  64.225.*
                  64.226.*
                  195.10.*
                  205.96.* - 205.103.*
                  207.30.* - 207.120.*
                  207.60.* - 207.61.*
                  209.35.*
                  216.25.*
                  216.247.*
                  62.0.0.1 - 62.30.255.255
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.159.33.56
                  212.159.40.211
                  212.159.41.173
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.56.107.22
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.159.33.56
                  212.159.40.211
                  212.159.41.173
                  212.159.0.2
                  212.159.1.1
                  212.159.1.4
                  212.159.1.5
                  212.56.107.22






                  DANGEROUS IP RANGES
                  6.*.*.* - Army Information Systems Center
                  21.*.*.* - US Defense Information Systems Agency
                  22.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  26.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  29.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  30.*.*.* - Defense Information Systems Agency
                  49.*.*.* - Joint Tactical Command
                  50.*.*.* - Joint Tactical Command
                  53.*.*.* DaimlerChrysler AG
                  55.*.*.* - Army National Guard Bureau
                  62.0.0.1 - 62.30.255.255
                  64.224.*.*
                  64.225.*.*
                  64.226.*.*
                  128.47.0.0 Army Communications Electronics Command (NET-TACTNET)
                  128.50.0.0 Department of Defense (NET-COINS)
                  128.51.0.0 Department of Defense (NET-COINSTNET)
                  128.56.0.0 U.S. Naval Academy (NET-USNA-NET)
                  128.63.0.0 Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (NET-BRL-SUBNET)
                  128.80.0.0 Army Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) (NET-CECOMNET)
                  128.98.0.0 - 128.98.255.255 Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (NET-DERA-UK)
                  128.154.0.0 NASA Wallops Flight Facility (NET-WFF-NET)
                  128.155.0.0 NASA Langley Research Center (NET-LARC-NET)
                  128.156.0.0 NASA Lewis Network Control Center (NET- LERC)
                  128.157.0.0 NASA Johnson Space Center (NET-JSC-NET)
                  128.158.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-MSFC-NET)
                  128.159.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-KSC-NET)
                  128.160.0.0 Naval Research Laboratory (NET- SSCNET)
                  128.161.0.0 NASA Ames Research Center (NET-NSN-NET)
                  128.183.0.0 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NET-GSFC)
                  128.216.0.0 MacDill Air Force Base (NET-CC-PRNET)
                  128.217.0.0 NASA Kennedy Space Center (NET-NASA-KSC-OIS)
                  128.236.0.0 U.S. Air Force Academy (NET-USAFA-NET)
                  155.7.0.0 American Forces Information (NET-AFISHQ-NET1)
                  155.8.0.0 U.S. ArmyFort Gordon (NET-GORDON-NET5)
                  155.9.0.0 United States Army Information Systems Command (NET-LWOOD-NET2)
                  155.74.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP2)
                  155.75.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP3)
                  155.76.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP4)
                  155.77.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP5)
                  155.78.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP6)
                  155.79.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP7)
                  155.80.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP
                  155.81.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP9)
                  155.82.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP10)
                  155.83.0.0 US Army Corps of Enginers (NET-CEAP11)
                  155.84.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP12)
                  155.85.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP13)
                  155.86.0.0 US Army Corps of Engineers (NET-CEAP14)
                  155.87.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP15)
                  155.88.0.0 PEO STAMIS (NET-CEAP16)
                  155.178.0.0 Federal Aviation Administration (NET-FAA)
                  155.213.0.0 USAISC Fort Benning (NET-FTBENNNET3
                  155.214.0.0 Director of Information Management (NET-CARSON-TCACC )
                  155.215.0.0 USAISC-FT DRUM (NET-DRUM-TCACCIS)
                  155.216.0.0 TCACCIS Project Management Office (NET-FTDIX-TCACCI)
                  155.217.0.0 Directorate of Information Management (NET- EUSTIS-EMH1)
                  155.218.0.0 USAISC (NET-WVA-EMH2)
                  155.219.0.0 DOIM/USAISC Fort Sill (NET-SILL-TCACCIS)
                  155.220.0.0 USAISC-DOIM (NET-FTKNOX-NET4)
                  155.221.0.0 USAISC-Ft Ord (NET-FTORD-NET2)
                  195.10.*
                  205.96.* - 205.103.*
                  207.30.* - 207.120.*
                  207.60.* - 207.61.* - FBI Linux server used to trap scanners
                  209.35.*
                  216.25.* <-- VERY DANGEROUS
                  216.247.* <-- VERY DANGEROUS
                  217.6.*.*




From dog3 at eruditium.org  Thu Dec 11 10:19:18 2003
From: dog3 at eruditium.org (cubic-dog)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:19:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312111314160.9836-100000@ns.eruditium.org>

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote:
> > > With the USA
> > > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... 
> > 
> > That's a pretty silly thing to say.
> > Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the
> > world?
> 
> It's not silly at all: look again.  He said "becoming".  


Agreed.

I recall watching the events unfold in Tienamin Square all those years
ago on TV, and I thought to myself at the time, within 20 years,
China will be the last free place on earth.

Clocks ticking, and for once, I might have actually been right.

Now that the US has no "other" to compare it self to, it is
free to lock it all down with the best totalitarian system
in history. 

There are TRENDS, you see, and the TREND is toward total government
domination of all aspects of life. This is the trend, and there is
not only no signs of any reversal in the trend, it's building momentum
like crazy, down-hill train on greased rails. 




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 11 13:45:10 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:45:10 -0800
Subject: LAPD captain busted for selling bootleg DVDs
Message-ID: <3FD8E566.A82A230@cdc.gov>

December 10, 2003

Just days after Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton pledged a
crackdown on motion picture piracy, department investigators on Tuesday
helped arrest an LAPD captain suspected of selling bootleg DVDs.

Julie D. Nelson, a decorated patrol captain and a 28-year veteran of the
Los Angeles Police Department, was arrested at the Hollywood station
following a sting operation in which she allegedly sold counterfeit film
titles such as "The Cat in the Hat" to undercover officers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/orange/la-me-dvd10dec10,1,6566326.story?coll=la-editions-orange




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Thu Dec 11 11:07:07 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:07:07 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7402@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:

> Nothing less than a guerilla war seems necessary to restore 
> something akin to the original constitutional balance in the 
> U.S.  But where to recruit these people?  My suggestion: the 
> terminally ill.  

> Many TI come to the table with a 'gift', the certainty of 
> impending death and for some the possibility of fearlessness 
> for physical harm or imprisonment.

Mr. Dumbass appears to be channeling the Earth Liberation Front:

Quotes from: http://www.stopecoviolence.com/words.htm
------------
"If I knew I had a fatal disease, I would definitely do something 
like strap dynamite on myself and take out Grand Canyon Dam. Or 
maybe the Maxxam Building in Los Angeles after it's closed up for the
night."
      - Darryl Chernery, Northern California Earth Firster, 
CBS News Sixty Minutes, March 4, 1990 

"Are you terminally ill with a wasting disease? .Don't go out 
with a whimper; go out with a bang! Undertake an ecokamikaze 
mission."
      - Excerpt from an article that ran in the Sept. 1989 issue 
of the Earth First Journal, urging terminally ill activists to 
go on "eco-kamikaze" suicide missions 
----------------
Google on "eco-kamikaze" for more.

It's worth noting that despite over a decade of this rhetoric, 
not a single terminally ill American has done this, so far as I
am aware.

The *only* even vaguely simlar cases I'm aware of are in 
India and Sri Lanka, where young Hindu widows (who, in 
traditional Hindu society have very dim prospects for 
a happy life) are recruited as suicide bombers by the 
Tamil Tigers. I think Rajiv Ghandi's assassin was 
such a woman.

Peter Trei




From eugen at leitl.org  Thu Dec 11 05:14:59 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:14:59 +0100
Subject: Cryptophone delivers source
Message-ID: <20031211131459.GZ13099@leitl.org>

http://www.cryptophone.de/html/downloads_en.html

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Dec 11 11:35:51 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:35:51 -0500
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed? (and Clouds)
Message-ID: <BAY7-F18zwYmQdEreyQ000279d2@hotmail.com>

Variola wrote...

"How do you know the signature of the unaltered carrier-medium?
E.g., have you measured the LSBit noise from my camera recently?
Under which lighting conditions?"

Well, having done some optical signal processing (and getting a patent in 
that area, come to think of it), I imagined that most photos will naturally 
have some image noise in certain frequency bands...this noise would not have 
to have anything to do with your camera or whatever, but is probably a 
function of what's in the image. For instance, a picture of a naked girl 
standing in front of drywall probably has very little useful image energy in 
spatial frequencies represented down at the length of a pixel. In a spatial 
fft there's probably a lot of low frequency white noise for a while, until 
you get to the level of the shorter body hairs and whatnot. And then there 
may be spatial freuency bands between that and her height that are nearly 
unoccupied with image energy.

>From a spatial/fft perspective I imagined that this is where stego'd 
information goes. I also imagined that if it were done in a very simple way, 
the stegoed info will be fairly obvious to someone knowledgeable and looking 
at the spatial fft of the image. I imagine that it will look obvious 
because, to an expert, it won't look like the authentic kind of noise 
expected there. If the information is encrypted, I consider it possible that 
the noise may even look too "perfect" perhaps.

If that's true, then I suspect it's often possible to determine that a 
photo's stego has been removed. Or at least, there will be cases where stego 
removal will be "obvious".

Come to think of it, I bet TLA operatives are given precise instructions 
about what kinds of photos make for undiscernable stego (I'd bet where the 
spatial image information is not well-concentrated into "bands"). In other 
words, a photo with all different-sized objects in it. Perhaps they even 
travel with some photos for just this purpose.

Hum. I wonder if photos of "clouds" work well for this purpose. That would 
actually explain something I encountered recently....

-TD




>From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at cdc.gov>
>To: "cypherpunks at lne.com" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Re: Has this photo been de-stegoed?   (and Anonymity)
>Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 10:26:16 -0800
>
>At 06:22 PM 12/10/03 +0200, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> >On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 04:20:20PM -0600, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> >> We have anonymity in Web browsing (more or less, thanks to Lance &
> >> co). It's not NSA-proof, but it's probably subpoena-proof.
> >>
> >> We have anonymity in email thanks to remailers (to the extent they're
>
> >> still around).
> >>
>...
> >
> >alt.anonymous.messages has a healthy amount of traffic.
>
>One could count some fraction of all the *.binaries.* on usenet
>as anonymous communications (via stego), but then you'd have to know
>how many are stego'd, and that is the game after all.
>
>
>At 02:24 PM 12/8/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
> >Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it
>was
> >sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted
>in
> >transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever?
>
>Yes.  Trivially, If your correspondent told you, but that's out of
>band.  Otherwise,
>If there *remains* info which was not washed out "in transit", then that
>
>would be an inband way.  Maybe all the pictures with a red flower
>in them are carriers, and this content isn't washed out.  Maybe its a
>more subtle crypto-watermark, independent of the stego'd message.
>
> >Now I know pretty much nothing about this subject, but I would suppose
>that
> >de-stegoing a photo must like some kind of spatial spectral fingerprint
>that
> >should be visible after the photo is FFT'd (is there freeware software
>out
> >there?).
>
>1. How do you know the signature of the unaltered carrier-medium?
>E.g., have you measured the LSBit noise from my camera recently?
>Under which lighting conditions?
>
>2. Don't you think I can measure the properties of my carrier and shape
>the stego'd info to match?   (This does get into an arms race over what
>properties to measure.)
>
> >Now I IMAGINE that a sophisticated interceptor could substitute
>'believable'
> >de-stego-ing noise so that it would look like the photo never had any
>stego
> >in the first place. OR...is this actually 'impossible' to do perfectly?
>
>You don't just put your message in the LSBits or whatever.  You
>compress,
>encrypt, and possibly redundantly code them.  Then you shape the noise
>to match the bits you're replacing.
>
>
> >And then, what if the interceptor tried to put an alternate message in
>there
> >instead? Is there a way to tell that there was originallya different
>message
> >there?
>
>Depends on the coding.
>
> >My assumption first of all is that nothing was done to prepare the
>photo
> >against these possibilities.
>
>Just make sure you did the original analog recording and destroy the
>original after you stego it.  Best also if you never post unstego'd
>messages
>so the Adversary can't measure your raw carrier.
>
>A simple stego message was placed without real
> >thought about whether it might be intercepted and altered.
>
>You shouldn't stego life-critical messages without proper training in
>the use of your tools.
>(That training may vary with personality, see _Silk and Cyanide_.  Some
>like "why",
>some like "do this".)
>
>-----
>"You can have democracy when you vote for the people we approve of"
>King George to the Colony of Iraq

_________________________________________________________________
Cell phone switch rules are taking effect  find out more here. 
http://special.msn.com/msnbc/consumeradvocate.armx




From baudmax23 at earthlink.net  Thu Dec 11 11:56:55 2003
From: baudmax23 at earthlink.net (baudmax23 at earthlink.net)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:56:55 -0500
Subject: Totalitarianism & Revolution
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312111314160.9836-100000@ns.eruditium.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20031211143722.00b7b3b8@pop.earthlink.net>

At 01:19 PM 12/11/2003 -0500, cubic-dog <dog3 at eruditium.org> wrote:

>On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote:
> > > > With the USA
> > > > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise...
> > >
> > > That's a pretty silly thing to say.
> > > Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the
> > > world?
> >
> > It's not silly at all: look again.  He said "becoming".
>
>
>Agreed.
>
>I recall watching the events unfold in Tienamin Square all those years
>ago on TV, and I thought to myself at the time, within 20 years,
>China will be the last free place on earth.
>
>Clocks ticking, and for once, I might have actually been right.
>
>Now that the US has no "other" to compare it self to, it is
>free to lock it all down with the best totalitarian system
>in history.
>
>There are TRENDS, you see, and the TREND is toward total government
>domination of all aspects of life. This is the trend, and there is
>not only no signs of any reversal in the trend, it's building momentum
>like crazy, down-hill train on greased rails.

You are right in noticing the one way trend here.  Funny thing is, this 
failed Amerikan political system seems to suggest that voting for the 
"other official party" will correct the imbalance.  All I can say is that 
during Clinton/Reno, civil liberties advocates were still quite busy 
fighting back totalitarian BS being inserted here and there.  Then Bush 
comes along, and ups the ante, now that They've got their brand new 
boogeyman of "terrorism" to scare all the proles.  Who could have thought 
it could have been worse than Clinton-Reno, and then we now see the horror 
of Bush-Asscroft to prove us wrong.

The Amerikan system has failed, all the so-called checks-and-balances have 
been subverted.  No band-aid reform can pretend to correct the thorough, 
systemic corruption and perversion of justice which now exists within the 
govmint of the united Slaves of Amerika.

Only total revolution (whatever that means) will fix the problem.  From a 
systemic standpoint, look at the linchpins that hold this slimy gangsterism 
in place:  THE MEDIA (principally TV), and the POWERLORDS (govt-corporate 
plutocracy).  The media, in covering up the main game plan of the 
plutocrats, would be an obvious logical target of applied pressure, by 
whatever means possible.  The so-called powerlords, could be individually 
targetted so that they are less cocky about their personal power and 
physical safety.

How  far will it have to go?  Will we just sit back passively, and watch 
our "Masters" increasingly lord over us, in our homes, in our courts, 
everywhere?  Will we just watch as they build the Beast databases of DNA, 
etc etc etc and track us like lab rats.  Will we send our children off to 
die for their empire, while those remaining "at home" are enslaved in 
meaningless, subserviant work?

Then it all comes down to figuring out who the REAL TERRORISTS are.  Who 
has the power to truly oppress, enslave, and murder you?  A sad day indeed, 
when Asscrofts and Bush's are more terrifying than Bin Ladens, et al.

We need citizen's grand juries convened under their OWN declared 
jurisdiction of We The People and the Constitution, and the immediate 
arrest and trial of those responsible for this fascist nightmare.  The 
"Potomic Trials"... like Nuremburg II...

-Max




------------------------------------------------
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should 
have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence 
from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own 
government.

--George Washington
-------------------------------------------------
Smash The State! mailing list home
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/smashthestate
---




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 11 15:23:33 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 15:23:33 -0800
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed? (and Clouds)
Message-ID: <3FD8FC75.84A8710F@cdc.gov>

At 02:35 PM 12/11/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
>Variola wrote...
>
>"How do you know the signature of the unaltered carrier-medium?
>E.g., have you measured the LSBit noise from my camera recently?
>Under which lighting conditions?"
>
>Well, having done some optical signal processing (and getting a patent
in
>that area, come to think of it), I imagined that most photos will
naturally
>have some image noise in certain frequency bands...

You are *way* too FT based in your thinking.  There are *many* other
measurements and statistics and co-relations.

And the noise I was referring to is in part electronic noise, not image
noise
in either the spatial freq. or poisson sense.  The point being that
there is
info that is perceptually insignificant, that you can replace with
compressed encrypted bits.




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Thu Dec 11 07:31:22 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 15:31:22 +0000
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <20031211094503.C9543@baltwash.com>
References: <171.27763a24.2d079198@aol.com>
  <p0602041bbbfc54b47cdd@[66.149.49.5]>
  <3FD6F767.18539.3154D2@localhost> <20031211094503.C9543@baltwash.com>
Message-ID: <3FD88DCA.9030706@students.bbk.ac.uk>

Declan McCullagh wrote:

> I don't know what "entryist" means. It might be helpful to define
> your terms.

Really?

That's odd.

Taking you at your word it means someone who joins (i.e. enters) 
a political party or another organisation in order to take it over 
and change it to their own point of view.




From mellon at pobox.com  Thu Dec 11 05:34:12 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 15:34:12 +0200
Subject: (No Subject)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <20031209202007.GA15332@pobox.com>
  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312102205540.4377-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <20031211133412.GA25912@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 10:10:03PM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > > With the USA
> > > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... 
> > 
> > That's a pretty silly thing to say.
> > Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the
> > world?
> 
> It's not silly at all: look again.  He said "becoming".  And it is.  Fast.

No, it's silly because he said "becoming". Had he said "is", it would've 
been criminally stupid.

For example, the US has a long, long, long, long way to go before 
becoming anything remotely like North Korea, in terms of 
totalitarianism. Of course, North Korea is a radical example; there are
many countries much more totalitarian than the US and extremely likely
to remain so in any foreseeable future. All the Patriot Acts and 
increased surveillance and whatever else has been happening in the US
lately is a drop in the ocean of difference between the 
US and those other countries, in that respect.

--
avva




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Dec 11 14:11:49 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:11:49 -0500
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>
References: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <p0602040fbbfe9b6de856@[66.149.49.5]>

At 12:07 PM -0500 12/11/03, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
>Sterling is a capitalist in the same way that Brin is a libertarian.

Better be careful when you say that, or Brin'll fire up his screaming
monkey routine at you...

>therefore feel some need to candy coat their statism.

Say 'amen', somebody...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Dec 11 14:17:25 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:17:25 -0500
Subject: Dangerous Proxies to Avoid
In-Reply-To: <N1-D3i5TzbB@SAFe-mail.net>
References: <N1-D3i5TzbB@SAFe-mail.net>
Message-ID: <p06020411bbfe9cc7396a@[66.149.49.5]>

At 1:05 PM -0500 12/11/03, Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net wrote:
>The Internet Access Company

Bingo.

You just won "spot the fed".

;-)

Cheers,
RAH
(formerly rah at tiac.net)
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From anmetet at freedom.gmsociety.org  Thu Dec 11 16:36:48 2003
From: anmetet at freedom.gmsociety.org (An Metet)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 19:36:48 -0500
Subject: interesting pattern
Message-ID: <b732068bf3c2647bf943f6aa1dafa0f5@anonymous>

I have noticed this lately:

When someone sends mail to user at thisdomain.com , shortly thereafter a query comes from the ISP that runs the outgoing SMTP and loads http://www.thisdomain.com.

The query does not load any images, just the base html page. It comes from IP usually in the same cloud as outgoing SMTP.

Sometimes this happens only after the first mail from that ISP to thisdomain.com, sometimes every time.

Is this anti-spam (why querying the recipient?), or some data harvesting and connecting the dots?




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Dec 11 17:09:51 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 20:09:51 -0500
Subject: Stego worm
Message-ID: <BAY7-F884r1EvrXSsWn00028e2c@hotmail.com>

Mr Shaddack...

That's some interesting thinking there. The interesting thing is that no one 
might ever even notice the presence of this benevolent worm. It could go 
pretty much unchecked for a while.

As for Variola's comment, you might be right. I just assumed there's some 
kind of relationship between LSB and those spatial freuencies wherein image 
information might be stored. Actually, I would still think there's a 
relationship, in which case an Echelon-like approach based on ffts and 
"noise templates" might be going on (hence the usefulness of jamming).

Anyone got a TLA Operative Handbook? ANy mention in there of what kind of 
photos are best for Stego? How about cloud photos? (particularly where there 
are clouds of many different shapes and sizes present in the photo 
simultaneously.)

-TD


>From: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz>
>To: cypherpunks <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Stego worm
>Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 01:10:24 +0100 (CET)
>
>It's unknown to which extent the Adversary can detect presence of
>steganography in images being sent over the Net.
>
>But whatever capabilities they have, they can be jammed.
>
>Imagine a worm that spreads from machine to machine, and on the infected
>machine it finds all suitable JPEG files, generates some random data as
>source and encrypts them with random key, and stegoes them into the files.
>
>In few days or even hours, a sizeable portion of images on the Net
>contains potentially detectable stegoed encrypted data.
>
>Any Chinese want to get immortalized in Internet history?

_________________________________________________________________
Shop online for kids toys by age group, price range, and toy category at 
MSN Shopping. No waiting for a clerk to help you! http://shopping.msn.com




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Dec 11 17:25:17 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 20:25:17 -0500
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F42ZUx3z5gNUpi00028f35@hotmail.com>

Tim May wrote...

"Not only does it not make sense, but clearly this would cause pileups at 
_some_ stores (too much Spam) and shortages at _other_ stores (still not 
enough Spam, even with the latest "send more Spam to all stores" order. The 
fact that neither shortages nor pileups (that I can see) are apparent at any 
of the stores I visit, and that all of them use UPC and POS methods for 
_all_ sales of ordered products, is consistent with the reorder method 
described earlier."

Oh I have certainly experienced those back in my retail days during college. 
I was working in a Waldenbooks where the auto-inventory was sent based on 
sales (as a scaling factor). The store I worked at was basically quite 
small, but with Class A sales, so during some seasons we were DUMPED with 
books that we simply couldn't keep up with. They were eventually thrown out 
or listed as "shrinkage". (But all of that was behind the scenes...the 
customers couldn't SEE the pileup.)
But, notice how Waldenbooks has gotten WACKED by these big Borders' and 
B&Ns. Maybe these are smarter (or, these "giant" bookstores don't really 
need to consider shelf space...).


Continuing...

"I repeat: the "despised by anti-capitalists" Borders store has a deeper and 
broader inventory of books than the "cherished by Greens and locals" 
locall-owned bookstore. And they also use UPC and POS and reorder books 
dynamically."

Well, don't lump me in there. My point was not that such stores COULDN'T 
provide the level of service that an indpendent could. My point was that the 
"statist" culture that we are so used to prevents many big retail chains 
from taking advantage of their "human capital". If Borders learned, then 
great. (In fact, I helped quash a local bookstore during aforementioned 
stint...the guy was just a shitty, arrogant businessman and deserved to be 
run outta town. My only regret was that I made $3.35/hour to do it.)

Food is different from music or books, however. Books are much less of a 
commodity in that a particular neighborhood may respond very strongly to 
certain types of books, and ignore other kinds. Inventory systems can't 
really get the ball rolling on that kind of thing...they don't tell you what 
the locals want (but you don't have), they only tell you what they've 
already bought. Thus, a well-run chain would hire smart local college kids 
and let them order (in additionto the "basics" that come from the inventory 
systems). What I've yet to see is where a low-level retail kid is actually 
given a piece of the action: "Here kid...if you increase the sales of this 
Sci-Fi section by 45% then you'll get 2% of each book sold after that." I'd 
like to see a chain try that kind of a thing, but that seems WAY too down-up 
for most corporate cultures.

-TD



>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Is Matel Stalinist?
>Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:36:03 -0800
>
>On Dec 11, 2003, at 1:56 AM, ken wrote:
>>
>>>Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, 
>>>they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what 
>>>their owners want them to do.
>>
>>Yes, but, it might be that a corporation makes more money for its owners 
>>by centralising and systematising and reducing the local autonomy of 
>>business units. It's a lot easier to manage a thousand identical stores 
>>than a hundred unique ones. So from "Tyler Durden's"'s POV there might be 
>>more responsiveness from an independent  store than a chain.
>>
>>Though like you said, that doesn't seem to apply to books.  Might to food 
>>though.
>>
>
>I doubt it applies to food, either.
>
>If my local grocery store runs low on "Spam," say, they will order more. 
>This is why they track items with POS terminals and UPC labels (largely 
>replacing the inventory people who used to be seen in the aisles counting 
>items and entering them into a small computer or, earlier, onto an 
>inventory log sheet).
>
>It makes no sense to "lump" or "consolidate" all of the stores into one 
>lump calculation and then issue order to "send more Spam in this amount to 
>each store." Not only does it not make sense, but clearly this would cause 
>pileups at _some_ stores (too much Spam) and shortages at _other_ stores 
>(still not enough Spam, even with the latest "send more Spam to all stores" 
>order. The fact that neither shortages nor pileups (that I can see) are 
>apparent at any of the stores I visit, and that all of them use UPC and POS 
>methods for _all_ sales of ordered products, is consistent with the reorder 
>method described earlier.
>
>I repeat: the "despised by anti-capitalists" Borders store has a deeper and 
>broader inventory of books than the "cherished by Greens and locals" 
>locall-owned bookstore. And they also use UPC and POS and reorder books 
>dynamically.
>
>(For another list I've been discussing lazy evaluation languages, like 
>Miranda and Haskell, and like Scheme can be "forced" to do, and the 
>similarities between demand-driven evaluation of partial results and the 
>obviously demand-driven inventory practices of modern businesses is 
>striking. There's an essay here for some political thinker, along the lines 
>of Phil Salin's "Wealth of Kitchens" essay drawing parallels between free 
>markets and object-oriented systems.)
>
>--Tim May

_________________________________________________________________
Cell phone switch rules are taking effect  find out more here. 
http://special.msn.com/msnbc/consumeradvocate.armx




From njohnsn at njohnsn.com  Thu Dec 11 19:00:50 2003
From: njohnsn at njohnsn.com (Neil Johnson)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 21:00:50 -0600
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
Message-ID: <200312112100.50713.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>

What I object to are corporations who utilize their power (money) to influence 
governments to make laws that benefit them at the expense of others.

- The DMCA
- Tariffs AND Free Trade Agreements
- H1-B visas

Even Ayn Rand weaves this into "Atlas Shrugged" where the competitors of 
Reardon Steel get the government to try and force him to give them his 
formula for his high-strength steel because it's putting them out business 
and "unfair".

Company's that do this are no better than Tim's "Welfare mutants" and probably 
worse because they have a much larger impact.

But I don't see him calling for their "vaporization". 

It would screw up his stock portfolio.

-- 
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.




From njohnsn at njohnsn.com  Thu Dec 11 19:39:43 2003
From: njohnsn at njohnsn.com (Neil Johnson)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 21:39:43 -0600
Subject: Good Quote!
Message-ID: <200312112139.43803.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>

 "They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just 
give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for 
over 200 years, and Hell, we're not using it anymore."

-Jay Leno

 
-- 
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Thu Dec 11 18:52:15 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 21:52:15 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <N1-XSrzfscJ@SAFe-mail.net>

From: An Metet   <anmetet at freedom.gmsociety.org>
> The devil is in details.
> 
> Given small numbers and absence of any other grouping factor there needs to be an "obvious" place for ZPs to refer to. Any obvious place that becomes even remotely attractive to ZPs will be immediately raided.

If you mean a physical location you're probably right.  
> Because ZPs have potential to be actually dangerous to the gang in power, as opposed to everything else I've seen so far.
> 
> So we're back to square one - effective anonymous publishing is prerequisite for the regime change and executing post-natal abortions. And it has been for centuries.

Not at.  All that is required is for a few "early adopters" to point the way and then make their statments through the popular press.  Look at what havoc two Joe Sixpacks caused D.C. operating out of the back of a slightly modified sedan.  Imagine if they had the home addersses of lots of federal agents instead of randomly picking other Joes filling up their gas tanks.

I've heard a project has been underway for some time to create and publish dossiers for federal officers.

> 
> When I say "effective" I don't mean posting a message to Usenet via WiFI-ing into some sucker's open AP. No one gives a fuck for Usenet postings, blacknet etc. - and ZPs are unlikely to educate themselves and search for them. Effective means untouchable web site with untouchable DNS entry. Effective means something doable by average determined person. Like tuning to Radio London from occupied Europe in WW2.

Create dossiers on a broad variety the hoster management.  If sites are terminated or their DNS is disabled so will managemnt and/or their familes.  Like a force of nature, no explanation warning or threat.

I2P is coming.  With six months it should offer a stable and fairly bullet proof platform for lots of nice apps.  It should be easy to install and operate in most consumer net situations.

> 
> Like I said, we're back to square one - all effective means are firmly shut down.

Waaa!!! Waaa!!! What a cry baby.  Pick you target, go out and shake things up.




From jspence at lightconsulting.com  Thu Dec 11 22:04:26 2003
From: jspence at lightconsulting.com (Jason Spence)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 22:04:26 -0800
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
	System-on-Chip
Message-ID: <mailman.821.1576007639.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 07:07:01PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 04:49:11PM -0800, Jason Spence
(jspence at lightconsulting.com) wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 01:23:33PM -0600, D. Joe Anderson wrote:
> > >
> > > w00t!  Here's a good start to the the back-up plan if
> > > TCPA/Longhorn/Palladium/"Fritz-chips"* get out of hand.
> >
> > You know, the black hat community is drooling over the possibility of
> > a secure execution environment that would allow applications to run in
> > a secure area which cannot be attached to via debuggers and such.
>
> Any more background on that?  Excellent sig material, BTW ;-)

TCPA and friends have a few core objectives driven by different
parties in the standards bodies:

 - Provide secure audio playback with license management,
   self-destructing licenses, etc

 - Uniquely identify hardware instances for software license
   management and software activation type schemes

 - Provide a trusted "hypervisor" or "ring -1" environment from which
   authorized code can spy on the operating system and make sure it's
   not running any reverse engineering tools or known cracks before
   the authorized code can install itself or download privileged data
   like strictly licensed content or restricted documents, etc

 - Really fast PKI crypto on a dedicated processor for ipsec type
   stuff

 - Protected cert store in hardware that is somehow immune or
   resistent to tampering (I don't completely understand how this
   can't be attacked by patching the nexus on the hard disk; I'm
   learning more about it)

<scenario class="evil">
I write a worm.  It's a nasty little bugger.  It pokes around your
machine and your network for anything that looks like a credit card
number.  It's allowed to install itself in the protected memory area
because it's ostensibly a popup blocker or spam blocker or something
and I got it certified by NGSCB or whoever'll be in charge of handing
out signatures.

It joins a p2p network of other worms which can't be spied upon
because the crypto keys are located in curtained memory and since your
debugger doesn't have access to curtained memory, you can't get a copy
of them.  You can't get a copy of the destination addresses that your
credit card numbers are being sent to either, because those are also
located in curtained memory.  Oh yeah, and it'll fire up your modem
and wardial for fax machines and randomly fax the credit card numbers
around too, just because I like to be a pain in the ass.

So one of these nodes is not like the others, and I'm sitting on it
collecting credit card numbers all day long.  Anyone who tries to
break my scheme is going to get their ass thrown in jail by everyone
with an interest in keeping the scheme secure, like software vendors
who want to lock you in to their file formats, governments out to
censor you, the media industries, etc.  So I scam a million dollars
through credit card fraud and fencing stolen goods and retire in Cabo.
</scenario>

But those are just the black hats.  What if the governments didn't
like you saying naughty things about them?  Or generic megacorp wants
to take your little business out just because?  Or what if the
megacorps start fighting over file formats and interoperability using
this stuff?  Here's a bunch of even more fun scenarios:

http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html

And here's the MS document outlining their strategy:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/documents/NGSCB_Security_Model.doc

Locke, the Vikings, and a bunch of others throughout history have had
a lot to say about individual responsibility and assigning rights to
the state, because they were worried about tyrants doing Bad Things to
them.  So Jefferson and those other guys wrote things like freedom of
speech and certain other rights right into the constitution and bill
of rights.  So we trust the federal government to enforce those rights
because otherwise we'll yank the officials which make it up right out
of office during the next election.  Or at least that's the way it's
supposed to be... but the people are becoming increasingly apathetic
about it.  Voter turnout continues to decline, and so that last ditch
safety mechanism won't be very effective if someone decides to take
control of the trusted component we know as the federal government and
use things like TCPA and friends to literally take over the world.

I understand the vendors' point of view that sometimes you just can't
trust the users, but this is the wrong way to implement protection
against them.  The people who implement this stuff should be unbiased
towards either the software vendors or the people, and that's just not
the case here.  The people who are implementing these ideas are the
software vendors and the media companies, and they're pretty upset
about pirates and music thieves.  If I were them, I'd exact some kind
of retribution or competitive advantage out of this thing I'm
designing to make up for all the pirated software and stolen music and
annoying competitors I've had to put up with in the past.

--
 - Jason Last known location: 2.5 miles northwest of MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA

Take everything in stride.  Trample anyone who gets in your way.
_______________________________________________
linux-elitists
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From anmetet at freedom.gmsociety.org  Thu Dec 11 19:12:19 2003
From: anmetet at freedom.gmsociety.org (An Metet)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 22:12:19 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <a6fbeb8b73e02b4306690e64e72143fa@anonymous>

The devil is in details.

Given small numbers and absence of any other grouping factor there needs to be an "obvious" place for ZPs to refer to. Any obvious place that becomes even remotely attractive to ZPs will be immediately raided. Because ZPs have potential to be actually dangerous to the gang in power, as opposed to everything else I've seen so far.

So we're back to square one - effective anonymous publishing is prerequisite for the regime change and executing post-natal abortions. And it has been for centuries.

When I say "effective" I don't mean posting a message to Usenet via WiFI-ing into some sucker's open AP. No one gives a fuck for Usenet postings, blacknet etc. - and ZPs are unlikely to educate themselves and search for them. Effective means untouchable web site with untouchable DNS entry. Effective means something doable by average determined person. Like tuning to Radio London from occupied Europe in WW2.

Like I said, we're back to square one - all effective means are firmly shut down. Most cpunk talk about secret/stego messaging is mental masturbation that does not relate to the real thing.

We want sex.




From schoen at loyalty.org  Thu Dec 11 23:11:47 2003
From: schoen at loyalty.org (Seth David Schoen)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:11:47 -0800
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
	System-on-Chip
Message-ID: <mailman.822.1576007639.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

Geoff Lane writes:

> If you can hear it or see it, you can rip it.
> OK the quality isn't as consistent as it would be with a pure digital
> copy, but the single analog->digital conversion isn't a problem and from
> that point it's digital all the way.

http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/content_protection.pdf
http://www.cptwg.org/Assets/Presentations/ARDG/ARDG%20page.htm

... you might observe that they attained the first of the three
regulatory objectives described in the Content Protection Status
Report last month.

(If you have the ability to read PowerPoint documents, take a look
especially at the MPAA presentations at ARDG, like the introduction to
the analog reconversion problem and the MPAA reference model.)

--
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Very frankly, I am opposed to people
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   | being programmed by others.
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |     -- Fred Rogers (1928-2003),
                                       |        464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984)
_______________________________________________
linux-elitists
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From schoen at loyalty.org  Thu Dec 11 23:32:31 2003
From: schoen at loyalty.org (Seth David Schoen)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:32:31 -0800
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
	System-on-Chip
Message-ID: <mailman.823.1576007639.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

Jason Spence writes:

>  - Really fast PKI crypto on a dedicated processor for ipsec type
>    stuff

I don't think the TCG TPM is the really fast processor you're looking
for; from all accounts I've heard, it's really rather slow.

>  - Provide a trusted "hypervisor" or "ring -1" environment from which
>    authorized code can spy on the operating system and make sure it's
>    not running any reverse engineering tools or known cracks before
>    the authorized code can install itself or download privileged data
>    like strictly licensed content or restricted documents, etc

I don't think "spy on the operating system" is quite the right term.
It might be better to say "prove that the relevant parts of the
operating system, if any, are completely unmodified".  There is no
intrinsic value judgment and there is also no attempt to identify
particular _ways_ of modifying the operating system as "bad".  At the
same time, you can also try to reduce the privilege of the operating
system to affect certain things, so that it may not matter to certain
secure operations whether the operating system is compromised or not.

>  - Protected cert store in hardware that is somehow immune or
>    resistent to tampering (I don't completely understand how this
>    can't be attacked by patching the nexus on the hard disk; I'm
>    learning more about it)

There is an ingenious thing called a platform configuration register
(PCR) that contains hashes of running code.  The hardware is designed
in a such a way that, if the PCRs are used at all, at least the first
PCR will accurately reflect the code first loaded and to which control
was first transferred.

Because of the way the hardware is set up, if you load different code
(a different or modified nexus, for example), the PCR values are
guaranteed to be different.

To put this a different way, the hardware has (minimal, but
security-relevant) knowledge of what software is running.  If
different software is running -- for whatever reason -- the PCR values
will be different.

The encryption and decryption keys for the seal and unseal operation
are derived by hashing the PCRs, and the PCRs are derived by hashing
running code.  There is supposed to be no way to get arbitrary values
into PCRs (which is actually an oversimplification, but you can
pretend it's true) and so you can choose not to use them at all, but
you can't choose to load values into them that precisely correspond to
the values they would have been loaded with if you had booted an
operating environment other than the operating environment you
actually did boot.

Therefore, the _availability_ of a valid encryption or decryption key
inside the TPM -- to make an unseal operation work properly -- depends
on what software is really running.  You can have many different
operating environments installed on a single PC -- differing by a
little or a while -- and in principle they cannot unseal one another's
sealed data at all, because each one has its own family of PCR values
that results when it's booted.

> I write a worm.  It's a nasty little bugger.  It pokes around your
> machine and your network for anything that looks like a credit card
> number.  It's allowed to install itself in the protected memory area
> because it's ostensibly a popup blocker or spam blocker or something
> and I got it certified by NGSCB or whoever'll be in charge of handing
> out signatures.

There is no central CA necessarily implied by NGSCB.  Loading these
applets should require some kind of user decision and should not be
automatic based on presentation of a certificate.

The trusted computing applets are not supposed to have direct access
to any hardware (except that they can take input directly from the
keyboard when no other process is doing so, and they can write output
directly to the video framebuffer).  That is the NGSCB model.  So they
can't themselves directly "poke around your machine and your network";
they would need to have an ordinary (unencrypted) user-space agent
that does that.  In priciple, it should be possible to detect and
interfere with the operation of that agent by standard anti-virus or
IDS techniques.  If there is some reason that the user-space agent
can't be disrupted or detected -- which I don't imagine is the case --
then you have a severe problem.  But note that the trusted computing
applet can't authenticate the identity of the user-space agent code.

> It joins a p2p network of other worms which can't be spied upon
> because the crypto keys are located in curtained memory and since your
> debugger doesn't have access to curtained memory, you can't get a copy
> of them.

This part seems very possible.

> You can't get a copy of the destination addresses that your
> credit card numbers are being sent to either, because those are also
> located in curtained memory.

Since the worm applet needs to use regular operating system services
to access the network, and since your computer is connected to a
network you can observe, you should be able to see the IP addresses of
the peers -- you can just run netstat, or you can run a sniffer, or a
firewall that monitors connection requests.  You can tell who the
peers are.  Of course, the worm can conceivably conceal where the
_ultimate_ destination is, if the worm network is a store-and-forward
kind of network.  In fact, the attacker who wrote the worm can join
the worm network in a way that looks like just another infected peer
-- but unlike other peers, the worm author can decrypt the messages
from all the other worms and make use of them.  (But that can be done
today.  Just have worms join an IRC channel and post data there
encrypted with some public key.  The worm author can join the same
channel -- pretending to be another infected victim -- and log what
gets posted there, and then decrypt it with the corresponding private
key.)

> Oh yeah, and it'll fire up your modem
> and wardial for fax machines and randomly fax the credit card numbers
> around too, just because I like to be a pain in the ass.

I'm told there is a scheme like this in Europe now where people are
unwittingly calling the equivalent of 900 numbers.

But remember that in NGSCB the code in curtained memory can't access
the modem -- it needs to rely on a user-space agent to ask the OS to
do that.  The OS could still enforce a policy saying that the agent
can't actually access the modem, or the agent could still be detected
by an antivirus program.

--
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Very frankly, I am opposed to people
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   | being programmed by others.
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |     -- Fred Rogers (1928-2003),
                                       |        464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984)
_______________________________________________
linux-elitists
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From roy at rant-central.com  Thu Dec 11 20:39:09 2003
From: roy at rant-central.com (Roy M. Silvernail)
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:39:09 -0500
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <200312112100.50713.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
  <200312112100.50713.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
Message-ID: <200312112339.09987.roy@rant-central.com>

On Thursday 11 December 2003 22:00, Neil Johnson wrote:
> What I object to are corporations who utilize their power (money) to
> influence governments to make laws that benefit them at the expense of
> others.
>
> - The DMCA
> - Tariffs AND Free Trade Agreements
> - H1-B visas

And now... tarrifs for filming movies in Canada.  Just heard that one on NPR 
today, and I nearly drove off the road.  The plan is to raise the cost of 
filming in Canada so that there's no longer an economic advantage. Made me 
want to puke.

> Even Ayn Rand weaves this into "Atlas Shrugged" where the competitors of
> Reardon Steel get the government to try and force him to give them his
> formula for his high-strength steel because it's putting them out business
> and "unfair".

I guess Canada is "Reardon Pictures".




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Dec 11 15:53:15 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 00:53:15 +0100 (CET)
Subject: interesting pattern
In-Reply-To: <b732068bf3c2647bf943f6aa1dafa0f5@anonymous>
References: <b732068bf3c2647bf943f6aa1dafa0f5@anonymous>
Message-ID: <0312120051430.-1212504816@somehost.domainz.com>

It's a test if you aren't running an open proxy. Its purpose is antispam.


On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, An Metet wrote:

> I have noticed this lately:
>
> When someone sends mail to user at thisdomain.com , shortly thereafter a query comes from the ISP that runs the outgoing SMTP and loads http://www.thisdomain.com.
>
> The query does not load any images, just the base html page. It comes from IP usually in the same cloud as outgoing SMTP.
>
> Sometimes this happens only after the first mail from that ISP to thisdomain.com, sometimes every time.
>
> Is this anti-spam (why querying the recipient?), or some data harvesting and connecting the dots?




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Dec 11 16:10:24 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 01:10:24 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Stego worm
Message-ID: <0312120101030.-1212489260@somehost.domainz.com>

It's unknown to which extent the Adversary can detect presence of
steganography in images being sent over the Net.

But whatever capabilities they have, they can be jammed.

Imagine a worm that spreads from machine to machine, and on the infected
machine it finds all suitable JPEG files, generates some random data as
source and encrypts them with random key, and stegoes them into the files.

In few days or even hours, a sizeable portion of images on the Net
contains potentially detectable stegoed encrypted data.

Any Chinese want to get immortalized in Internet history?




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Thu Dec 11 22:41:14 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 01:41:14 -0500
Subject: PhoneBook: Making your PC 'Police-Ready'
Message-ID: <N1-dSOX5oPx@SAFe-mail.net>

[Wherein the author of Freemail reveals his latest project idea.  Comments to the author are appreciated.]

PhoneBook is a suite of Linux software that allows you to protect your privacy by creating encrypted filesystems, in such a way as to defend you from both technical and legal attacks.

http://www.freenet.org.nz/phonebook/




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Dec 11 18:18:30 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 03:18:30 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Is Matel Stalinist? - semi-offtopic note
In-Reply-To: <3FD83F4F.8070308@students.bbk.ac.uk>
References: <BAY7-F88FWfBnjgX5jj0001dbd5@hotmail.com> 
  <1495A174-2A85-11D8-9AB2-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <3FD83F4F.8070308@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <0312120316570.0@somehost.domainz.com>

> > Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells,
> > they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what
> > their owners want them to do.

Sales tracking software relevant quote from Risks Digest 22.05:

------------------------------


From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Dec 11 19:20:51 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 04:20:51 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Idea: Using GPG signatures for SSL certificates
Message-ID: <0312120353350.-1212489260@somehost.domainz.com>

The problem that makes me feel uneasy about SSL is the vulnerability
of the certification authorities; when they get compromised, everything
they signed gets compromised too.

However, the system could be for some applications potentially get
hardened to certain degree, using the web-of-trust approach.

The server presents its certificate to the client. The client then can
optionally request the GPG signature of the certificate from the server
either by always trying if it is there or only if its presence is
indicated in the certificate data fields, and verify it by the specified
GPG public key (which then can be firmly embedded in the web of trust).

The server's key may be stored on the server itself together with the
certificate signature file, or the signature file may indicate the
keyserver it should be fetched from. Being signed by several trusted keys
is crucial for this purpose, as otherwise it would be trivial to
compromise the GPG pubkey together with the signature and the SSL
certificate, if the adversary gets access to the server and manages to
compromise the CA (risk especially with in-house CAs, or when Agencies get
involved).

The clients should cache the server's authentication information, and
report any changes, like SSH does.

The location of the signature may vary; it can be stored in a default
place on the server (https://secure.server.com/cert-gpgsignature.asc), or
the location can be specified in a X509 field.

Is it a good idea? Could it fly? If not, why?




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Dec 11 20:28:18 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 05:28:18 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Stego worm
In-Reply-To: <BBFEF0CA.40436%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
References: <BBFEF0CA.40436%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
Message-ID: <0312120517490.-1212504816@somehost.domainz.com>

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

> > Any Chinese want to get immortalized in Internet history?
>
> And deleted with a bullet, for which they'd have to pay. That's insane.
>
> The creations of the majority of presently active virii/ worms are not
> attributable to individuals. :)

That's true. However, you can be immortalized even if your identity isn't
known; you can be known under a nym "unknown creator of the StegoWorm".

Besides, even Unknown Soldiers sometimes get statues. :)

> But:! you will stop all the people who are now using stego .. all two of
> them .. their stego will be corrupted

Only the ones who use it to store documents in images on read-write media.
The files in transit and on read-only wouldn't be corrupted.

Speaking of storing data... the best for stego are big not-too-compressed
or uncompressed files. Occassionally playing in a garage band or having a
DV camera could be a good cover for having disks full of the only copies
of WAV and video files, where no "virgin" versions are available for
comparison for bit-level changes. Decreasing prices of DV camcorders could
be helpful here.




From cripto at ecn.org  Thu Dec 11 20:32:48 2003
From: cripto at ecn.org (Anonymous)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 05:32:48 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <e3f732f1c416a79c2414218d66c0be5e@ecn.org>

The devil is in details.

Given small numbers and absence of any other grouping factor there needs to be an "obvious" place for ZPs to refer to. Any obvious place that becomes even remotely attractive to ZPs will be immediately raided. Because ZPs have potential to be actually dangerous to the gang in power, as opposed to everything else I've seen so far.

So we're back to square one - effective anonymous publishing is prerequisite for the regime change and executing post-natal abortions. And it has been for centuries.

When I say "effective" I don't mean posting a message to Usenet via WiFI-ing into some sucker's open AP. No one gives a fuck for Usenet postings, blacknet etc. - and ZPs are unlikely to educate themselves and search for them. Effective means untouchable web site with untouchable DNS entry. Effective means something doable by average determined person. Like tuning to Radio London from occupied Europe in WW2.

Like I said, we're back to square one - all effective means are firmly shut down. Most cpunk talk about secret/stego messaging is mental masturbation that does not relate to the real thing. We want sex.




From nobody at dizum.com  Thu Dec 11 23:10:03 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 08:10:03 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <39f2b6e0c33986d33118db911dc8be3b@dizum.com>

    Another excellent group of potential recruits are prisoners.
Especially if you can create a new religious movement teaching
them to stop the interracial, intergang fighting and concentrate
on their true enemy, the Man. Teach that killing cops, soldiers,
any type of government agent, is a holy act. Robbing banks is 
a holy act. Killing the guards in the prisons, killing the 
excutives of polluting industries -- all holy acts. 
    Leaflets could be dropped from radio controlled balloons 
during "yard time" preaching the Word. 




From mv at cdc.gov  Fri Dec 12 09:02:34 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 09:02:34 -0800
Subject: Stego worm
Message-ID: <3FD9F4AA.83EC5605@cdc.gov>

At 08:09 PM 12/11/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
>As for Variola's comment, you might be right. I just assumed there's
some
>kind of relationship between LSB and those spatial freuencies wherein
image
>information might be stored. Actually, I would still think there's a
>relationship, in which case an Echelon-like approach based on ffts and
>"noise templates" might be going on (hence the usefulness of jamming).

I'm not saying that you could never use FT to detect weaker kinds of
stego.
But if information is encoded as say the parity of 3 LSBits from
different
regions of the image, good luck.

>Anyone got a TLA Operative Handbook? ANy mention in there of what kind
of
>photos are best for Stego? How about cloud photos? (particularly where
there
>are clouds of many different shapes and sizes present in the photo
>simultaneously.)

The most important thing is not to put too much cargo in your carrier.
Think in terms of signal to noise if you wish.

Obviously a picture with truly uniform color fields ---like a digital
cartoon--
won't be useful.  But scanning a piece of paper does not have this
problem,
for say 8 bits per grayscale pixel.   Because each analog scan of the
same piece
of paper gives different bits.

TD, you surely have the background to look into this stuff (and stego
detection) if you want.  BTW Stego ~aka watermarking.  And stego
can be done in music, movies, ascii text, etc.

Or you could work from first principles, if you are able to mentally
switch between
steganographer and stego-detecter.  (This same
playing-chess-with-yourself is
vital to security analysis, crypto, etc.)




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Dec 12 09:04:08 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 09:04:08 -0800
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <20031212081639.GR13099@leitl.org>
References: <20031212081639.GR13099@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <334D3048-2CC5-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 12, 2003, at 12:16 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> ----- Forwarded message from Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> 
> -----
>
> From: Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:32:31 -0800
> To: Jason Spence <jspence at lightconsulting.com>
> Cc: linux-elitists at zgp.org
>

Please STOP forwarding traffic from other lists to the CP list.


--Tim May




From eugen at leitl.org  Fri Dec 12 00:13:55 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 09:13:55 +0100
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
  System-on-Chip (fwd from jspence@lightconsulting.com)
Message-ID: <20031212081355.GQ13099@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from Jason Spence <jspence at lightconsulting.com> -----


From eugen at leitl.org  Fri Dec 12 00:16:39 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 09:16:39 +0100
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
Message-ID: <20031212081639.GR13099@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> -----


From mv at cdc.gov  Fri Dec 12 09:19:54 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 09:19:54 -0800
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <3FD9F8BA.33A4B061@cdc.gov>

At 10:12 PM 12/11/03 -0500, An Metet wrote:
>
>Given small numbers and absence of any other grouping factor there
needs to be an "obvious" place for ZPs to refer to. Any obvious place
that becomes even remotely attractive to ZPs will be immediately raided.
Because ZPs have potential to be actually dangerous to the gang in
power, as opposed to everything else I've seen so far.
>
>So we're back to square one - effective anonymous publishing is
prerequisite for the regime change and executing post-natal abortions.
And it has been for centuries.

You need to think about the "lone warrior" scenario that the Gang
worries about.  McVeighs and Rudolphs.
They were influenced by memes which were not immediately suppressed.

Look at Al Q, Inc: you don't need explicit instructions from the Boss to
motivate folks to do things.
You see who is the enemy, you see opportunity.  You don't need
permission.

There is also the "copycat" phenom ---remember how school shootings
reccurred after the first big one?   So the memes can get out.

As Tim has mentioned here, the talkers can't
be the doers.  And watch out for COINTELPRO.


>When I say "effective" I don't mean posting a message to Usenet via
WiFI-ing into some sucker's open AP. No one gives a fuck for Usenet
postings, blacknet etc

Well, some do, but its not relevent for ZPs.


>. - and ZPs are unlikely to educate themselves and search for them.
Effective means untouchable web site with untouchable DNS entry.

Fuck the web.  The web is 0wn3d by the feds and run by largely spineless
fedsucking sheep.  The web is for
talkers, not doers.


>Effective means something doable by average determined person. Like
tuning to Radio London from occupied Europe in WW2.

I don't listen to shortwave, but I understand some of it can be fairly
strong.   I could easily see some
lunatic fringe suggesting that deathbed xians blowing up medical clinics
as a holy thing.  (And I understand
that shortwave is popular among lunatic xians.)
As the US descends into statism, perhaps some agitators will pick better
targets, like the oppressors.
Perhaps some will simply begin to act, the news reports it, and others
will clue in and repeat.




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Fri Dec 12 06:46:05 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 09:46:05 -0500
Subject: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7406@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

I'm trying to think of a reason why a recipient of
a image containing stego'd information would want
to keep it around after reading the contained info,
with the stego bits overwritten.

Why not just (securely) get rid of it?

There are tons of sources of unique ephemeral
images, such as webcams.

Peter Trei




From eugen at leitl.org  Fri Dec 12 01:23:56 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 10:23:56 +0100
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
Message-ID: <20031212092356.GX13099@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> -----


From Freematt357 at aol.com  Fri Dec 12 08:42:50 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 11:42:50 EST
Subject: Fwd: Speaking of Reason
Message-ID: <8.41e1aa43.2d0b4a0a@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/11/2003 5:25:34 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
rah at shipwright.com writes:

> Better be careful when you say that, or Brin'll fire up his screaming
> monkey routine at you...


I've already had my turn at bat with Brin.  He was upset several years ago 
when I made a few comments about his essay "The Cheerful libertarian", he asked 
that I send him the subscriber list to Freematt's Alerts so he could contact 
them directly- He thought that my commentary would adversely effect his ability 
to sell books-  Anyway I told him to shove his request up his ass, at which 
point he said he'd get my subscriber list by other means.  He's a good writer, 
but IMHO a total nutcase asshole.

Regards,  Matt-

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type message/rfc822]




From nobody at paranoici.org  Fri Dec 12 04:52:01 2003
From: nobody at paranoici.org (Anonymous)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 13:52:01 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Idea: Using GPG signatures for SSL certificates
Message-ID: <504028ab917f6b095fe447132fd5a5f2@paranoici.org>

Thomas Shadduck writes:
> The problem that makes me feel uneasy about SSL is the vulnerability of
> the certification authorities when they get compromised, everything
> they signed gets compromised too.

Technically this is true, but the only thing that the CA signs is
other keys.  So it merely means that the CA can create certificates on
behalf of anyone the compromisers choose.  It doesnt "compromise" any
existing key or previously issued certificate or even any newly created
key.  

In any case, you dont need a CA to use SSL.  (Or more accurately, you
dont need anyone elses CA to use SSL just create your own CA and
issue yourself a certificate. This can be done without a lot of effort
using openssl, for example.)

> However, the system could be for some applications potentially get
> hardened to certain degree, using the web-of-trust approach.

What exactly does this buy you?  The SSL certification authority system
has as its only (but useful) redeeming value that one can connect to
www.somecompany.com and have some level of confidence that the SSL
certificate presented by that site was actually issued to
www.somecompany.com and was issued by a "reputable" certification
authority -- one that presumably will not hand out a certificate stamped
www.somecompany.com to creditcardscammer at blackhat.net.

If the certificate presented is not from one of the recognized
"reputable" CAs built into your web browser, SSL itself will still work
but your web browser will pop up a box saying that the CA is not in its
list of "reputable" CAs (and BTW "would you like to connect anyway?
yesno").

I dont understand the mindless worship of the "web of trust".  PGP
(/GPG) is a useful tool, but the "web of trust" is simply a way of
"certifying" a key in a non-centralized, non-hierarchical way.

-- Frondeur




From rah at shipwright.com  Fri Dec 12 11:05:44 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 14:05:44 -0500
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <3FD9D7A0.9070204@students.bbk.ac.uk>
References: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>
  <3FD9D7A0.9070204@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <p06020415bbffc1bd94b1@[66.149.49.5]>

At 2:58 PM +0000 12/12/03, ken wrote:
>Bruce is a lefty, but not a statist

riiiighhht...

That's like saying that he's a sow, but not a boar...

:-)

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From rah at shipwright.com  Fri Dec 12 11:15:19 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 14:15:19 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <3FD9F8BA.33A4B061@cdc.gov>
References: <3FD9F8BA.33A4B061@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <p06020418bbffc269bcdb@[66.149.49.5]>

At 9:19 AM -0800 12/12/03, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>Look at Al Q, Inc: you don't need explicit instructions from the Boss to
>motivate folks to do things.
>You see who is the enemy, you see opportunity.  You don't need
>permission.

Yup. That's the way Reagan operated, too.

I'm just finishing up "Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the
Success of His Presidency". The middle and last of which is a President's
Counsel-eye view of his role in the Iran/Contra thing, but the beginning of
which makes exactly the point you're making. The troops really did take
their cues from public pronouncements at things like the State of the Union
speech, and he really did run things with, shall we say, as little
attention to detail as possible.

Keep your message simple, say it a lot, and people can make up their own
stuff without too much supervision. Ollie North as the extreme example, but
you can bet that Reagan certainly didn't have to tell people like Schultz
and Weinberger how to do their jobs. George Will's comparison of his
management style to that of a Turkish Pasha's was not a bad one, hmmm?

Cheers,
RAH



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Fri Dec 12 06:58:40 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 14:58:40 +0000
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>
References: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3FD9D7A0.9070204@students.bbk.ac.uk>

Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

[...]

> Sterling makes a comment betraying what Ludwig Von Mises called the 
> anti-capitalist mentality when he quipped to Godwin: "Sure, we hate Exxon because 
> they're huge and they're everywhere."

He was pointing it out, not preaching it. I think over in Austin 
they do self-deprecrating humour, just like us English do.

> Sterling is a capitalist in the same way that Brin is a libertarian. I think 
> what it is, both are uncomfortable with really labeling what their true 
> ideology is and therefore feel some need to candy coat their statism.

I think - but I don't know - that Bruce is a lefty, but not a statist.

Anyway the real relevance of the viridian list  to the cypherpunks 
list is that it is about technical fixes to apparently political 
problems. It's saying something like:

"so you think cars (or fridges, or office buildings, or polyester 
pants) are destroying the world? Don't vote to ban them - all that 
will happen then is that only the rich (or the government, opr the 
military) get to own them. Instead design and build and sell 
better cars, kinder gentler fridges,  healthier buildings, cleaner 
pants, whatever. And these days, cooler, stylish, and more fun, is 
part of what "better" means".

(my paraphrasody of what I see Bruce's point as)




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 12 17:58:59 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:58:59 -0800
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <200312112339.09987.roy@rant-central.com>
References: <200312112100.50713.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
Message-ID: <3FDA01E3.2180.C12CF20@localhost>

    --
On 11 Dec 2003 at 23:39, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
> And now... tarrifs for filming movies in Canada.  Just heard
> that one on NPR today, and I nearly drove off the road.  The
> plan is to raise the cost of filming in Canada so that
> there's no longer an economic advantage. Made me want to
> puke.

You will notice that a lot of big hollywood movies have been
filmed in New Zealand, for example Lord of the Rings.   Reason
is, there is not lot of beautiful unspoilt scenery left near
Hollywood.

Obvious solution.  Require all mandatory uglification of all
foreign scenery -- for example video editing to insert some
smokestacks.

 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     oS6RUufi6iM2JkeHnX1nXK1wxsbAhlo4Md1bP7PR
     4uwZpe5XF48SCJyKwwT6Zbn14lRM00o01bbj5o2SI




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 12 17:59:00 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:59:00 -0800
Subject: ALTA/DMT privacy
In-Reply-To: <0991B5EF-2C18-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <3FD85AF9.12698.59ECD80@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FDA01E4.28411.C12D5B3@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > Every atom of gold is identical to every other atom of
> > gold. There is only one stable isotope.
> >
> > E-gold does not provide untraceability -- but gold does.

Tim May:
> Where tax authorities get people is in the transfer _in to_
> and _out of_ certain kinds of accounts, be they Cayman Island
> or Swiss bank accounts, whatever. The issue with opening a
> Swiss bank account and wiring money into it, or depositing
> Federal Reserve Notes into it has NOTHING to do with FRNs
> having serial numbers and hence being traceable. The issue is
> with their own reporting to the IRS (these days) and to stops
> in place to stop the wiring of said money or the transport of
> said FRNs.

The fact that you need a lot of ID to open a swiss bank
account, and very little ID to open a pecunix account
ultimately has everything to do with transport of FRNs

> What *form* the "item of value" is inside the bank, be it
> gold bars or Spanish doubloons or stacks of $20 bills or
> diamonds, is unimportant.

Bank accounts have value because this stuff gets moved between
the outside and the the inside of the bank.  When it gets moved
between inside and outside, the form matters.

> In fact, for all intents and purposes the "item of value"
> inside the bank can be marks in a ledger book, which is
> effectively the situation today.

And the ultimate holder of those marks is the federal reserve
-- whereupon you are screwed.

Reality is that you can do stuff with a gold demoninated
account that you cannot do with a federal reserve dollar
demoninated account, and you really should ask yourself:  Why
is it so?

Indeed, you can do stuff with an australian dollar demoninated
account that you cannot do with a federal reserve dollar
demoninated account, which may explain why so many internet
gold currency dealers are located in Australia.

> That some of the gold fetishists here keep perpetuating this
> deep misunderstanding of the issues is...unsurprising.

Reality is that gold denominated accounts are different.
Observe this difference, then ask yourself why is it so.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     dgc/6bEVNysFdnfP7WNdUlY88c0N8EW4FpSJGCgs
     4UbJQQDrpPXxtyBvHRcTPi2GBXEeVul6XkRQScePv




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 12 17:59:00 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 17:59:00 -0800
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <200312112100.50713.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
Message-ID: <3FDA01E4.12764.C12D33C@localhost>

    --
On 11 Dec 2003 at 21:00, Neil Johnson wrote:
> Even Ayn Rand weaves this into "Atlas Shrugged" where the 
> competitors of Reardon Steel get the government to try and 
> force him to give them his formula for his high-strength 
> steel because it's putting them out business and "unfair".

Ah yes, recall big steel corporations talking about 'fair
trade" in recent weeks.

Tim has been implying that I am a pinko, gold nut, and 
randroid, which sort of hints that Ayn Rand is too pink for 
him. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     CjIBaSAKl0IJN9I3DeASo7aRlExuLcig+i8nQerX
     4lhf+RpXoGyN729O6EP9syh9Wm7PuVRCJQA/oCEnr




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Fri Dec 12 15:50:56 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:50:56 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7402@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031212184130.046bc580@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 02:07 PM 12/11/03 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
>It's worth noting that despite over a decade of this rhetoric,
>not a single terminally ill American has done this, so far as I
>am aware.

Well, I think for most terminal illnesses, by the time it's obvious you're 
really not going to live much longer, you're pretty damned sick.  And until 
then, you'd probably like to make some personal use of what days or weeks 
you have left doing something like talking to your kids, praying, composing 
that last piece of music, etc., rather than blowing random strangers up to 
make some political point.  (Wouldn't it be a hell of a depressing 
statement about yourself, if you really believed that the most valuable use 
of the last hours of your life of which you were capable would involve 
strapping some dynamite to yourself and taking out a busload of random 
strangers?)

Along with that, most people care about either the afterlife form of 
immortality, or at least the reputation/legacy form of immortality.  Even 
if you don't worry about lakes of fire and red guys with pitchforks, you 
might prefer not to have your family and friends humiliated and ashamed at 
the mention of your name.  ("Oh my God!  That was *your* son?  How do you 
live with that?")

>The *only* even vaguely simlar cases I'm aware of are in
>India and Sri Lanka, where young Hindu widows (who, in
>traditional Hindu society have very dim prospects for
>a happy life) are recruited as suicide bombers by the
>Tamil Tigers. I think Rajiv Ghandi's assassin was
>such a woman.

So there, the women are still healthy enough to do something, and doing the 
suicide bombing thing won't leave behind a legacy of relatives who change 
their names to avoid being associated with you.

>Peter Trei

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Dec 12 18:59:11 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:59:11 -0800
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source 
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312121957370.7199-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312121957370.7199-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <53CB8BC8-2D18-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 12, 2003, at 5:58 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:
>
>> On Dec 12, 2003, at 12:16 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>>
>>> ----- Forwarded message from Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
>>> -----
>>>
>>> From: Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
>>> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:32:31 -0800
>>> To: Jason Spence <jspence at lightconsulting.com>
>>> Cc: linux-elitists at zgp.org
>>>
>>
>> Please STOP forwarding traffic from other lists to the CP list.
>
> Why don't you just filter it Tim: the rest of are capable of making 
> our own
> reading decisions.
>


And so why don't you just filter _my_ comments, twit?

It's bad enough that that Eugene Leitl has made himself the new Choate, 
now you have made yourself the new Detweiler.

--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Dec 12 19:06:55 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 19:06:55 -0800
Subject: The silliness of those who argue that gold is the key to
  untraceability
In-Reply-To: <3FDA01E4.12764.C12D33C@localhost>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
  <3FDA01E4.12764.C12D33C@localhost>
Message-ID: <68390366-2D19-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 12, 2003, at 5:59 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 11 Dec 2003 at 21:00, Neil Johnson wrote:
>> Even Ayn Rand weaves this into "Atlas Shrugged" where the
>> competitors of Reardon Steel get the government to try and
>> force him to give them his formula for his high-strength
>> steel because it's putting them out business and "unfair".
>
> Ah yes, recall big steel corporations talking about 'fair
> trade" in recent weeks.
>
> Tim has been implying that I am a pinko, gold nut, and
> randroid, which sort of hints that Ayn Rand is too pink for
> him.

Rand supported taxes for the space program and for support of big 
business. So, yes, she was very pinkoid.

And like Rand, you have the same delusions about what's possible and 
what's not.

Your notion that "a gold atom cannot be distinguished from another" has 
anything important to do with issues at the crypto and traceability 
layers is symptomatic of this delusion. Hint: the alleged traceability 
of Federal Reserve Notes at the serial number level has absolutely 
nothing whatsoever to do with traceability of payments and the reasons 
we need digital money.

When a person deposits $10,000 and then writes a check to another 
person, or wires money, or withdraws cash, and so and so forth, do you 
think some record of the serial numbers was the means by which this 
transaction was traced?

Your foolish faith that "E-gold" is some significant step "because gold 
atoms look like all other gold atoms, because there is only one stable 
isotope of gold" is embematic of the delusions which the gold bugs and 
offshore platform silly people have.

And people wonder why the wrong issues are being worked on.


--Tim May




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Fri Dec 12 16:07:49 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 19:07:49 -0500
Subject: Stego worm
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F884r1EvrXSsWn00028e2c@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031212185610.046b2cd0@pop.ix.netcom.com>





From measl at mfn.org  Fri Dec 12 17:58:33 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 19:58:33 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source 
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <334D3048-2CC5-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312121957370.7199-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> On Dec 12, 2003, at 12:16 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> 
> > ----- Forwarded message from Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> 
> > -----
> >
> > From: Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
> > Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:32:31 -0800
> > To: Jason Spence <jspence at lightconsulting.com>
> > Cc: linux-elitists at zgp.org
> >
> 
> Please STOP forwarding traffic from other lists to the CP list.

Why don't you just filter it Tim: the rest of are capable of making our own
reading decisions.

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

Father, you are a great and mighty God. Help our governments to remember the
lessons of our history and to appreciate the purpose of your son Jesus. Teach
our representatives not to be so arrogant as to speak in one way, but doing
another, for surely this not the way of truth. Help us to understand that
your will is not death but life, not the darkness of hatred but the light of
friendship in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Merle Harton, Jr.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Fri Dec 12 17:14:57 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 20:14:57 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]
Message-ID: <N1-PiJc8nJk@SAFe-mail.net>

From: John Kelsey <kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com>
> At 02:07 PM 12/11/03 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
> >It's worth noting that despite over a decade of this rhetoric,
> >not a single terminally ill American has done this, so far as I
> >am aware.
> 
> Well, I think for most terminal illnesses, by the time it's obvious you're 
> really not going to live much longer, you're pretty damned sick.  

About half of my friends who died of a terminal illness were apparently quite healthy when told they had joined the "nearly departed".

>And until 
> then, you'd probably like to make some personal use of what days or weeks 
> you have left doing something like talking to your kids, praying, composing 
> that last piece of music, etc., rather than blowing random strangers up to 
> make some political point.  

Isn't it depressing than some have been living their lives in a way that such an 11th hour changes of heart are necessary or desired?

(Wouldn't it be a hell of a depressing 
> statement about yourself, if you really believed that the most valuable use 
> of the last hours of your life of which you were capable would involve 
> strapping some dynamite to yourself and taking out a busload of random 
> strangers?)

Who mentioned random?  Who mentioned dynamite?

What I'm suggesting is no more random than soldiers killing other soldiers in war. "The purpose is to get the other poor dumb bastard to die for their ideology."  Besides, there is no need for these operations to be a suicide.  The lack of fear gives one a decided edge in dangerous situations which may actually increase survival rates.

> 
> Along with that, most people care about either the afterlife form of 
> immortality, or at least the reputation/legacy form of immortality.  Even 
> if you don't worry about lakes of fire and red guys with pitchforks, you 
> might prefer not to have your family and friends humiliated and ashamed at 
> the mention of your name.  ("Oh my God!  That was *your* son?  How do you 
> live with that?")

That's their problem.  From my prespective its like Hollywood: as long as you still being talked about you're 'alive'.  It doen't matter what they are saying.  Better to be infamous down through history than unknown.

ND




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Fri Dec 12 17:23:56 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 20:23:56 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <N1-at-xKbUg@SAFe-mail.net>

-------- Original Message --------
From: Anonymous <cripto at ecn.org>
Apparently from: owner-cypherpunks at minder.net
To: cypherpunks at lne.com
Subject: Re: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 05:32:48 +0100 (CET)

> The devil is in details.
> 
> Given small numbers and absence of any other grouping factor there needs to be an "obvious" place for ZPs to refer to. Any obvious place that becomes even remotely attractive to ZPs will be immediately raided. Because ZPs have potential to be actually dangerous to the gang in power, as opposed to everything else I've seen so far.

> Like I said, we're back to square one - all effective means are firmly shut down. Most cpunk talk about secret/stego messaging is mental masturbation that does not relate to the real thing. We want sex.


I think this is a new use for SPAM.  Because its a political message it may even be protected under the new Congressional legislation.  :-)




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Fri Dec 12 17:55:45 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 20:55:45 -0500
Subject: Anti-globalization
Message-ID: <N1-a9VnsZB8@SAFe-mail.net>

From: Neil Johnson <njohnsn at njohnsn.com>

> What I object to are corporations who utilize their power (money) to influence 
> governments to make laws that benefit them at the expense of others.
> 
> - The DMCA
> - Tariffs AND Free Trade Agreements
> - H1-B visas
> 
> Even Ayn Rand weaves this into "Atlas Shrugged" where the competitors of 
> Reardon Steel get the government to try and force him to give them his 
> formula for his high-strength steel because it's putting them out business 
> and "unfair".

"Corporations shall not be considered to be 'persons' protected by the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania within the Second Class Township of Porter, Clarion County, Pennsylvania."

Only a small handful of very large corporations abuse these rights to deceive people, hide crimes, or make politicians violate the will of their own voters. The millions of ethical corporations will thus be freed from the tyranny of the few while democratic government will be returned to its citizens.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1219-06.htm




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Fri Dec 12 12:28:13 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 21:28:13 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Idea: Using GPG signatures for SSL certificates
In-Reply-To: <504028ab917f6b095fe447132fd5a5f2@paranoici.org>
References: <504028ab917f6b095fe447132fd5a5f2@paranoici.org>
Message-ID: <0312122112520.-1244848736@somehost.domainz.com>

> Thomas Shadduck writes:
         ^^^^^^^^ - cute :) Though I am more often called Shaddup.

> > The problem that makes me feel uneasy about SSL is the vulnerability of
> > the certification authorities when they get compromised, everything
> > they signed gets compromised too.
>
> Technically this is true, but the only thing that the CA signs is
> other keys.  So it merely means that the CA can create certificates on
> behalf of anyone the compromisers choose.  It doesnt "compromise" any
> existing key or previously issued certificate or even any newly created
> key.

By "compromised" I meant "the signature confirming the authenticity of the
certificate can't be trusted anymore". Sorry if it wasn't obvious.

> In any case, you dont need a CA to use SSL.  (Or more accurately, you
> dont need anyone elses CA to use SSL just create your own CA and
> issue yourself a certificate. This can be done without a lot of effort
> using openssl, for example.)

I am aware of this.

Using the GPG/SSL approach, you can have your own in-house CA for SSL
purposes, and at the same time be able to prove to external users that the
certificate is really yours. One more factor for establishing trust, one
more obstacle for the Adversary to pass.

> > However, the system could be for some applications potentially get
> > hardened to certain degree, using the web-of-trust approach.
>
> What exactly does this buy you?  The SSL certification authority system
> has as its only (but useful) redeeming value that one can connect to
> www.somecompany.com and have some level of confidence that the SSL
> certificate presented by that site was actually issued to
> www.somecompany.com and was issued by a "reputable" certification
> authority -- one that presumably will not hand out a certificate stamped
> www.somecompany.com to creditcardscammer at blackhat.net.

It won't buy me anything "new". It only strengthens the confidence level
by providing a CA-independent, alternative method of verifying the
certificate.

> If the certificate presented is not from one of the recognized
> "reputable" CAs built into your web browser, SSL itself will still work
> but your web browser will pop up a box saying that the CA is not in its
> list of "reputable" CAs (and BTW "would you like to connect anyway?
> yesno").

What I'd like is one more button, "Attempt to verify by GPG". Though that
can be easily done by an external application; browser integration is
nothing more than mere comfort.

> I dont understand the mindless worship of the "web of trust".  PGP
> (/GPG) is a useful tool, but the "web of trust" is simply a way of
> "certifying" a key in a non-centralized, non-hierarchical way.

YES! Which is what I want to achieve.




From measl at mfn.org  Fri Dec 12 19:34:31 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 21:34:31 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <20031213032258.GI27422@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312122133580.7199-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

So, what we need to complete the picture is a good old-fashioned top-posted
CASCADE!!!

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 rtusers-lists-fsck-com at jal.org wrote:

> Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 22:22:58 -0500
> From: rtusers-lists-fsck-com at jal.org
> To: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
> Cc: J.A. Terranson <measl at mfn.org>, cypherpunks at lne.com
> Subject: Re: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
>     System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen at loyalty.org)
> 
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:
> 
> > On Dec 12, 2003, at 5:58 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > 
> > >On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:
> > >
> > >>On Dec 12, 2003, at 12:16 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > >>
> > >>>----- Forwarded message from Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
> > >>>-----
> > >>>
> > >>>From: Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
> > >>>Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 23:32:31 -0800
> > >>>To: Jason Spence <jspence at lightconsulting.com>
> > >>>Cc: linux-elitists at zgp.org
> > >>>
> > >>
> > >>Please STOP forwarding traffic from other lists to the CP list.
> > >
> > >Why don't you just filter it Tim: the rest of are capable of making 
> > >our own
> > >reading decisions.
> > >
> > 
> > 
> > And so why don't you just filter _my_ comments, twit?
> > 
> > It's bad enough that that Eugene Leitl has made himself the new Choate, 
> > now you have made yourself the new Detweiler.
> > 
> > --Tim May
> 
> Hey! I'm the forth person to meta-comment about the list in this thread. 
> Do I win a prize? Are we sufficiently indistiguishable from Usenet? Is
> there life on Saturn? I hear Detweiler is changing the litter for Andrew
> Loeb!
> 
> (With apologies to poor Zippy,)
> 
> -j
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

Father, you are a great and mighty God. Help our governments to remember the
lessons of our history and to appreciate the purpose of your son Jesus. Teach
our representatives not to be so arrogant as to speak in one way, but doing
another, for surely this not the way of truth. Help us to understand that
your will is not death but life, not the darkness of hatred but the light of
friendship in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Merle Harton, Jr.




From rah at shipwright.com  Fri Dec 12 18:35:44 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 21:35:44 -0500
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <3FDA01E4.12764.C12D33C@localhost>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0312081840080.15601-100000@sun10101.dn.net>
  <3FDA01E4.12764.C12D33C@localhost>
Message-ID: <p06020452bc002b4951b8@[66.149.49.5]>

At 5:59 PM -0800 12/12/03, James A. Donald wrote:
>Tim has been implying that I am a pinko, gold nut, and
>randroid, which sort of hints that Ayn Rand is too pink for
>him.

Apparently, he likes his meat burned -- and halfway up the flue...

;-)

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From measl at mfn.org  Fri Dec 12 19:55:39 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 21:55:39 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source 
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <53CB8BC8-2D18-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312122154090.7199-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> And so why don't you just filter _my_ comments, twit?

I choose to read your comments Tim - as I pointed out, we can all make our
own decisions as to reading material.


> It's bad enough that that Eugene Leitl has made himself the new Choate, 
> now you have made yourself the new Detweiler.

Ad hominem is not a cloak you wear well.

 
> --Tim May


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

Father, you are a great and mighty God. Help our governments to remember the
lessons of our history and to appreciate the purpose of your son Jesus. Teach
our representatives not to be so arrogant as to speak in one way, but doing
another, for surely this not the way of truth. Help us to understand that
your will is not death but life, not the darkness of hatred but the light of
friendship in Christ. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Merle Harton, Jr.




From nobody at dizum.com  Fri Dec 12 15:20:01 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 00:20:01 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <39f2b6e0c33986d33118db911dc8be3b@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <5377d466828160d440b8da6bed5d2801@dizum.com>

Nomen Nescio spake:

>     Another excellent group of potential recruits are prisoners.
> Especially if you can create a new religious movement teaching
> them to stop the interracial, intergang fighting and concentrate
> on their true enemy, the Man. Teach that killing cops, soldiers,
> any type of government agent, is a holy act. Robbing banks is 
> a holy act. Killing the guards in the prisons, killing the 
> excutives of polluting industries -- all holy acts. 

Why robbing banks?  Aside from allowing the
government to regulate them, what have they
done to deserve being robbed?




From discord-nobody at erisiandiscord.de  Fri Dec 12 16:55:42 2003
From: discord-nobody at erisiandiscord.de (Anonymous)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 01:54:42 +0059 (CET)
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <4db65b47830226204720bc7d4070e551@erisiandiscord.de>

Nomen pondered:

> Why robbing banks?  Aside from allowing the
> government to regulate them, what have they
> done to deserve being robbed


   Why not? Revolutionaries need money, and the financial sector has 
always been asshole buddies with the police, politicians, and other pigs.




From nobody at dizum.com  Fri Dec 12 18:40:07 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 03:40:07 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <4db65b47830226204720bc7d4070e551@erisiandiscord.de>
Message-ID: <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>

Anonymous wrote:

> Nomen pondered:
> 
> > Why robbing banks?  Aside from allowing the
> > government to regulate them, what have they
> > done to deserve being robbed
> 
>    Why not? Revolutionaries need money, and the financial sector has 
> always been asshole buddies with the police, politicians, and other pigs.

Retarded.  Someone trying to frame Mr. Seaver by adopting his
three-space paragraph lead-ins.




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Fri Dec 12 19:58:43 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 04:58:43 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Anti-globalization
In-Reply-To: <3FDA01E3.2180.C12CF20@localhost>
References: <200312112100.50713.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
  <3FDA01E3.2180.C12CF20@localhost>
Message-ID: <0312130455090.0@somehost.domainz.com>

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> Obvious solution.  Require all mandatory uglification of all
> foreign scenery -- for example video editing to insert some
> smokestacks.

Just pay them to decorate their unfairly lovely landscapes with
king-sized billboards.

*Poof!* Beauty gone, problem solved.




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Sat Dec 13 07:44:50 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 09:44:50 -0600
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>
References: <4db65b47830226204720bc7d4070e551@erisiandiscord.de>
  <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <20031213154450.GA15768@cybershamanix.com>

On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 03:40:07AM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Anonymous wrote:
> 
> > Nomen pondered:
> > 
> > > Why robbing banks?  Aside from allowing the
> > > government to regulate them, what have they
> > > done to deserve being robbed
> > 
> >    Why not? Revolutionaries need money, and the financial sector has 
> > always been asshole buddies with the police, politicians, and other pigs.
> 
> Retarded.  Someone trying to frame Mr. Seaver by adopting his
> three-space paragraph lead-ins.

  WTF is this bizarre shit? We got narcs trolling for "terrorists" and more (or
the same) narcs attempting to do textual analysis to figure out who the anon
replies are from? Or pretending to do so to implicate others? 
  And what is my supposed "three-space paragraph lead-ins?" The concept of
textual analysis to prove ID has always amused me. A competent writer can easily
change writing styles from moment to moment. I well recall a university english
lit prof almost accusing me of plagarism when I wrote a piece mimicking Faulkner
and doing so well enough that the prof actually started looking thru his works
trying to find it. 


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Sat Dec 13 08:52:46 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 11:52:46 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <3FD9F8BA.33A4B061@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031213113129.04683ae0@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 09:19 AM 12/12/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
...
>You need to think about the "lone warrior" scenario that the Gang
>worries about.  McVeighs and Rudolphs.
>They were influenced by memes which were not immediately suppressed.

One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't actually 
make peace.  With large sets of them, there's not only no way to force them 
to surrender, there's no way to even surrender to them!  The demands of 
different lone warriors are different.  Because they're not under anyone's 
authority, you can't negotiate a truce that's worth anything with 
them.  You've executed the FBI and BATF agents involved in the Waco 
disaster, and so Tim McVeigh has made peace with you.  But Randolph still 
blows things up, because he wants abortion clinics and gay bars shut 
down.  And the Unabomber wanted (as far as I can tell) technology shut down.

Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the lone 
warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that we 
finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed pro-choice 
activist.  What's your next move?

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From eugen at leitl.org  Sat Dec 13 04:17:05 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 13:17:05 +0100
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <53CB8BC8-2D18-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312121957370.7199-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <53CB8BC8-2D18-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031213121705.GR13099@leitl.org>

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 06:59:11PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

> It's bad enough that that Eugene Leitl has made himself the new Choate,
> now you have made yourself the new Detweiler.

The comments from linux-elitists were clueful, and apropos. As I said, I don't
intend
to make it a habit, but my Mailman isn't working yet, and I don't
have time to debug the setup to resurrect cpunx-news.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From jya at pipeline.com  Sat Dec 13 13:28:36 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 13:28:36 -0800
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
Message-ID: <E1AVEX0-0003pP-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>

It was discovered a while back, check the archives, or Tim's
FAQ, that all the remailers were compromised, with or without
the operator's complicity with TLAs. After that discovery there
was a turning of the covert control to re-direct it toward its 
implementer(s). That was soon re-turned by the TLAs back
at the turners, a cycle-countercycle that continues now.

One day you may be read by the TLAs, the next read by the
remailer operators, each looking for evidence of nefarium 
by the other so that countermeasures can be invented and
deployed.

While the remailer/coopt-remailer make-work has kept a 
couple of cut-out remailer operators busy in Bhopal
keeping the TLAs focussed on threats to the institutionalized 
suppression of anonymous speech, astute anonymity performers
are jabbering at mirrors and pontificating to pets against 
law and order elsewhere.

For a small fortune you can subscribe to a source of
absolutely secure means of communications tested by
centuries of reliability. Blind Faith.

No, not that of the Masons, and certainly not nouveau-cult
Skull and Bones, nor even Tri-Lateral Commies, what you 
have to do to get entry is to Fedex weapons grade anthrax 
to the homes (and/or lovers) of heads of government 
worldwide. You get ten HoGs, or 5,000 celebrities, certifiable 
by swissbank.com forwarded to you of their secret account 
deposits, you're in. Call yourself god's emissary.

And then a target for someone younger and smarter and
far uglier in ruthless mayhem, driven by murderous,
most often suicidal, hatred for everything holy.

Dread of easily-blameworthy TLAs is for cotton-candy 
addicts. Fear not those carrying a peashooter, instead
those armed with horrifying urges beyond belief.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sat Dec 13 14:35:07 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 14:35:07 -0800
Subject: The silliness of those who argue that gold is the key to
  untraceability
In-Reply-To: <68390366-2D19-11D8-9527-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <3FDA01E4.12764.C12D33C@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FDB239B.8141.107E8624@localhost>

    --
On 12 Dec 2003 at 19:06, Tim May wrote:
> Your notion that "a gold atom cannot be distinguished from 
> another" has anything important to do with issues at the 
> crypto and traceability layers is symptomatic of this 
> delusion.

It has nothing to do with crypto, but a great deal to do with 
traceability.

> When a person deposits $10,000 and then writes a check to 
> another person, or wires money, or withdraws cash, and so and 
> so forth, do you think some record of the serial numbers was 
> the means by which this transaction was traced?

Usually the transfer of value ultimately results in an 
adjustment in the ledgers of the federal reserve -- the 
receiving bank goes up slightly, the sending bank goes down 
slightly, and the traceability follows from the fact that the 
transaction ultimately goes through the federal reserve.  The 
FRN numbers are a backup system to trace people and banks who 
try to bypass this.

A gold transfer does not go through the federal reserve.

> Your foolish faith that "E-gold" is some significant step
> "because gold atoms look like all other gold atoms, because
> there is only one stable isotope of gold" is embematic of the
> delusions which the gold bugs and offshore platform silly
> people have.

I can rather easily open a pecunix account with a hotmail
address.   Opening a swiss bank account is considerably harder. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     RbQNKTbJxJRsjesXiXUdfxhkzsujCH/JFKjO3gzH
     4xkPkjIloRW2PyFGweps7t3gno3ljOkFGy0RuSOC4




From nobody at dizum.com  Sat Dec 13 09:40:05 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 18:40:05 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Fuck em to death
Message-ID: <7923081132db952552fd0ce622f2171c@dizum.com>

Death to the Oinks!




From nobody at dizum.com  Sat Dec 13 09:40:05 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 18:40:05 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Fuck Them All Dead
Message-ID: <ed1d790a5989333d668e4cc13ce49401@dizum.com>

Off All the Pigs!




From cripto at ecn.org  Sat Dec 13 09:49:15 2003
From: cripto at ecn.org (Anonymous)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 18:49:15 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>

   A question for the moment might well be how many if any of
the remailers are operated by TLAs?




From nobody at dizum.com  Sat Dec 13 10:30:04 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 19:30:04 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Fuck Them Dead
Message-ID: <644f4cac046dd750689844ad7115b473@dizum.com>

Off the Pigs!




From peter.thoenen at email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil  Sat Dec 13 10:32:02 2003
From: peter.thoenen at email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil (Thoenen, Peter Mr CN Sprint)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 19:32:02 +0100
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
References: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
Message-ID: <3FDB5B22.6090206@email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil>

does it matter?

Anonymous wrote:

>    A question for the moment might well be how many if any of
> the remailers are operated by TLAs?




From vab at cryptnet.net  Sat Dec 13 17:58:03 2003
From: vab at cryptnet.net (V Alex Brennen)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 20:58:03 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [linux-elitists] Monday 15 Dec: first all-Open Source 
  System-on-Chip (fwd from schoen@loyalty.org)
In-Reply-To: <20031213121705.GR13099@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312132056590.7680-100000@cryptnet.net>

Eugen Leitl wrote:

> The comments from linux-elitists were clueful, and apropos. As 
> I said, I don't intend
> to make it a habit, but my Mailman isn't working yet, and
> I don't have time to debug the setup to resurrect cpunx-news.

Here:

https://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news

k thx.

   - VAB
--
V. Alex Brennen   <vab at cryptnet.net>
  F A R  B E Y O N D  D R I V E N




From eugen at leitl.org  Sat Dec 13 14:58:57 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 23:58:57 +0100
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
References: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
Message-ID: <20031213225857.GX13099@leitl.org>

On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 06:49:15PM +0100, Anonymous wrote:
>    A question for the moment might well be how many if any of
> the remailers are operated by TLAs?

The community is small enough so that the fraction must be in low 10% at
worst.

What'd be interesting to know how secure the remailer software is
and whether remailer machines get more frequently compromised than
comparable machines.

Ingress/egress points into nodes are potentially subject to traffic analysis
and interception of egressing cleartext.

I'm not sure anyone is giving a damn, though.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sun Dec 14 00:40:27 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 00:40:27 -0800
Subject: Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>

At 06:49 PM 12/13/2003 +0100, some provocateur claiming to be Anonymous wrote:
>    A question for the moment might well be how many if any of
>the remailers are operated by TLAs?

The TLAs have proposed running various anonymizers for China
and other countries that have oppressive eavesdroppers.

If you go look at past remailer discussions (probably starting with
Tim's Cyphernomicon or some of the remailer docs),
you'll be reminded that just using one remailer isn't enough
if you're worried about it being compromised,
though it's usually fine for trolling mailing lists :-)

Remailers are secure if at least one remailer in a chain
is _not_ compromised, so you not only want to be sure
that some of the remailers you chain through are run by good people,
but that their machines are likely not to have been cracked,
and ideally you use remailers in multiple legal jurisdictions
because that reduces the ability of any one government to put
pressure on the remailer operators, and increases the chances that
if all of the remailers are compromised, at least one of them
isn't compromised by someone who's interested in _you_.




From Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net  Sat Dec 13 23:52:13 2003
From: Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net (Nostradumbass at SAFe-mail.net)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 02:52:13 -0500
Subject: Patriot Ants (was: Re: Zombie Patriots and other musings)
Message-ID: <N1-bFBH_xgK@SAFe-mail.net>

From: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz>
> On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, John Kelsey wrote:
> 
> > Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the lone
> > warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that we
> > finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed pro-choice
> > activist.  What's your next move?
> 
> Two moves possible.
> 
> The violent, far less effective and possibly somehow counterproductive
> one: attacking the ones who enforce the measurement, by letal or nonlethal
> means, to act as deterrent.

I think  you should the word possibly when referring to effectiveness of outcomes.  One can never knows until one tries.  Every monment in history is unique and the effectiveness of the use of a particular strategy can never be ascertained beforehand.  Mine is based on at least two inspirations...

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?" --Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago
                                 and

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. -- Louis D. Brandeis 

As Americans I'm sure we have been tutored by some of the best.  Time to put into practice what we have learned.

> 
> The nonviolent one: developing and deploying the technology necessary for
> underground clinics to provide higher quality service, and for their
> clients to find, order and pay for the services without being likely to
> trace down by the Whateveriscurrentlythelaw Enforcement. Causing bad press
> for them, keeping public awareness that alternatives to the law-compliance
> exist. Learning from countries with similar bans in action, both from the
> present and from history, how the alternatives developed there, and
> building on this knowledge.
> 
> Direct attack is not always the best route, however tempting. A house can
> be brought down from the outside by a bomb, or from the inside by white
> ants.

The trouble with this method is that is generally requires a large percentage of the population to actively or passively support a position.  This almost always occurs after a situation has become intolerable to the masses.  I have no intention in placing my ability to enjoy what I consider my basic rights into the hands of a million Joe Sixpacks and await their enlightenment.


"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people
think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which
all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which
have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be
allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened.
This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the
right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to
allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the
liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if
it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is
no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the
very hallmark of liberty."
         -- Quintin H. Hailsham, The Dilemma of Democracy

Get ready for a lot of abuse...




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Sat Dec 13 22:38:19 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 07:38:19 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Patriot Ants (was: Re: Zombie Patriots and other musings)
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20031213113129.04683ae0@pop.ix.netcom.com>
References: <5.2.0.9.0.20031213113129.04683ae0@pop.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <0312140651440.-1075646336@somehost.domainz.com>

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, John Kelsey wrote:

> Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the lone
> warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that we
> finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed pro-choice
> activist.  What's your next move?

Two moves possible.

The violent, far less effective and possibly somehow counterproductive
one: attacking the ones who enforce the measurement, by letal or nonlethal
means, to act as deterrent.

The nonviolent one: developing and deploying the technology necessary for
underground clinics to provide higher quality service, and for their
clients to find, order and pay for the services without being likely to
trace down by the Whateveriscurrentlythelaw Enforcement. Causing bad press
for them, keeping public awareness that alternatives to the law-compliance
exist. Learning from countries with similar bans in action, both from the
present and from history, how the alternatives developed there, and
building on this knowledge.

Direct attack is not always the best route, however tempting. A house can
be brought down from the outside by a bomb, or from the inside by white
ants. Insect survival strategies are distributed and largely successful; I
am pretty sure we can learn a lot from there. One "Patriot Ant" doesn't
have to fight in any big way, doing heroic deeds or big sacrifices; enough
people who just provide "samizdat" for few friends, know what files to
mirror, when to look away, what to be "unable to remember" when questioned
by the Authorities, who know the newsbits that aren't officially reported
and tell their friends can make big difference. The strength of Patriot
Ants isn't in their individual strength, they don't make headlines - they
just eat the System from the inside, one bite at time.




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Sun Dec 14 07:36:02 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 10:36:02 -0500
Subject: Textual analysis
In-Reply-To: <20031213154450.GA15768@cybershamanix.com>
References: <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>
  <4db65b47830226204720bc7d4070e551@erisiandiscord.de>
  <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031214103323.04689ab0@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 09:44 AM 12/13/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
...
>   And what is my supposed "three-space paragraph lead-ins?" The concept of
>textual analysis to prove ID has always amused me. A competent writer can 
>easily
>change writing styles from moment to moment. I well recall a university 
>english
>lit prof almost accusing me of plagarism when I wrote a piece mimicking 
>Faulkner
>and doing so well enough that the prof actually started looking thru his works
>trying to find it.

Textual analysis correctly identified the author of _Primary Colors_, 
though that was from a pretty small field of people with the right level of 
inside knowledge.  Does anyone know whether there have been real randomized 
trials of any of the textual analysis software or techniques?  E.g., is 
this an identification technique like DNA, or is it an identification 
technique like retrieving repressed memories under hypnosis (or, 
equivalently, consulting a ouiji board)?

It's not obvious to me how you'd change your writing style to defeat these 
textual analysis schemes--would it really be as simple as changing the 
average length of sentences and getting rid of the big words, or would 
there still be ways to determine your identity from that text?  I'm 
thinking especially of long discussions of technical topics--if I wrote a 
five page essay on what to look at when trying to cryptanalyze a new block 
cipher, I think it would be hard to keep readers who knew me from having a 
pretty good guess about the author, even if I tried changing terms, being 
more mathematical and less conversational, etc.  (Though this is more of a 
problem with humans familiar with my writing style, rather than with 
automated analysis.)

>Harmon Seaver
>CyberShamanix
>http://www.cybershamanix.com

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From measl at mfn.org  Sun Dec 14 09:05:33 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 11:05:33 -0600 (CST)
Subject: RFIDs at tech summit
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312141104420.9600-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

Bug devices track officials at summit


By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES



    Officials who attended a world Internet and technology summit in
Switzerland last week were unknowingly bugged, said researchers who attended
the forum. 
    Badges assigned to attendees of the World Summit on the Information
Society were affixed with radio-frequency identification chips (RFIDs), said
Alberto Escudero-Pascual, Stephane Koch and George Danezis in a report issued
after the conference ended Friday in Geneva. The badges were handed out to
more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and other high-level officials from
174 countries, including the United States. 
    The trio's report said they were able to obtain the official badges with
fraudulent identification only to be stunned when they found RFID chips . a
contentious issue among privacy advocates in the United States and Europe
. embedded in the tags. 
    Researchers questioned summit officials about the use of the chips and
how long information would be stored but were not given answers. 
    The three-day WSIS forum focused on Internet governance and access,
security, intellectual-property rights and privacy. The United States and
other countries defeated an attempt to place the Internet under supervision
of the United Nations. 
    RFID chips track a person's movement in "real time." U.S. groups have
called for a voluntary moratorium on using the chips in consumer items until
the technology and its effects on privacy and civil liberties are addressed. 
    Mr. Escudero-Pascual is a researcher in computer security and privacy at
the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Miss Koch is the president of
Internet Society Geneva, and Mr. Danezis studies privacy-enhancing
technologies and computer security at Cambridge University. 
    "During the course of our investigation, we were able to register for the
summit and obtain an official pass by just showing a fake plastic identity
card and being photographed via a Web cam with no other document or
registration number required to obtain the pass," the researchers said. 
    The researchers chose names for the fake identification cards from a list
printed on the summit's Web site of attendees. 
    The hidden chips communicate information via radio frequency when close
to sensors that can be placed anywhere "from vending machines to the entrance
of a specific meeting room, allowing the remote identification and tracking
of participants, or groups of participants, attending the event," the report
said. 
    The photograph of the person and other personal details are not stored on
the chip but in a centralized database that monitors the
movement. Researchers said they are concerned that database will be used for
future events, including the next summit to be hosted by Tunisian
authorities. 
    "During the registration process, we requested information about the
future use of the picture and other information that was taken, and the
built-in functionalities of the seemingly innocent plastic badge. No public
information or privacy policy was available upon our demands that could
indicate the purpose, processing or retention periods for the data
collected. The registration personnel were obviously not properly informed
and trained," the report said. 
    The lack of security procedures violates the Swiss Federal Law on Data
Protection of June 1992, the European Union Data Protection Directive, and
United Nations' guidelines concerning computerized personal-data files
adopted by the General Assembly in 1990, the researchers said. 
    "The big problem is that system also fails to guarantee the promised high
levels of security while introducing the possibility of constant surveillance
of the representatives of civil society, many of whom are critical of certain
governments and regimes," the report said. 
    "Sharing this data with any third party would be putting civil-society
participants at risk, but this threat is made concrete in the context of WSIS
by considering the potential impact of sharing the data collected with the
Tunisian government in charge of organizing the event in 2005," it said. 
    The organization Reporters Without Borders was banned from attending the
summit and launched a pirate radio broadcast to protest the ban and detail
press-freedom violations by some countries attending the meetings, including
Tunisia. 
    "Our organization defends freedom of expression on the Internet on a
daily basis. Our voice should therefore be heard during this event, despite
this outrageous ban," said Robert Menard, secretary general of Reporters
Without Borders. 
    Tunisia is among several countries Reporters Without Borders has accused
of censoring the Internet, intercepting e-mails and jailing cyber-dissidents. 




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sun Dec 14 08:41:12 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 11:41:12 -0500
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
Message-ID: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com>

Spread the word. The adminstration got desparate. In a few weeks they'll 
announce this isn't the real Saddam, but that rounding up all of the clones 
is necessary progress in the fight to get the real Saddam.

-TD

_________________________________________________________________
Get holiday tips for festive fun. 
http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Dec 14 12:34:05 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 12:34:05 -0800
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
Message-ID: <3FDCC93C.97ED60EF@cdc.gov>

(resend) 
At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
>At 09:19 AM 12/12/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>...
>>You need to think about the "lone warrior" scenario that the Gang
>>worries about.  McVeighs and Rudolphs.
>>They were influenced by memes which were not immediately suppressed.
>
>One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't
actually
>make peace.

Good points, but not entirely true.  For instance, we could stop the
Jihad (tm)
(including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all foreign aid,
following the good general's advice,
"Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign
entanglements."

If you take yourself out of the game, you are not seen by a player which
can be influenced.
Or which influencing would do any good to a given cause.

A government can take itself (and thus the proles that fed the NYC
rodentia the second week
of Sept 01) out of the game,  while individuals (corporations) continue
to trade freely, and at their
own consensual risk.

The point is that while the soldiers are independent, their motivations
are not.  So you can
reduce the cost of the lone warriors to you by not annoying them any
more.


>Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the
lone
>warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that
we
>finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed
pro-choice
>activist.  What's your next move?

Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the
clinics.  Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to
sway a govt.

If the US went neutral, whether Halliburton was in Arabia would be
entirely an economic
question, involving the cost of paying off widows or hiring Islamic
workers, or buying the
goods through a third party.  Instead its a policy question, the only
way to influence it
is to bring it home ---"the only language the American people understand
is
dead Americans." -EC

---
"Can you hear me now?" -UBL, 11.9.01




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec 14 12:35:46 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 12:35:46 -0800
Subject: Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <18717368-2E75-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 14, 2003, at 12:40 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 06:49 PM 12/13/2003 +0100, some provocateur claiming to be 
> Anonymous wrote:
>>    A question for the moment might well be how many if any of
>> the remailers are operated by TLAs?
>
> The TLAs have proposed running various anonymizers for China
> and other countries that have oppressive eavesdroppers.

China has proposed to run remailers for use by citizens of nations with 
laws allowing bureaucrat search warrants (not judges, just civil 
servants), Patriot Acts, no-knock raids, and concentration camps at 
Gitmo.

>
> If you go look at past remailer discussions (probably starting with
> Tim's Cyphernomicon or some of the remailer docs),
> you'll be reminded that just using one remailer isn't enough
> if you're worried about it being compromised,
> though it's usually fine for trolling mailing lists :-)
>
> Remailers are secure if at least one remailer in a chain
> is _not_ compromised, so you not only want to be sure
> that some of the remailers you chain through are run by good people,
> but that their machines are likely not to have been cracked,
> and ideally you use remailers in multiple legal jurisdictions
> because that reduces the ability of any one government to put
> pressure on the remailer operators, and increases the chances that
> if all of the remailers are compromised, at least one of them
> isn't compromised by someone who's interested in _you_.

I haven't carefully looked at the current source code (if it's 
available) for things like "Type II Mixmaster" remailers, things which 
offer reply-blocks.

Certainly for the canonical Cypherpunks remailer, the 
store-and-forward-after-mixing remailer, the fact that the nested 
encryption is GENERATED BY THE ORIGINATOR means that interception is 
useless to a TLA. The most a TLA can do is to a) not forward as 
planned, resulting in a dropped message, or b) see where a particular 
collection of random-looking (because of encryption) bits came from and 
where they are intended to next go.

In particular, a TLA or interceptor or corrupted or threatened remailer 
operator CANNOT insert new text or new delivery instructions into 
packets received by his node BECAUSE HE CANNOT OPEN ANY PAYLOAD 
ENCRYPTED TO THE NEXT NODE. Anything he adds to the payload bits (which 
he can see of course, though not decrypt or make sense of) will of 
course make the next node see only garbage when he tries to decrypt the 
payload.

This process continues, in a recursive fashion.

Now of course there are some boundary conditions. If every remailer is 
compromised, then complete "visibility" is ensured. The sender and 
receiver are in a fishbowl, a panopticon, with everything visible to 
the TLA or attackers.

And if even a fraction of the remailers are compromised, then with 
collusion they can map inputs to outputs, in many cases. (How many they 
can and how many they can't are issues of statistics and suchlike.)

Another boundary condition is when a remailer network is lightly used, 
or when correlations between sent messages, received messages, and 
actions take place. A signal recovery problem, perhaps akin to some 
military sorts of problems.

(Note that this "few users" problem is essentially isomorphic to 
"compromised remailers." And if the TLAs are the dominant users of 
remailers, sending dummy messages through, they get the same benefits 
as when their are few users or compromised remailers. For example, if 
the typical mix "latency" is 20 messages, and TLAs account for 98% of 
the traffic through remailers, then it's easy to calculate the Poisson 
probability that they can trace the only message that is NOT theirs. 
And so on.)

Most of these problems go away when the number of remailers is large, 
the number of independent users is large, and the remailers are 
scattered in multiple jurisdictions, making it hard for the TLAs to 
enforce or arrange collusion.

Another "trick" of use in _some_ of the boundary conditions is to "BE A 
REMAILER." This gives at least one node, namely, oneself, which is 
presumably not compromised (modulo black bag attacks, worms, that sort 
of stuff). And one could pay others to operate remailers with trusted 
code. (No disk Linux computers, for example, as discussed by several 
here over the years..)

Finally, most of these issues were obvious from the very beginning, 
even before Cypherpunks. When I proposed the "quick and dirty" 
remailers in the first Cypherpunks meeting, the ones we emulated in our 
Games, it was with the full awareness of David Chaum's "untraceable 
e-mail" paper of 1981 (referenced in the handout at the first meeting). 
And of his later and more robust DC Net paper of 1988, further 
developed by the Pfitzman team around that time.

The Chaum/Pfitzman/et. al. DC-Net addresses the collusion problem with 
novel methods for doing, effectively, zero knowledge proofs that some 
bit has bit been entered into a network without any traceability as to 
who entered it. (Chaum uses 3 people at a restaurant, using a scheme 
involving coins and parity and selective disclosure with some neighbors 
to show that it can be proved that one of a group paid the bill, but 
not which one.).

Adding reply-block capability significantly raises the risks for 
traceability, in my opinion. I am not casting doubt on the Anonymizer 
and on Mixmaster Type N (whatever is current), but I have not seen much 
detailed discussion here on the Cypherpunks list, and I am unaware of 
peer-reviewed papers on the cryptographic protocols being used. (If 
they exist, pointers here would be great to have!)


When I did the BlackNet demonstration, conventional Cypherpunks 
remailers were used for the sending of a message to a recipient, who 
might be a true name, might be a nym, whatever. Replies were handled 
with message pools, i.e., sending another message via remailers to a 
place that is widely visible (a Democracy Wall sort of thing) such as a 
Usenet newsgroup. The newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages was created 
around that time, as I recall, and served well.

This was not a "reply-block" approach, just the basically clean 
approach of nesting payloads, a la conventional encrypted Cypherpunks 
remailers. For a significant fraction of messages through remailers, 
replies are not even needed. When replies are needed, message pools.

Note: From 1988-93 I bought the Crypto Proceedings, some of the 
Eurocrypt proceedings, etc. I even attended some of the conferences. I 
followed who was doing what. For various reasons, my interest in the 
guts of crypto declined. Others were following developments, 
fortunately. But I haven't looked at a Crypto Proceedings volume in 
several years, so I'm out of touch with what researchers are publishing 
about mixes and untraceability. I'm relatively confident that the 
points above are general enough to be unchanged, whether the Newest 
Name is "Onion Routing" or "Crowds" or whatever.

--Tim May




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Dec 14 14:54:52 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 14:54:52 -0800
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
Message-ID: <3FDCEA3B.902C828C@cdc.gov>

I went to a meeting of the Irvine Underground (irvineunderground.org)
which reminded me of late-90s SF CP meatings.  Although the overall
tech level was probably lower and social implications weren't a big
topic.
Also, at this meeting, there were far more cameras or videocams than
were present (at least overtly :-) at the few CP meats I attended.
However,
nyms were used more than they were (overtly :-) at CP meatings; this may

have been due to a "introduce yourself" poll.  The IU
group seems to be a bit more social, going to movies for instance, than
the
topic-only CPs were.  The meeting was held in a room at an IHOP (pancake
restaurant
for furriners)

The exploit mentioned in
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-12-11-microsoft2_x.htm
was demonstrated, we were debriefed on the recent LA 802.11b War Flying
mission
(and the EMI resistance of 1960's era single-engine airplane instruments
:-).
Toorcon organizers were present.  About 30+ people
were there, with what appeared to me to be a bimodal distribution of
skills,
some advanced, some admitted unix newbies, etc.  There was even
recreational
lock picking.  A WiFi LAN, net connectivity through someone's cell phone
eventually.
A video projector.

I didn't notice persons with exceptional Euler numbers,
though black was definately the color of choice for garments.  Ages
appeared
well distributed from undergrad to hoary.  One gent noticed a certain
TLA on my
cypherpunks T-shirt and admitted that he had once worked in Ft Meade,
though
he wouldn't say on what :-)




From bfordham at socialistsushi.com  Sun Dec 14 13:56:50 2003
From: bfordham at socialistsushi.com (Bryan L. Fordham)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 16:56:50 -0500
Subject: Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <18717368-2E75-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
  <18717368-2E75-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <3FDCDCA2.1080509@socialistsushi.com>

Tim May wrote:

> I haven't carefully looked at the current source code (if it's 
> available) for things like "Type II Mixmaster" remailers, things which 
> offer reply-blocks.

The source is available for mixmaster.  However, Type II does not offer 
reply blocks.

> Certainly for the canonical Cypherpunks remailer, the 
> store-and-forward-after-mixing remailer, the fact that the nested 
> encryption is GENERATED BY THE ORIGINATOR means that interception is 
> useless to a TLA. The most a TLA can do is to a) not forward as 
> planned, resulting in a dropped message, or b) see where a particular 
> collection of random-looking (because of encryption) bits came from 
> and where they are intended to next go.

Not necessarily.  You don't have to be able to read a message to 
determine what it is.  In the case of an amphibian remailer operator 
(who shall remain nameless) revealing the identity of someone using his 
remailer, this remop ran 2 of the three remailers being used.  The chain 
went:

A -> B -> C -> D -> E
where A is the sender, E the recipient, and B and D are the remailers 
controlled by the same person. Also, if the message to E had been 
encrypted it wouldn't have mattered much in identifing who what sending 
something to whom.

The remop could tell that a message from A coming in through B always 
resulted in a message going to C, and that such messages always had a 
corresponding message from D to E.  The fact that the messages were 
encrypted to each remailer's key, and that the middle remailers was not 
compromised, did not protect the user.

There were a some special circumstances to this, the biggest one being 
that A was sending a ton of messages, all of similar size, through the 
exact same chain.  But it does show the problem with Type I reply blocks 
in use by the current system.

> In particular, a TLA or interceptor or corrupted or threatened 
> remailer operator CANNOT insert new text or new delivery instructions 
> into packets received by his node BECAUSE HE CANNOT OPEN ANY PAYLOAD 
> ENCRYPTED TO THE NEXT NODE. Anything he adds to the payload bits 
> (which he can see of course, though not decrypt or make sense of) will 
> of course make the next node see only garbage when he tries to decrypt 
> the payload.

Of course they can't alter the encrypted text, but it may be possible to 
add text after the pgp-encrypted block to make tracking the messages 
easier.  There's also the issue of taking a reply block and replaying it 
with new text in order to watch where it goes.

[snip]

> And if even a fraction of the remailers are compromised, then with 
> collusion they can map inputs to outputs, in many cases. (How many 
> they can and how many they can't are issues of statistics and suchlike.)

Exactly. This is the case I was mentioning above.  It shows that the "if 
one remailer is legit your messages are safe" line of thinking is not 
necessarily true.

[snip]

> Adding reply-block capability significantly raises the risks for 
> traceability, in my opinion. I am not casting doubt on the Anonymizer 
> and on Mixmaster Type N (whatever is current), but I have not seen 
> much detailed discussion here on the Cypherpunks list, and I am 
> unaware of peer-reviewed papers on the cryptographic protocols being 
> used. (If they exist, pointers here would be great to have!)

Type II is the current, though cypherpunk (Type I) are in use.  II does 
not allow for reply blocks.  Type III (mixminion) is in active 
development and allows for SURBs - Single Use Reply Blocks -- that will 
allow for nyms without having to store a set number of reply blocks that 
can be replayed (a la the current type I pseudonym setup)

Anyway, just a few thoughts.  I'm far from an expert on this so take 
everything with a large grain of salt.

--B




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec 14 18:36:12 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 18:36:12 -0800
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <72B91F66-2EA7-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 14, 2003, at 6:07 PM, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:

> Hi, I've been admiring your and Tim's contributions, and I was 
> wondering if
> either of you were planning to subscribe to the (new) news list.
>
> http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
>
> Be sure and check the archive before posting.  It is still small.

No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the 
ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.

"News" lists tend strongly to be just dumping grounds for crap from 
other lists.


>
> Otherwise, if anyone could recommend additional good sources for
> cypherpunk-related news, I'd be very grateful, because I don't feel
> right about cross-posting news items to cypherpunks list.  I'm already
> subscribed to the Cryptome rdf channel, Politech, and GNU-Darwin of
> course.  I don't think I'm interesting enough for Interesting
> People ;-}.

I failed the entrance exam for "Interesting People," which is fine, for 
obvious reasons.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec 14 18:56:55 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 18:56:55 -0800
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
In-Reply-To: <0312150311460.-1271143200@somehost.domainz.com>
References: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com>
  <0312150311460.-1271143200@somehost.domainz.com>
Message-ID: <57CEB866-2EAA-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 14, 2003, at 6:33 PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
>> Spread the word. The adminstration got desparate. In a few weeks 
>> they'll
>> announce this isn't the real Saddam, but that rounding up all of the 
>> clones
>> is necessary progress in the fight to get the real Saddam.
>
> If I don't remember incorrectly, they said something about identifying 
> him
> by DNA testing. But it wasn't widely quoted in the mainstream news.

How boring. The DNA confirmation was reported on all of the puppet news 
organizations here.

The Germans and Eastern Europeans, being mostly opposed to the war, 
probably just buried the confirmation.

The Czech Republic supported the war, and sent troops, and now that 
Saddam has been captured, both of them will be returning home, with 
medals.

--Tim May




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Dec 14 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 20:00:00 -0800
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200312150400.hBF4006t024867@slack.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Oct 13, 2003

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography
and its effect on society.  It is not a moderated list (but see exceptions
below) and the list operators are not responsible for the list content.

Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list.  A subscriber can subscribe to
one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list.  Each node
(called a "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer", although they are not
related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes
in addition to sending messages to its subscribers.  A message posted
to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes,
and vice-versa.

1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers.
Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of
spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to.

There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
messages to their subscribers. "cooked" CDRs try to eliminate the spam
on that's on the regular list by automatically sending only messages
that are from cypherpunks list subscribers (on any CDR) or people who
are replying to list messages.  Finally there are moderated lists, where
a human moderator decides which messages from the raw list to pass on
to subscribers.

2. Message Modification

Message modification policy indicates what modifications, if any, beyond
what is needed to operate the CDR are done (most CDRs add a tracking
X-loop header on mail posted to their subscribers to prevent mail loops).
Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
subscribers. CDRs should not modify mail that they pass from one CDR
to the next, but some of them do, and others undo those modifications.

3. Privacy

Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
list members, or no one ("private") , to retrieve the subscribers list.
Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
since your address is now out there.   It's really only useful for
keeping spammers from harvesting addresses from the list software.

Digest mode indicates that the CDR supports digest mode, which is where
the posts are batched up into a few large emails.  Nodes that support
only digest mode are noted.

4. Anonymous posting

Cypherpunks encourages anonymous posting.

You can use an anonymous remailer:
http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.html
http://anon.efga.org/Remailers
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html

5. Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
Since the list is run from a number of different CDRs, you have to
figure out which CDR you are subscribed to.  If you don't remember and
can't figure it out from the mail headers (hint: the top Received: line
should tell you), the easiest way to unsubscribe is to send unsubscribe
messages to all the CDRs listed below.

How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
"internet headers").  Look for the Sender or X-loop headers.  The Sender
will say something like "Sender: owner-cypherpunks at lne.com".  The X-loop
line will say something like "X-Loop: cypherpunks at lne.com".  Both of
these inticate that you are subscribed to the lne.com CDR.   If you were
subscribed to the algebra CDR, they would have algebra.com in them.
Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the
table below to find that CDRs unsubscribe instructions.

6. Lunatics, spammers and nut-cases

"I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings".
At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who
are abusing the lists openness by dumping reams of propaganda on the list.
The distinction between a spammer and a subscriber is nearly always very
clear, but the dictinction between a subscriber who is abusing the list
by posting reams of propaganda and a subscriber who is making lots of
controversial posts is not clear.  Therefore, we tolerate the crap.
Subscribers with a low crap tolerance should check out mail filters.
Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems
only.  Eudora also has a capacity for filtering mail, as do many other
mail readers.  An example procmail recipie is below, you will of
course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
    * (^From:.*ravage at ssz\.com.*|\
    ^From:.*jchoate at dev.tivoli.com.*|\
    ^From:.*mattd at useoz.com|\
    ^From:.*proffr11 at bigpond.com|\
    ^From:.*jei at cc.hut.fi)
	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

Operator:
Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at algebra.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???
Info:   ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

Operator:         drt at un.bewaff.net
Subscription:     "subscribe [password of your choice]" to 
				       cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe <password>" to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Help:             "help" to to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Web site:         http://koeln.ccc.de/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks
Posting address:  cypherpunks at koeln.ccc.de
Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and
                  every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line
                  containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. 
Digest mode:      this node is digest-only
NNTP:             news://koeln.ccc.de/cbone.ml.cypherpunks
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infonex:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at infonex.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lne:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at lne.com
Filtering policy: cooked 
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.
Message Modification policy:  
 1. messages are demimed (MIME attachments removed) when posted 
  through lne or received by lne CDR subscribers
 2. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 3. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html
(thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minder:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Help:             "help" to majordomo at minder.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at minder.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: private
Info:           send mail to cypherpunks-info at minder.net


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Help:             "help" to listproc at openpgp.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at openpgp.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder:

Subscription:     "subscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Help:             "help" to sunder at sunder.net
Posting address:  sunder at sunder.net
Filtering policy: moderated
Message Modification policy:  ???
Privacy policy:  ???
Info: ???


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pro-ns:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at pro-ns.net
Filtering policy: cooked
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.   
Message Modification policy:
 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 2. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec 14 20:00:57 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 20:00:57 -0800
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <20031215025340.BDE36241B30@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <20031215025340.BDE36241B30@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <49C66A06-2EB3-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 14, 2003, at 6:53 PM, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:

> On 14 Dec, Tim May wrote:
>> No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the
>> ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.
>>
>> "News" lists tend strongly to be just dumping grounds for crap from
>> other lists.
>
> Yea, and I'll admit that I'm a junky, which is why I made the following
> pages...
>
> http://www.gnu-darwin.org/update.html
> http://www.gnu-darwin.org/applelists.html
>
> More...   info.....,   Must.... have........  ...  more.......

Lie down and just resist the temptation.

The world already has a dozen crypto/cyber rights mailing lists, 
probably more. And many '"e$", "digibucks," "digital bearer 
settlement," and "cybercurrency" types of list just from one single 
person...who also cross-posts to Cypherpunks.

I had a friend who created a new high technology company whenever he 
got bored. Of course, these were not _real_ high tech companies, with 
actual products and actual profits. Rather, they were "ventures," 
things that gave him a new business card, "Orion X. Altschluss, 
President, Plutonic Transgenics, Inc." A few months later, "Director, 
Corporate Relations, the Galt Foundation."

Some people think spinning off new lists whenever they get interested 
in some area is interesting. Most of these lists fail for obvious 
reasons. Sometimes a famous person, especially Net famous, creates a 
vanity list. Hence the "Interesting People" vanity list. This trend 
seems to be giving way to Blogs, however, as the various 
net.personalities realize that what they really want is a forum for 
blogging their message to an attentive audience.

I have done nearly all of my writing for Cypherpunks since 1992. I have 
watched Lewispunks, Perrypunks, various e-rights and digidollars and 
Geodesic Singularity Lists arise and do whatever they do after they 
arise. I have joined none of the varous other lists (which are usually 
"with permission of owner" lists--fuck that).

So now we have someone calling himself "Proclus," who has not 
contributed anything memorable to Cypherpunks, inviting Cypherpunks to 
join his new "cpunx-news" list.

Yawn.

Have fun.


--Tim May

#1. Sanhedrin 59a: "Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild 
animal."
#2. Aboda Sarah 37a: "A Gentile girl who is three years old can be 
violated."
#3. Yebamoth 11b: "Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted 
if she is three years of age."
#4. Abodah Zara 26b: "Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed."
#5. Yebamoth 98a: "All gentile children are animals."
#6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122: "A Jew is forbidden to drink from 
a glass of wine which a Gentile has touched, because the touch has made 
the wine unclean."
#7. Baba Necia 114, 6: "The Jews are human beings, but the nations of 
the world are not human beings but beasts."




From rabbi at abditum.com  Sun Dec 14 20:42:28 2003
From: rabbi at abditum.com (Len Sassaman)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 20:42:28 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <18717368-2E75-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
  <18717368-2E75-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0312141933230.24836@thetis.deor.org>

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> I haven't carefully looked at the current source code (if it's
> available) for things like "Type II Mixmaster" remailers, things which
> offer reply-blocks.

Yes, it is available. You can download it via ftp from
mixmaster.anonymizer.com, or view the SVN tree at
https://source.mixmaster.anonymizer.com/

(We believe that keeping the source tree and commit list open is
important, as it should help prevent a situation like that which happened
to JAP not too long ago. Changes to the code should all be made in
public.)

Also it's important to note that Type II does not support reply blocks,
while "Type I" remailers do. (Perhaps the first cut of Cypherpunk
remailers, i.e. those running Hal's scripts did not, but the Cypherpunk
nym servers that use reply blocks are built on top of Type I.)

> Certainly for the canonical Cypherpunks remailer, the
> store-and-forward-after-mixing remailer, the fact that the nested
> encryption is GENERATED BY THE ORIGINATOR means that interception is
> useless to a TLA. The most a TLA can do is to a) not forward as
> planned, resulting in a dropped message, or b) see where a particular
> collection of random-looking (because of encryption) bits came from and
> where they are intended to next go.

For most TLS adversaries that may be correct. However, there are a number
of subtle attacks on Chaum systems that Type I is susceptible to --
tagging and timing attacks in particular, as well as replay attacks, and
various other attacks which all strive to narrow the anonymity set.

> In particular, a TLA or interceptor or corrupted or threatened remailer
> operator CANNOT insert new text or new delivery instructions into
> packets received by his node BECAUSE HE CANNOT OPEN ANY PAYLOAD
> ENCRYPTED TO THE NEXT NODE. Anything he adds to the payload bits (which
> he can see of course, though not decrypt or make sense of) will of
> course make the next node see only garbage when he tries to decrypt the
> payload.

Ideally. There are ways to flip bits in PGP encrypted messages which will
not result in a failed decryption, however. (The property you describe is
essential for protecting against tagging attacks. Type II does better than
PGP-based systems, but is still not as good at this as Type III. The
Mixminion design paper covers these concerns in detail:

http://mixminion.net/minion-design.pdf

> This process continues, in a recursive fashion.
>
> Now of course there are some boundary conditions. If every remailer is
> compromised, then complete "visibility" is ensured. The sender and
> receiver are in a fishbowl, a panopticon, with everything visible to
> the TLA or attackers.
>
> And if even a fraction of the remailers are compromised, then with
> collusion they can map inputs to outputs, in many cases. (How many they
> can and how many they can't are issues of statistics and suchlike.)

Right. The claim that "there only needs to be one trustworthy remailer in
a chain" fails to recognize the power of statistical analysis of a
network's traffic. Certainly, having k number of remailers in a network
under your control makes such analysis easier.

> Another boundary condition is when a remailer network is lightly used,
> or when correlations between sent messages, received messages, and
> actions take place. A signal recovery problem, perhaps akin to some
> military sorts of problems.

Yes. And as you look at this problem more closely (as I have been doing
ever since our conversation about this problem at the Cypherpunks meeting
in Santa Cruz a while back), the solutions become more elusive.

The big problems arise when the adversary has the ability to observe
messages in the network over time. Partitioning attacks and long-term
intersection attacks likely mean that the original Cypherpunk remailer
system is transparent to any entity which is able to view the traffic on
the entire network. (The attacks are passive, though they can be optimized
with some active interference.)

Big weak spots: client version information, statistics distribution, and
key rotation. In a system like Type I which relies on an external program
for the layered crypto, information about the user's software
distinguishes him from other users. Likewise, a user's choice of remailer
nodes in a selected chain may vary based on which "pinger" service he is
using, and whether he has updated his remailer keys after the remailer has
gone through a key rotation also gives away valuable information. These
and other distinguishing factors allow an attacker to partition the
main anonymity set into smaller sets. Over time, the attacker may be able
to plot the intersection of these sets such that he is able to identify a
given user based on his usage patterns and the information he is leaking.

Type III goes a long way to address many of these, but still falls short
of perfect. The particularly troubling issue at the moment is how to
distribute information about the reliability (as well as key information)
of remailers in the network such that every client is using the same set
of data in the same way. (If pingers, or reputation servers, could be
assumed to never disagree, this would be much easier. Unfortunately
experience and common sense tells us they cannot.)

There are some detailed discussions of this on the Mixminion list.
www.mixminion.net.

> (Note that this "few users" problem is essentially isomorphic to
> "compromised remailers." And if the TLAs are the dominant users of
> remailers, sending dummy messages through, they get the same benefits
> as when their are few users or compromised remailers. For example, if
> the typical mix "latency" is 20 messages, and TLAs account for 98% of
> the traffic through remailers, then it's easy to calculate the Poisson
> probability that they can trace the only message that is NOT theirs.
> And so on.)

Right. The simplistic demonstration of this problem is the "n-1" attack,
discussed in detail on this list many times over the last decade.

George Danezis and I recently published a paper on an optimized method of
detecting and thwarting these attacks.

http://www.abditum.com/p125_danezis.pdf

(Note that this does presume that there exists a good userbase, and the
n-1 attack conditions are a result of the attack, and not simply present
because of a significant shortage of users.)

> Most of these problems go away when the number of remailers is large,
> the number of independent users is large, and the remailers are
> scattered in multiple jurisdictions, making it hard for the TLAs to
> enforce or arrange collusion.

I never assume that the location of nodes in multiple jurisdictions
protects a network against a global observer. I view it as an important
way of deterring forced collusion, but simple espionage passive is still
very possible irrespective of borders.

> Another "trick" of use in _some_ of the boundary conditions is to "BE A
> REMAILER." This gives at least one node, namely, oneself, which is
> presumably not compromised (modulo black bag attacks, worms, that sort
> of stuff). And one could pay others to operate remailers with trusted
> code. (No disk Linux computers, for example, as discussed by several
> here over the years..)

Indeed. The greatest point of attack on the Type II or stronger remailer
systems is the end points -- sender or receiver. If an attacker can
correlate one user's act of sending a message with another person's
receipt of an anonymous message (and can confirm this over time), the
remailer network can be treated as a black box, and needs no further
analysis of its internals in order to compromise its anonymity. This is
probably the greatest of the intersection attacks, and is made
significantly harder to conduct if a user is able to inject messages into
the remailer network unobserved. The best way to do this is to send your
remailer mail from the same server that runs an active remailer.

> Adding reply-block capability significantly raises the risks for
> traceability, in my opinion.

This is very true. And yet, users demand reply functionality. When Lance
Cottrell originally wrote Mixmaster, he designed it in a way which made
reply blocks impossible (as a side effect of protecting against replay
attacks.) Unfortunately, because of this there are still many users of the
Cypherpunk remailer system, and many remailers still operating that
protocol. (Even worse, one of the dominant implementations of Type I
remailers eschews the pool mix method in favor of a variation on
Kesdogan's S-G Mixes, and then uses the Windows Rand() function for
determining the time delay at each node. Ugh!)

Type III has a very clever way of doing replies, which I think is sound
from a security standpoint. I have come to believe that reply blocks are
not the best way of doing anonymous message receipt for a number of other
reasons, however, and am pursuing different methods based on PIR schemes.

> I am not casting doubt on the Anonymizer

Anonymizer is an entirely different beast, and suitable for a different
set of threats. If you have an adversary who is able to watch and analyze
the Internet in real time, a single trusted proxy is not your solution.

> and on Mixmaster Type N (whatever is current), but I have not seen much
> detailed discussion here on the Cypherpunks list, and I am unaware of
> peer-reviewed papers on the cryptographic protocols being used. (If
> they exist, pointers here would be great to have!)

They do; there has been much work done by the academic researchers in this
area in the past few years. I've spent the last couple of years making
them aware of the Cypherpunks -- perhaps I should be doing the opposite as
well.

Roger Dingledine keeps a nice bibliography of anonymity papers on his
site: http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/

> When I did the BlackNet demonstration, conventional Cypherpunks
> remailers were used for the sending of a message to a recipient, who
> might be a true name, might be a nym, whatever. Replies were handled
> with message pools, i.e., sending another message via remailers to a
> place that is widely visible (a Democracy Wall sort of thing) such as a
> Usenet newsgroup. The newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages was created
> around that time, as I recall, and served well.
>
> This was not a "reply-block" approach, just the basically clean
> approach of nesting payloads, a la conventional encrypted Cypherpunks
> remailers. For a significant fraction of messages through remailers,
> replies are not even needed. When replies are needed, message pools.

I believe this is the right approach for replies. However, message pools
don't scale. (In order to protect against many attacks, each user would
have to download all messages. In order to work well, they must be a "send
everything everywhere" system.) Private Information Retrieval is
effectively an optimization on this approach that allows it to scale while
preserving the anonymity and reliability properties.

I have a draft of a paper that I am writing (with Bram Cohen) about such a
system. I will post a link to it here after I spend the next few days
correcting some minor mistakes.


As for sender anonymity systems, it would be great if you and other
Cypherpunks were to read the recent papers on the subject. We'd all
benefit from your input.

It is also worth noting that high-latency systems, like Mixmaster, face a
different set of threats than low-latency systems, like Freedom or Onion
Routing. There is overlap, but it is important to discuss these systems in
the context of their latency requirements, to make it known which set of
attacks are present.

(An aside -- The Onion Router has finally been open sourced. You can read
about it here: http://www.freehaven.net/tor/ or see the presentation on
TOR at CodeCon '04.)


Pointers to important papers:

Andreas Pfitzmann's paper on terminology is a good primer for those
reading who may not know the specific vocabulary of anonymity:

http://freehaven.net/anonbib/papers/Anon_Terminology_v0.14.pdf

Here's a paper about the nym.alias.net nym server (based on cpunk reply
blocks) :
ftp://cag.lcs.mit.edu/pub/dm/papers/mazieres:pnym.pdf

Here's some work that's been done on measuring the strength of an
anonymity system:

http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~cdiaz/papers/tmAnon.ps.gz
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aas23/papers_aas/set.ps
http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~cdiaz/papers/DS03.ps.gz

This is a good paper on remailer attacks, as well as the different pool
mix schemes:

http://freehaven.net/doc/batching-taxonomy/taxonomy.pdf

Of course, the Mixminion paper:

http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/minion-design.pdf

(This is just a selection of papers I have found important. There are a
number of other papers that are also very worth reading linked from the
http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/ site as well.)


--Len.




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sun Dec 14 18:07:50 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 21:07:50 -0500 (EST)
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <3FDCEA3B.902C828C@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>

Hi, I've been admiring your and Tim's contributions, and I was wondering if
either of you were planning to subscribe to the (new) news list.

http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news

Be sure and check the archive before posting.  It is still small.

Otherwise, if anyone could recommend additional good sources for
cypherpunk-related news, I'd be very grateful, because I don't feel
right about cross-posting news items to cypherpunks list.  I'm already
subscribed to the Cryptome rdf channel, Politech, and GNU-Darwin of
course.  I don't think I'm interesting enough for Interesting
People ;-}.  Please feel free to write back to me on- or off-list
for whatever reason you like.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/



On 14 Dec, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
> 
> I went to a meeting of the Irvine Underground (irvineunderground.org)
> which reminded me of late-90s SF CP meatings.  Although the overall
> tech level was probably lower and social implications weren't a big
> topic.
> Also, at this meeting, there were far more cameras or videocams than
> were present (at least overtly :-) at the few CP meats I attended.
> However,
> nyms were used more than they were (overtly :-) at CP meatings; this may
> 
> have been due to a "introduce yourself" poll.  The IU
> group seems to be a bit more social, going to movies for instance, than
> the
> topic-only CPs were.  The meeting was held in a room at an IHOP (pancake
> restaurant
> for furriners)
> 
> The exploit mentioned in
> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-12-11-microsoft2_x.htm
> was demonstrated, we were debriefed on the recent LA 802.11b War Flying
> mission
> (and the EMI resistance of 1960's era single-engine airplane instruments
> :-).
> Toorcon organizers were present.  About 30+ people
> were there, with what appeared to me to be a bimodal distribution of
> skills,
> some advanced, some admitted unix newbies, etc.  There was even
> recreational
> lock picking.  A WiFi LAN, net connectivity through someone's cell phone
> eventually.
> A video projector.
> 
> I didn't notice persons with exceptional Euler numbers,
> though black was definately the color of choice for garments.  Ages
> appeared
> well distributed from undergrad to hoary.  One gent noticed a certain
> TLA on my
> cypherpunks T-shirt and admitted that he had once worked in Ft Meade,
> though
> he wouldn't say on what :-)
> 

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Dec 14 21:22:13 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 21:22:13 -0800
Subject: Idea: Simplified TEMPEST-shielded unit (speculative
  proposal)
In-Reply-To: <0312150419370.-1271127644@somehost.domainz.com>
References: <0312150419370.-1271127644@somehost.domainz.com>
Message-ID: <A3D16D8E-2EBE-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 14, 2003, at 8:33 PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> TEMPEST shielding is fairly esoteric (at least for non-EM-specialists)
> field. But potentially could be made easier by simplifying the problem.
>
> If we won't want to shield the user interface (eg. we want just a
> cryptographic processor), we may put the device into a solid metal case
> without holes, battery-powered, with the seams in the case covered with
> eg. adhesive copper tape. The input and output can be mediated by 
> fibers,
> whose ports can be the only holes, fraction of millimeter in diameter,
> carefully shielded, in the otherwise seamless well-grounded box. There 
> are
> potential cooling problems, as there are no ventilation holes in the
> enclosure; this can be alleviated by using one side of the box as a 
> large
> passive cooler, eventually with an externally mounted fan with separate
> power supply. If magnetic shielding is required as well, the box could 
> be
> made of permalloy or other material with similar magnetic properties.
>
> I am not sure how to shield a display. Maybe taking an LCD, bolting it 
> on
> the shielded box, and cover it with a fine wire mesh and possibly
> metalized glass? Using LCD with high response time of the individual
> pixels also dramatically reduces the value of eventual optical 
> emissions.

I worked inside a Faraday cage in a physic lab for several months. And, 
later, I did experiments in and around Faraday cages. Shielding is 
fairly easy to measure. (Using portable radios and televisions, or even 
using the Software-Defined Radio as a low-cost spectrum analyzer.)

My advice? Skip all of the nonsense about building special laptops or 
computers and special displays with mesh grids over the displays. Those 
who are _casually_ interested will not replace their existing Mac 
Powerbooks or Dell laptops with this metal box monster.

Instead, devise a metal mesh bag that one climbs into to use whichever 
laptop is of interest. To reduce costs, most of the bag can be 
metallized fabric that is not mesh, with only part of it being mesh, 
for breathability. (Perhaps the head region, to minimize claustrophobia 
and to allow audio and visual communication with others nearby.)

I would imagine a durable-enough metallized fabric bag could be 
constructed for under a few hundred dollars, which is surely cheaper 
for most to use than designing a custom laptop or desktop.

Or consider heads-up LCD glasses. These have been available for PCs and 
gamers for a few years (longer in more experimental forms, of course, 
dating back to the VR days of the late 80s). Sony has had a couple of 
models, and so have others. Some have video resolutions (PAL, NTSC), 
some have VGA resolutions. Perfectly adequate for displaying crypto 
results and requesting input.

These very probably radiate little. But of course a lightweight hood, a 
la the above mesh bag, would drop the emissions by some other goodly 
amount of dB. Experiments necessary, of course.

Interface to a laptop or PC could be as you described it, with shielded 
cables. Or just use a small PC (Poqet, etc.) and move the keyboard and 
CPU under the draped hood. Leakage out the bottom, hence the earlier 
proposal for a full bag, like a sleeping bag.

--Tim May




From eric at tully.com  Sun Dec 14 18:41:14 2003
From: eric at tully.com (Eric Tully)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 21:41:14 -0500
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <3FDD1F4A.2040408@tully.com>

Ahh... but if that were true, why would the US ever admit it?  Let's say 
they run a DNA test and it's not him... why not just say, "We ran a DNA 
test and it's him!!"   That would be a bigger boost for Bush for the 
coming election.

There's still 13 more in the deck of cards - as well as Bin Laden - to 
use as an excuse to maintain their war on terrorism.


- Eric Tully



Tyler Durden wrote:
> Spread the word. The adminstration got desparate. In a few weeks they'll 
> announce this isn't the real Saddam, but that rounding up all of the 
> clones is necessary progress in the fight to get the real Saddam.
> 
> -TD
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get holiday tips for festive fun. 
> http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sun Dec 14 18:53:13 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 21:53:13 -0500 (EST)
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <72B91F66-2EA7-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031215025340.BDE36241B30@gnu-darwin.org>

On 14 Dec, Tim May wrote:
> No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the 
> ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.
> 
> "News" lists tend strongly to be just dumping grounds for crap from 
> other lists.

Yea, and I'll admit that I'm a junky, which is why I made the following
pages...

http://www.gnu-darwin.org/update.html
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/applelists.html

More...   info.....,   Must.... have........  ...  more.......

>> Otherwise, if anyone could recommend additional good sources for
>> cypherpunk-related news, I'd be very grateful, because I don't feel
>> right about cross-posting news items to cypherpunks list.  I'm already
>> subscribed to the Cryptome rdf channel, Politech, and GNU-Darwin of
>> course.  I don't think I'm interesting enough for Interesting
>> People ;-}.
> 
> I failed the entrance exam for "Interesting People," which is fine, for 
> obvious reasons.

ROFL!

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Sun Dec 14 21:57:09 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 21:57:09 -0800 (PST)
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <20031215055709.72373.qmail@web40613.mail.yahoo.com>

> http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
> 
> Be sure and check the archive before posting.  It is still small.

Cookies, "members only" archive access. Bad deal. Will not happen. Very few
consumers here.


=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com  Sun Dec 14 21:22:10 2003
From: cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com (Tim Meehan)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:22:10 -0500
Subject: Wardial for Bush!  1-800-531-6789 -- call AGAIN AND AGAIN!
Message-ID: <n5hqtv49umoj1lhsbjj5ksdb02iom7tapi@4ax.com>

>From: Wardialers For Bush <war4bush at somewhat.com>
>Subject: [Wardialers for Bush] Set a record! Call 1-800-531-6789 AS OFTEN AS YOU CAN!
>
>Resident George W. Bush wants your support!  
>
>Even though ****every nuisance call to this phone number costs him money****, he
>wants you to call NOW, AGAIN AND AGAIN!
>
>1-800-531-6789
>
>If you don't get through, call again!
>
>1-800-531-6789
>
>Keep calling.  Say you were told to call by Ken Mehlman!  Ask for your free
>prize!
>
>1-800-531-6789
>
>
>1-800-531-6789
>
>
>1-800-531-6789
>
>
>1-800-531-6789
>
>
>1-800-531-6789




From DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk  Sun Dec 14 18:23:21 2003
From: DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk (Dave Howe)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 02:23:21 -0000
Subject: PKI root signing ceremony, etc.
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0312142027180.582-100000@smtp.datapower.com
  >
Message-ID: <024001c3c2b2$6b087730$01c8a8c0@broadbander>

Rich Salz wrote:
>> *shrug* it doesn't retroactively enforce the safety net - but that's
>> ok, most MS products don't either :)
> The whole point is to enhance common practice, not stay at the lowest
> common denominator.
If someone has *already* issued a certificate - and ignored the CA flag - is
it part of the software's duty to somehow point this out to you? But
regardless, as this only applies to imported keys you would never actually
see it in Real Life (tm)

>> Key management and auditing is pretty much external to the actual
>> software regardless of which solution you use I would have thought.
> You'd be wrong. :)  I did just download and use XCA for a little bit.
> It's practically impossible to audit.  Every key in the database is
> protected with the same password.
um, this is a **CA** - you have *one* key in the database, your CA key. It
is bad practice to generate the keys on the CA machine and transport them to
the server they will be used on - instead, the Cert request should be
generated on the end-use machine, and the *request* transported to the CA,
signed, and the certificate returned. That way, the private key never leaves
the machine it was generated for and used on, and is protected by its own
password.

> The system ask for the password
> as soon as it starts up.  If I leave the program running while
> I leave my computer, I'm screwed.
Then don't leave it running. If you got out of your car but left the engine
running, and somebody stole the car, would you blame the design of the car?

> The key-holder isn't asked to
> confirm each signing -- there's no *ceremony* -- and they never
> enter the password after the program starts.  For any kind of root
> these are all very bad.
This is just fine for a root - the root acquires 'n' signing requests, opens
the program, signs or rejects the requests as appropriate, then closes the
program.  It is not the duty of the CA to generate keys or enter certificate
information - that is the requestor's problem, which he can do with the
tools appropriate to his machine (openssl on almost anything, the built in
keygen in IIS and several other webservers, and so forth. I am actually
disappointed in XCA (compared to the earlier but awkward to set up OpenCA
project) in that no browser-accessable request interface is provided. of
course XCA is compatable with importing requests made from OpenCA, and
exporting them back into an openCA "pickup" dir..... but really it would be
nice to be compatable with the interface most key requestors are used to.

> XCA is pretty nice for a Level-2 or small Level-1 CA.  The template
> management, etc., is pretty good.  (Having them tied to the key
> database, and having the keys be unlocked while making cert requests,
> are both real bad ideas, however.)
There is no mystical value in having to type a key lots of times. I was just
pointing out what other options are out there (I would have pointed out
EBCrypt as well, which appears better suited to your current ritual, but its
website seems to have vanished)




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Sun Dec 14 18:33:53 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 03:33:53 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <0312150311460.-1271143200@somehost.domainz.com>

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Spread the word. The adminstration got desparate. In a few weeks they'll
> announce this isn't the real Saddam, but that rounding up all of the clones
> is necessary progress in the fight to get the real Saddam.

If I don't remember incorrectly, they said something about identifying him
by DNA testing. But it wasn't widely quoted in the mainstream news. So
even if it really is him - they may still claim he isn't the real McCoy if
the insurgency won't stop.

The timing is definitely weird. Too soon before the Elections.

But there is still the backup, the Lost TV Star, also known as Ossama;
whether They intend to announce capturing him, or whether he will be
claimed responsible for Something Scary in a psyops attempt to make the
voters more susceptible to the beat of the Homeland Security drums.




From jya at pipeline.com  Mon Dec 15 04:50:27 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 04:50:27 -0800
Subject: Idea: Simplified TEMPEST-shielded unit (speculative
  proposal)
In-Reply-To: <0312150419370.-1271127644@somehost.domainz.com>
Message-ID: <E1AVpOb-0000n9-00@granger.mail.mindspring.net>

There's a good possibility that Saddam was traced by Tempest
sensing, airborne or mundane. The technology is far more sensitive
than a decade ago. And with a lot of snooping technology kept obscure 
by tales of HUMINT, finks, lost laptops and black bag jobs.

For less sensitive compromising emanations, BETA, among others, 
makes portable Tempest units, desktop and room-sized, the devices 
export-restricted as if munitions.

There's a patent on a booth-like Tempest device into which the
user climbs, with protection provided for connections, but whether
it was ever built is unknown.

A slew of firms make Tempest products which can be examined
for what shielding works sufficiently well to be placed on NSA's
more or less trustworthy Tempest products list:

Beyond commercial-grade, NSA is reportedly able to read faint 
emanations from all known Tempest protection, thanks in part to 
reviewing products and international sharing among spooks.

Those leaked from fiber are now a piece of cake, and not by 
tapping the glass a la the RU submarine cable escapade and 
the derring-do of USS Jimmy Carter custom-rigged to hack 
transoceanic fiber.

Tempest snooping at the atomic level is feasible, thanks to
physicists who walk among the electrons with supercomputers.

As ever, what you don't know is what kills you, and if you are not
currently doing research or working on NDA stuff, you're toast.

Protecting against the known is what keeps the orchestrated 
leak industry thriving.

Be sure to submit bright inventions to the authorities to get contracts
for funding dark ones that work against the grain, then you'll get
really swell contracts or offed.

Ex-NSA staff are rolling in clover selling commercialized versions
of security technology that NSA freely accesses. Reminds of the Brits
selling to gullible govs impregnable Enigma machines after WW2.




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Sun Dec 14 20:33:28 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 05:33:28 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Idea: Simplified TEMPEST-shielded unit (speculative proposal)
Message-ID: <0312150419370.-1271127644@somehost.domainz.com>

TEMPEST shielding is fairly esoteric (at least for non-EM-specialists)
field. But potentially could be made easier by simplifying the problem.

If we won't want to shield the user interface (eg. we want just a
cryptographic processor), we may put the device into a solid metal case
without holes, battery-powered, with the seams in the case covered with
eg. adhesive copper tape. The input and output can be mediated by fibers,
whose ports can be the only holes, fraction of millimeter in diameter,
carefully shielded, in the otherwise seamless well-grounded box. There are
potential cooling problems, as there are no ventilation holes in the
enclosure; this can be alleviated by using one side of the box as a large
passive cooler, eventually with an externally mounted fan with separate
power supply. If magnetic shielding is required as well, the box could be
made of permalloy or other material with similar magnetic properties.

I am not sure how to shield a display. Maybe taking an LCD, bolting it on
the shielded box, and cover it with a fine wire mesh and possibly
metalized glass? Using LCD with high response time of the individual
pixels also dramatically reduces the value of eventual optical emissions.

I also have doubts about the keyboard. Several ideas that could help: We
may use optical scanning of the key matrix, with the light fed into and
read from the matrix by optical fibers, coming out from a well-shielded
enclosure, similar to the I/O lines of the first example. We may use a
"normal" keyboard, but modified to use reliably random scanning pattern;
that won't reduce the EM emissions of the keyboard, but effectively
encrypts them, dramatically reducing their intelligence value. It's then
necessary to take precautions about the data cable between the keyboard
itself and the computer, where the data go through in plaintext; it's
possible to encrypt it, or to use a fiber.

As really good shielding of complicated cases is difficult to achieve, the
primary objective of this approach is to put everything into simple
metallic boxes with as few and as small ports as possible, which should be
comparatively easy to manufacture, replacing the special contacting of
removable panels with disposable adhesive copper tape (the only reason to
go inside is replacing batteries, and the tape together with other
measures may serve as tamperproofing), and replacement of all potentially
radiating external data connections with fiber optic.

I should disclaim I have nothing that could vaguely resemble any deeper
knowledge of high frequencies; therefore I lay out the idea here and
wonder if anyone can see holes in it (and where they are).




From vab at cryptnet.net  Mon Dec 15 05:52:52 2003
From: vab at cryptnet.net (V Alex Brennen)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 08:52:52 -0500
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <20031215101401.GU22728@leitl.org>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org> 
  <20031215055709.72373.qmail@web40613.mail.yahoo.com>
  <20031215101401.GU22728@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <3FDDBCB4.1050508@cryptnet.net>

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 09:57:09PM -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> 
>>>http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
>>>
>>>Be sure and check the archive before posting.  It is still small.
>>
>>Cookies, "members only" archive access. Bad deal. Will not happen. Very few
>>consumers here.
> 
> 
> "To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the cpunx-news
> Archives. The current archive is only available to the list members."
> 
> No good. Please fix.

Archive it your selfs you fucking wankers.  Damn.  Since when
can cypherpunks not even handle setting up a public mailing
list archive?  If that's beyond you, you probably don't
belong on the cypherpunks list.

What do you need a government assistance program?  Some public
service announcements?  A welfare sponsored skills training
program?

Here's the hand out you're looking for:

http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#newlist



    - VAB




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Mon Dec 15 01:07:46 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:07:46 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
In-Reply-To: <57CEB866-2EAA-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <BAY7-F42pojYNy9kFr500032652@hotmail.com> 
  <0312150311460.-1271143200@somehost.domainz.com>
  <57CEB866-2EAA-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <0312150954270.0@somehost.domainz.com>

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> How boring. The DNA confirmation was reported on all of the puppet news
> organizations here.

It made it to the evening news. Which I missed (my info was from the news
at noon), and caught only this morning in the evening news rerun.

> The Germans and Eastern Europeans, being mostly opposed to the war,
> probably just buried the confirmation.

They just delayed it. Most likely timezone stuff. Local news take their
material from the standard newsfeeds; though it's fun to watch who
includes what details and how the spin differs by station. (Does anybody
here know if it's possible to receive the raw APTN and Reuters satellite
newsfeeds, and how?)

> The Czech Republic supported the war,

Local political scene was much less than homogenous in this issue. The
quarrels around it were quite amusing to watch (though it all boiled down
into if it will be better to kiss American ass or the European one, or,
better, if there isn't a way how to kiss both of them at once).

> and sent troops, and now that Saddam has been captured, both of them
> will be returning home, with medals.

You don't know local administration. The troops can consider themselves
lucky if they get official thank you.




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Mon Dec 15 10:37:30 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:37:30 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031215154411.F11657-100000@localhost>
References: <d6e90d9996080086ea23cad6de527390@paranoici.org>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031215103452.0298b8c0@idiom.com>

At 03:47 PM 12/15/2003 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
>On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Anonymous wrote:
>
> >   The U.S. official's way of behaving like Texas rednecks are
> > embarrassing. Not only are they cheering "we got him" like a child who
> > can not withhold his enthusiasm. Displaying Saddam the way they did
> > are also possibly a clear violation of the Geneva convention as far as
> > I can tell.
>
>The Geneva conventions require, among other things, that soldiers wear
>uniforms.  Maybe it was just the movies, but I do believe that in the
>first and second world wars combatants dressed in civilian clothes were
>routinely shot.

But Saddam isn't a soldier - he's a politician.   He may also have
been in charge of his country's army, but he was being attacked because
of his position as a political leader.




From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Dec 15 02:14:01 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 11:14:01 +0100
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <20031215055709.72373.qmail@web40613.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031215055709.72373.qmail@web40613.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20031215101401.GU22728@leitl.org>

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 09:57:09PM -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
> >
> > Be sure and check the archive before posting.  It is still small.
>
> Cookies, "members only" archive access. Bad deal. Will not happen. Very few
> consumers here.

"To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the cpunx-news
Archives. The current archive is only available to the list members."

No good. Please fix.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Dec 15 03:02:52 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 12:02:52 +0100
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <49C66A06-2EB3-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031215025340.BDE36241B30@gnu-darwin.org>
  <49C66A06-2EB3-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031215110251.GB22728@leitl.org>

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 08:00:57PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

> Some people think spinning off new lists whenever they get interested
> in some area is interesting. Most of these lists fail for obvious

There's a specific niche of high-volume topical news lists. They're designed
to distribute the mining the news sources load. Life's too short for
everybody to read every news source just to learn what's new in a specific
area.

They can take a while to get started, but once they go critical they
can become a valuable resource.

My problem with cpunx-news is that I've found relying on other people
for critical infrastructure a mistake.

> reasons. Sometimes a famous person, especially Net famous, creates a
> vanity list. Hence the "Interesting People" vanity list. This trend
> seems to be giving way to Blogs, however, as the various
> net.personalities realize that what they really want is a forum for
> blogging their message to an attentive audience.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Dec 15 03:28:42 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 12:28:42 +0100
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report 
Message-ID: <20031215112842.GI22728@leitl.org>

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 06:36:12PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

> No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the
> ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.

This is a bogus statement. As long as I can't use a single keyword to make
Google's news alerts topical, and _full text_ a search engine is rather
useless.

> "News" lists tend strongly to be just dumping grounds for crap from
> other lists.

The point is that you don't have to subscribe to 20-odd email lists, which
have about 5% relevance each. Life's too short for that. People are the best
filters, and with a handful of sustained contributors the list becomes a
valuable resource.

> I failed the entrance exam for "Interesting People," which is fine, for
> obvious reasons.

Case in point: most of IP list traffic is garbage from a cypherpunk point of
view. Let one list subscriber read it, and filter relevant bits to the
newsticker.

If it's a steaming pile of crap for Tim May it doesn't mean it's useless for
everybody else.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From nobody at dizum.com  Mon Dec 15 03:40:09 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 12:40:09 +0100 (CET)
Subject: self adjusting dummy traffic generation?
Message-ID: <da5373ceed40909f906d908ee83c8745@dizum.com>

	Would it be possible to have a self adjusting dummy traffic generator feature in remailers? Operator decides that he wants to process x number of incoming and y number of outgoing messages each time period t. Then the software adjusts the number of dummy messages to this value using some statistical calculations of past t2 hours. If incoming traffic increases then the amount of dummy messages are decreasing and so on. Does this feature exist today?




From rah at shipwright.com  Mon Dec 15 10:11:53 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:11:53 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <030b01c3c32f$ed6a1ee0$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
References: <20031215154411.F11657-100000@localhost>
  <030b01c3c32f$ed6a1ee0$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
Message-ID: <p06020473bc03a95edd46@[66.149.49.5]>

At 5:21 PM +0000 12/15/03, Dave Howe wrote:
> Iraq was somehow involved in
>the Trade Center attacks too....

For those who wondered why Abu Nidal took two in the hat shortly before the
daisycutters came to play:

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/12/14/ixportaltop.html>


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From nobody at paranoici.org  Mon Dec 15 04:17:59 2003
From: nobody at paranoici.org (Anonymous)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:17:59 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <d6e90d9996080086ea23cad6de527390@paranoici.org>

  The U.S. official's way of behaving like Texas rednecks are embarrassing. Not only are they cheering "we got him" like a child who can not withhold his enthusiasm. Displaying Saddam the way they did are also possibly a clear violation of the Geneva convention as far as I can tell.
  What was that quote by Nietsche again?
  One person who actually did behave in a respectable manner was the President. No lame "we got him" or cowboy hats there. At least not this time.




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Dec 15 13:26:01 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:26:01 -0800
Subject: Hack the Vote: cause a blackout
Message-ID: <3FDE26E9.65937B68@cdc.gov>

(This inspired by comments in Scheier's cryptogram)

Do all the newly electronic voting places have UPS?  I doubt
it.  Think of the fun you could cause if you downed a few
substations or poles.

>> And because elections happen all at once, there would be no means of
recovery.  Imagine if, in the next presidential election, someone
hacked the vote in New York.  Would we let New York vote again in a
week?  Would we redo the entire national election?  Would we tell New
York that their votes didn't count?

>>What we need are simple voting systems--paper ballots that can be
counted even in a blackout.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Dec 15 11:08:05 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 14:08:05 -0500
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
Message-ID: <BAY7-F71YQYx3G5aYY600018559@hotmail.com>

"If I don't remember incorrectly, they said something about identifying him
by DNA testing."

Well, of course "Saddam" is going to test positive...he's apparently an 
actual CLONE.
Actually, from what I understand this is the 'original' Saddam (note how 
much older he seems than the Saddams we've been seeing in the press over the 
last few years), but he hasn't actually controlled things for a couple of 
decades. The Saddam we're really looking for is approximately Saddam #3, and 
he's still at large, and directing the insurgency.

-TD


>From: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz>
>To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com>
>CC: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
>Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 03:33:53 +0100 (CET)
>
>
>On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > Spread the word. The adminstration got desparate. In a few weeks they'll
> > announce this isn't the real Saddam, but that rounding up all of the 
>clones
> > is necessary progress in the fight to get the real Saddam.
>
>If I don't remember incorrectly, they said something about identifying him
>by DNA testing. But it wasn't widely quoted in the mainstream news. So
>even if it really is him - they may still claim he isn't the real McCoy if
>the insurgency won't stop.
>
>The timing is definitely weird. Too soon before the Elections.
>
>But there is still the backup, the Lost TV Star, also known as Ossama;
>whether They intend to announce capturing him, or whether he will be
>claimed responsible for Something Scary in a psyops attempt to make the
>voters more susceptible to the beat of the Homeland Security drums.

_________________________________________________________________
Wonder if the latest virus has gotten to your computer? Find out. Run the 
FREE McAfee online computer scan! 
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Dec 15 14:12:09 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 14:12:09 -0800
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
Message-ID: <3FDE31B9.6A949CB3@cdc.gov>

At 09:57 PM 12/14/03 -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote:
>> Be sure and check the archive before posting.  It is still small.
>
>Cookies, "members only" archive access. Bad deal. Will not happen. Very
few
>consumers here.

But look how many IP addresses he got from members checking it out!




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Dec 15 14:19:03 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 14:19:03 -0800
Subject: Using PCR to find Hussein via the sewers?  [GATTACA]
Message-ID: <3FDE3357.E0823F31@cdc.gov>

At 04:50 AM 12/15/03 -0800, John Young wrote:
>There's a good possibility that Saddam was traced by Tempest
>sensing, airborne or mundane.

I wonder if you can trace DNA in sewers back to the source,
esp. in an inbred locale?   (Peter?  PCR with Saddam specific
primers?)

Or did he just dig a cat-hole instead of using the infrastructure?

You can trace industrial contamination up sewer lines back to the
source.
How about the cells we shed?

Just theoretically.  Papers fnord says someone used to the good life
narced, couldn't
handle a jail cell.




From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Dec 15 06:25:34 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:25:34 +0100
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <3FDDBCB4.1050508@cryptnet.net>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031215055709.72373.qmail@web40613.mail.yahoo.com>
  <20031215101401.GU22728@leitl.org> <3FDDBCB4.1050508@cryptnet.net>
Message-ID: <20031215142533.GR22728@leitl.org>

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 08:52:52AM -0500, V Alex Brennen wrote:

> Archive it your selfs you fucking wankers.  Damn.  Since when

That was I was going to do before you volunteered to host the lists.
Thanks for letting me know that the offer has been withdrawn.

I guess I don't need another illustration as to why free is too expensive.

> can cypherpunks not even handle setting up a public mailing
> list archive?  If that's beyond you, you probably don't

If you think debugging SuSE + Postfix + Mailman ("Failure to exec script.
WANTED gid 65534, GOT gid 8." <-- none of the standard fixes work) is high on
my priority list, you're on crack.

> belong on the cypherpunks list.
>
> What do you need a government assistance program?  Some public
> service announcements?  A welfare sponsored skills training
> program?
>
> Here's the hand out you're looking for:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#newlist

A redundant archive is a good idea. Thanks.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From jdd at dixons.org  Mon Dec 15 07:47:28 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:47:28 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <d6e90d9996080086ea23cad6de527390@paranoici.org>
Message-ID: <20031215154411.F11657-100000@localhost>

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Anonymous wrote:

>   The U.S. official's way of behaving like Texas rednecks are
> embarrassing. Not only are they cheering "we got him" like a child who
> can not withhold his enthusiasm. Displaying Saddam the way they did
> are also possibly a clear violation of the Geneva convention as far as
> I can tell.

The Geneva conventions require, among other things, that soldiers wear
uniforms.  Maybe it was just the movies, but I do believe that in the
first and second world wars combatants dressed in civilian clothes were
routinely shot.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From keith at nullify.org  Mon Dec 15 14:14:54 2003
From: keith at nullify.org (Keith Ray)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:14:54 -0600
Subject: Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <1071526494.3fde325e096c8@mail.nullify.org>

Quoting Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com>:

> At 06:49 PM 12/13/2003 +0100, some provocateur claiming to be Anonymous
> wrote:
> >    A question for the moment might well be how many if any of
> >the remailers are operated by TLAs?
> 
> Remailers are secure if at least one remailer in a chain
> is _not_ compromised...

A case-in-point on this is the admin of the Frog remailer in 2001.  He 'outted'
a user who chained a message through both of Frog admin's remailers.  The admin
didn't like what was said and used his logs to match the sender with the
decrypted outgoing message.  With sendmail and verbose Mixmaster logs, this is
trivial to do.  It's also not unheard of for remops to log and cooperate to
'out' a spammer.

If I were remailing a message that would get me sent to prison, I would
definately use a Wi-Fi hotspot and use 3-4 chained remailers with random delays.
 By the time the message is delivered, it will be many hours/days since the
message was sent.

 --
Keith Ray <keith at nullify.org> -- OpenPGP Key: 0x79269A12




From S  Mon Dec 15 15:16:17 2003
From: S (S)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:16:17 -0700
Subject: remailers-tla.htm Compromised Remailers, December 15, 2003
Message-ID: <E1AW1fD-0000XE-00@mallard.mail.pas.earthlink.net>

Thank you for posting the "Compromised Remailers" article:


http://cryptome.org/remailers-tla.htm

Over the past year, many remailer users have noticed that the reliability of 
the Mixmaster type II network has steadily degraded. Although it may well be 
the result of TLA interference, the remailer community's statistical methods 
of selecting a "reliable" remailer chain contribute significantly to the 
network's degradation.

As a former employee of the United States Army Communications Command [USACC] 
Headquarters, I was amazed to stumble upon the existence of a publicly 
available communications medium permitting truly anonymous communication by 
hampering the government's ability at "traffic analysis," or tracking an 
email message from its source to its destination. One would have to be 
foolish to believe that TLAs are not hard at work trying to pierce the veil 
of anonymity afforded by the Mixmaster type II, and, the yet to be released, 
type III remailers.

I ran tests in September, October & November, and provided the Mixmaster 
developers & remail operators with the same results I've included below. My 
testing was extremely simple: send a bunch of messages, and note which 

messages arrived. [The same procedure an accountant would use in tracking a 
financial transaction from its origin to its destination.]

What I found was that a handful of remailers accounted for virtually all of 
the un-delivered email messages. Yet, these same remailers, that never 
delivered my email messages to the "alt.anonymous.messages" news group, where 
also listed as among the most reliable remailers in mixmaster stats used to 
select remailer chains.

I've included my recommendations to improve the network's reliability in the 
test results below.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mixmaster II Reliability Issues & Test Results
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The major issue currently plaguing the Mixmaster remailer network is the true 
reliability of the LAST remailer in a chain. A considerable number of these 
remailers habitually act like "Black Holes" for email messages destined for 
"alt.anonymous.messages" and other news groups. 

Unfortunately, most of these "Black Hole" remailers also happen to be listed 
as among the most reliable remailers in mixmaster stats, with ratings ranging 
from the upper 90's to 100; consequently, it's highly probable that messages 
sent to newsgroups will frequently hit one of these demon remailers, never to 
reach their intended recipient.

Over the past 2 months, I've sent & tracked over 5,124 email messages 
consisting of either 4 or 6 copies of 1,220 unique messages, each routed 
through 11 Mixmaster type II remailers, to the "alt.anonymous.messages" news 
group.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Last Remailer   Lost Msgs      Delivered Msgs    % Reliability
---------------------------------------------------------------
antani             63                  0                 0
cripto             65                  0                 0
hastio             41                  0                 0
george             31                  7                18
paranoia           41                 10                20
futurew            33                  9                21
edo                27                  9                25
starwars           54                 29                35
itys                7                  9                56
italy               7                 10                59
bog                 3                 14                82
freedom             3                 45                94
tonga               5                106                95
liberty             2                 51                96
panta               3                 69                96
bigapple            3                104                97
metacolo            3                 99                97

bogg                1                 52                98
dizum               2                106                98
jmbcv               1                 59                98
frell               0                 34               100
randseed            0                  3               100
---------------------------------------------------------------
Sub-totals        395                825                68
---------------------------------------------------------------
Total           1,220
---------------------------------------------------------------


Surprisingly - at first - I found that sending messages through chains of 
remailers rated, in mixmaster stats, at 98% or greater was FAR LESS reliable 
than sending messages through remailers rated at 50% or greater. This is 
because the "Black Hole" remailers were almost always rated, in mixmaster 
stats, at 98% or greater reliability, while the remailers that were the most 
successful at delivering my messages were usually rated, in mixmaster stats, 
at reliability ratings of 90% or lower.

For those of you yelling, "it's the broken chains, dumbass!" I strongly 
disagree. Messages sent through broken chains were more than twice as likely 
to successfully reach the intended news group than were messages that failed.


--------------------------------------------
Messages Sent Through Broken Chains
   (copies of the same message)
--------------------------------------------
Copies        Lost        Delivered
--------------------------------------------
4               13            31
3               40            92            
2               94           218
1              154           325 
--------------------------------------------
Sub Total      301           666
--------------------------------------------
Total          967
--------------------------------------------


Broken chains were somewhat reliable predictors only after all the "Black 
Hole" remailers were removed from the remailer chains selected to send 
messages. Even then, the broken chain stats were marginally reliable only on 
the infrequent occasion that broken chains changed little from day to day.

The difference I found in the actual ability of a remailer to successfully 
deliver email was completely at odds with the mixmaster remailer stats and 
broken chain data, rendering them of little value in selecting a remailer 
chain that insures a successful delivery.

The remailer network screams for a testing methodology that stresses the 
success of actual messages delivered to their destination, as I've done in 
this test. Basically, the network needs to be auditable, and the current 
method of evaluating remailer reliability needs a complete re-think because 
it's not working well, at all. 

Additionally, Quality of Service standards need to be established and 
maintained. Remailers that consistently fail to deliver messages need to be 
removed from the network. I consistently achieved a 95% success ratio by 
removing the remailers, listed above, that failed to deliver email messages 
less than 94% of the time. 

It would also be helpful for there to be better communication between 
remailer operators.
Example: "Italy" abruptly stopped accepting mixmaster messages on the morning 

of Monday, October 20, but did send an email, that morning, to the remops 
mailing list announcing its action to permanently leave the mixmaster 
network. At least two days later, italy was still listed as a working 
mixmaster remailer, and not even listed as a broken chain for most remailers.


* When the "Black Hole" remailers were in the chain, but not the final 
remailers, they were as reliable as the rest of the remailers. I found this 
extremely puzzling. Thankfully, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist...

* Fortunately, in 5 of the tests when "bogg" was randomly selected as one of 
the last remailers, it posted all copies of each message to the 
"alt.anonymous.messages" news group instead of only sending one copy. Thank 
God for small favors. ;)

----------------------------------
Copies of Messages bogg posted
 to "alt.anonymous.messages"
----------------------------------
Copies       Messages
----------------------------------
 4               5
 3               8
 2              10
 1               1
----------------------------------

>From the first line: for 5 separate messages, all 4 copies of the messages 
sent through "bogg" were posted to the "alt.anonymous.messages" news group.

As you can see from the bogg data, usually more than a single copy made it 
through to the last remailer for the test cycles I noted.

Using bogg as an example, I feel comfortable "jumping to the conclusion" that 
most of the "Black Hole" remailers, that failed to deliver messages to the 
alt.anonymous.messages" news group, usually received more than one copy of 
each message.

I hope this helps improve the reliability of a network I've come to rely upon 
over the years...

Keep up the good work!



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mixmaster II Reliability Issues & Test Results [Final Test]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

183 messages [4 copies] were sent through chains of 20 remailers with an
overall & final remailer reliability of 30% or greater. This was truly a
torture test that guaranteed every message an equal probability of crossing
a broken chain.

The results of this final test were in line with my earlier testing
conducted in September & October. In a nutshell: choosing a low reliability
for the remailers resulted in a greater number of messages reaching their
intended recipient, which, in both tests, was the "alt.anonymous.messages"
news group. This is because the "Black Hole" remailers were almost always
rated, in mixmaster stats, at greater reliability than remailers that were
the most successful at delivering my messages.

The Mixmaster network had an overall improvement of 4% over my earlier 
testing, in which some batches of messages were sent through remailer chains
with reliabilities of 98%, while other batches were sent through remailer
chains with reliabilities of 50%. This time around, I used a reliability of
+30%.

I didn't bother tracking bad chain data this time around because I found
the data inconsequential in my earlier testing. In both earlier & present
testing, all messages had an equal probability of encountering a bad chain,
and a chain of 20 remailers, in this test, virtually guaranteed it.

Let me clarify the statement: "I found the bad chain data inconsequential
in my earlier testing." It's not that the data aren't necessary in choosing
a good chain. In fact, you can bet that the new Mixmaster client's ability
to avoid bad chains was primarily responsible for all the 100% ratings
in this testing cycle. [The developers really deserve a strong round of
applause for their improvements to the Mix client & bad chain data.]

The reason the bad chain data are inconsequential to the testing is that all
messages have an equal probability of encountering a bad chain that may
develop over the many hours, or days, it takes for the messages to navigate
20 remailers.

My recommendations are the same as I previously outlined in my earlier 
test results, which I've included below...

Thanks again to all the developers & remops!

----------------------
November test results:
----------------------

(November 19, 20 & 21)
183 messages (4 copies of each)

-------------------------------------------------
Last Remailer  | Sent  | Arrived | % Reliability
-------------------------------------------------
antani            14         0           0
cripto             8         0           0
futurew           12         0           0
george             6         0           0
hastio             4         0           0
bunker             8         3          38
paranoia          16        14          88
bigapple          14        13          93
dizum             10        10         100
edo               12        12         100
freedom            5         5         100
frell             12        12         100
itys              15        15         100
metacolo           8         8         100
panta             15        15         100
randseed           9         9         100
starwars           9         9         100
tonga              6         6         100
-------------------------------------------------
Total            183       131          72
-------------------------------------------------

-----




From DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk  Mon Dec 15 09:21:43 2003
From: DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk (Dave Howe)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:21:43 -0000
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
References: <20031215154411.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <030b01c3c32f$ed6a1ee0$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>

Jim Dixon wrote:
> The Geneva conventions require, among other things, that soldiers wear
> uniforms.
  No, they don't.

  Fox news repeats this enough that more than half of america believes it,
but then, more than half of america believes Iraq was somehow involved in
the Trade Center attacks too....

  The rules are considerably more lax for the defenders than the
attackers - if you are entering another country, then you must either be
part of a uniformed, standing army or be part of a militia (with a rigid
authority structure, open carrage of arms and an identifying badge or
emblem). You must also respect the rules of war - so at least in theory,
even a uniformed "official" combatant is not entitled to the protections
of the Geneva conventions if he himself breaks those conventions (by e.g.
shooting noncombatants)

  If you are defending though, you are entitled to the protection of the
geneva convention (and lawful combatant status) simply by being an "open"
hostile (carrying your weaponry openly and obeying all the usual
provisions of the geneva convention, which obviously doesn't allow hiding
in a crowd of civilians). This is the "take up arms" provision so beloved
of the american people - that in the face of invasion, the ordinary
citizen would "take up arms" to defend his home and neighbours.

  There is considerable doubt as to exactly how this applies to sniping -
certainly, uniformed combatants are little less likely to decide to dive
into cover and "take out" their opponents with aimed fire than random
undertrained militia are, and it would be insane for a lone "take up arms"
defender to stand out in the open to "duke it out"; the problem is a
random sniper is difficult to locate *after* an attack if he is not
otherwise identifiable; ok, he isn't permitted to drop his weapon and
retain his lawful combatant status, but nor could a uniformed individual
(one of several) be expected to volunteer that he was the one who just
killed four of the team now pointing weapons at him..... (the "take up
arms" provision seems to assume the defender picks up a gun and continues
firing until he is killed, captured, or he wins :)

"name rank and number" is for the movies.




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec 15 18:38:04 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 18:38:04 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <26e41b837ccf711a38dc99d58c198b71@paranoici.org>
References: <26e41b837ccf711a38dc99d58c198b71@paranoici.org>
Message-ID: <DF97884E-2F70-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 15, 2003, at 5:36 PM, Anonymous wrote:

> I am not sure I agree. I am no expert on this however. I saw several 
> people commenting the issue of Geneva convention on CNN during the 
> day. Also I saw an expert on this field from another country 
> commenting on the issue stating that it was a clear violation of the 
> convention. In either of these interviews were there any discussion on 
> whether it didn't apply to this specific case due to what clothings he 
> happened to wear or whattever. I got the impression that it was clear 
> that the U.S. treatment wasn't fully appropriate.

The U.S. would have screamed up and down in front of the U.N. and 
threatened severe reprisals if a U.S. prisoner were to have his (or 
her) mouth, hair, and medical exam televised by the Iranians, Syrians, 
Serbians, Iraqis, Panamanians, or any of the other nations we have gone 
to war with.

There are specific clauses which refer to not publically humiliating a 
prisoner. I'm surprised the Agitprop Division didn't show video of 
Saddam taking his first dump while in custody.

Saddam is not a good guy. But this went beyond the pale. I hope the 
next time a U.S. fighter is captured he is shown publically humiliated, 
with an Iranian or Syrian or French doctor forcing his mouth open and 
checking his hair for lice. The U.S. would be in no position to 
complain. (But they would, of course.)

But, what can one expect of a country which refers to its own 
terrorists who blow up commercial Cuban planes as "freedom fighters" 
and to Palestinians seeking to expel the Zionist Jew invaders as 
"terrorists"?

We are in Wonderland and the Republicrats are the Mad Hatters.

--Tim May
"We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania."
"We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia."
"We are at war with Iraq. We have always been at war with Iraq.
"We are at war with France. We have always been at war with France."




From jdd at dixons.org  Mon Dec 15 10:48:26 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 18:48:26 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031215103452.0298b8c0@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <20031215184318.R11657-100000@localhost>

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:

> >The Geneva conventions require, among other things, that soldiers wear
> >uniforms.  Maybe it was just the movies, but I do believe that in the
> >first and second world wars combatants dressed in civilian clothes were
> >routinely shot.
>
> But Saddam isn't a soldier - he's a politician.   He may also have
> been in charge of his country's army, but he was being attacked because
> of his position as a political leader.

Saddam was apparently quite proud of being a soldier.  He routinely wore a
uniform bearing insignia of miliary rank.  He carried weapons.  He was
armed when captured and had with him evidence that he was directing
military operations.

In any case, if you are arguing that he should be treated as a POW, you
cannot simultaneously argue that he is not a soldier.

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Dave Howe wrote:

> > The Geneva conventions require, among other things, that soldiers wear
> > uniforms.
>   No, they don't.

The provisions are reasonably clear.  You wear a uniform of some sort, or
you openly display your weapons:

"3. In order to promote the protection of the civilian population from the
effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves
from the civilian population while they are engaged in an attack or in a
military operation preparatory to an attack. Recognizing, however, that
there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the
hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall
retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he
carries his arms openly:

"(a) During each military engagement, and

"(b) During such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is
engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in
which he is to participate.

"Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be
considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1
(c)."  (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/93.htm)

If you don't wear a uniform or display your weapons during an engagement,
whether offensive or defensive, then you are engaging in perfidious acts
and lose the protection of the Geneva conventions.  Note that this says
"during each military engagement"; if you drop your weapon and try to melt
into the crowd, you have failed to comply, your behaviour is perfidious.

>   If you are defending though, you are entitled to the protection of the
> geneva convention (and lawful combatant status) simply by being an "open"
> hostile (carrying your weaponry openly and obeying all the usual
> provisions of the geneva convention, which obviously doesn't allow hiding
> in a crowd of civilians). This is the "take up arms" provision so beloved
> of the american people - that in the face of invasion, the ordinary
> citizen would "take up arms" to defend his home and neighbours.

I can find no support for what you say in this paragraph.  Attackers are
not distinguished from defenders except at the level of individual
engagements.  That is, if you are a member of an irregular force invading
another country and are captured, you are a POW, so long as you comply
with the rules: distinguish yourself from the civilian population, and
display your weapons openly.

Notwithstanding the above,

"7. This Article is not intended to change the generally accepted practice
of States with respect to the wearing of the uniform by combatants
assigned to the regular, uniformed armed units of a Party to the
conflict."

Saddam was an officer in a regular, uniformed armed unit.  He had worn his
uniform conspicuously for many years. He was not an irregular combatant.
Therefore he was obliged to continue to wear a uniform while engaged in
military action and not doing so could be considered perfidious.

The following is also relevant:

"Article 46.-Spies

"1. Notwithstanding any other provision of the Conventions or of this
Protocol, any member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who
falls into the power of an adverse Party while engaging in espionage shall
not have the right to the status of prisoner of war and may be treated as
a spy.

"2. A member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who, on behalf
of that Party and in territory controlled by an adverse Party, gathers or
attempts to gather information shall not be considered as engaging in
espionage if, while so acting, he is in the uniform of his armed forces."

If you gather information or attempt to do so, and are NOT in uniform,
you can be considered a spy and so are not eligible for POW status.

According to news reports, our friend Saddam had many intelligence reports
with him when captured.  He was gathering information for military
purposes.  He was not in uniform.  Therefore he forfeited any right to be
treated as a captured soldier - specifically because he was not in
uniform.

It was presumably on one of these grounds that Allied prisoners out of
uniform when captured were routinely executed in Europe during the second
world war: they were members of uniformed units and not in uniform; or
they were considered to be gathering information and not in uniform.

There are larger questions here.  Irregular forces whose tactics consist
largely of murdering random civilians because that's easier than fighting
soldiers are not military forces in the sense of the Geneva conventions,
especially where they conceal their weapons and hide behind civilians.
They are unlawful combatants and need not be treated as POWs if captured.
Nor should their leaders be.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From rabbi at abditum.com  Mon Dec 15 19:13:53 2003
From: rabbi at abditum.com (Len Sassaman)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 19:13:53 -0800 (PST)
Subject: An Analysis of Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <E1AW4bH-0004y5-00@maynard.mail.mindspring.net>
References: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
  <E1AW4bH-0004y5-00@maynard.mail.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0312151854300.17635@thetis.deor.org>

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, John Young wrote:

> This came in response to Cryptome's posting of Len Sassman's
> comments on remailers.

(BTW, John -- while the threat originally started out as being about
compromised remailers, my comments had little to do with that title.
Perhaps "remailer security" would be a better index term for cryptome?)

> Over the past year, many remailer users have noticed that the reliability of
> the Mixmaster type II network has steadily degraded. Although it may well be
> the result of TLA interference, the remailer community's statistical methods
> of selecting a "reliable" remailer chain contribute significantly to the
> network's degradation.

There are conflicting opinions on that statement. For instance, have a
look at this threat on alt.privacy.anon-server:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8eb77bbdadfd2a6d1b21efabc1e1e090%40firenze.linux.it&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain

So, on one hand we have the claim that remailer reliability is degrading
because of how we select reliable remailer chains, and on the other hand
there is the claim that the reliability is increasing, because TLAs are
the only entities competent to run reliable remailers. (Apparently, if you
believe this theory, you also believe I work for the FBI.)

The facts are that the remailer network's reliability has increased over
the past few years, largely due to the renewed development attention that
Mixmaster has received.


> I ran tests in September, October & November, and provided the Mixmaster
> developers & remail operators with the same results I've included below. My
> testing was extremely simple: send a bunch of messages, and note which

The tests below unfortunately do not provide any really useful data. What
is really being tested isn't the remailer reliability, but the "mail to
news gateway" reliability. It would be much more useful for the tester to
isolate which remailer/mail2news combinations are resulting in lost news,
and post that data instead.


--Len.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 15 19:23:05 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 19:23:05 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <7b38763ff193ee2c201126db3de204e7@remailer.privacy.at>
Message-ID: <3FDE0A19.2140.1BD2E20C@localhost>

    --
On 15 Dec 2003 at 20:06, privacy.at Anonymous Remailer wrote:
> The image of an Arab leader (however terrible) being 
> objectivised by a white gloved American medic like a bug on a 
> lab bench, will not be read in the Arab world as a moment of 
> liberation. It will be seen as a special kind of humiliation, 
> the kind which typifies the depth of ignorance which has 
> inspired this campaign from its outset.

Arabs respect power.  Well, everyone respects power, but arabs 
more so.

The image of Saddam being poked around will devastate the 
insurgents just as much as his bullet ridden body would have
done.  Either one works.

If he was cocky and defiant after being taken prisoner, that 
would have been a problem -- and I suspect that problem would 
have been swiftly solved.

What was done was an excellent use of him, perhaps the best 
possible use of him.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     DijbC0CdsDlDq+JMzf6Soaoy/uQpAPvQzIqw+vZV
     4V4l1cML3B68fAUZdXEQULOypQU+iOODMqAEAhN3z




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Dec 15 19:35:04 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 19:35:04 -0800
Subject: Textual analysis
Message-ID: <3FDE7D68.4B6A900C@cdc.gov>

At 10:36 AM 12/14/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
>It's not obvious to me how you'd change your writing style to defeat
these
>textual analysis schemes--would it really be as simple as changing the
>average length of sentences and getting rid of the big words, or would
>there still be ways to determine your identity from that text?

Its like steganalysis.  Its an arms race between measuring your own
signatures vs. what the Adversary can measure.  If sentence length
is a metric known to you, you can write filters that warn you.
Similarly for the Adversary.   You end up in an arms race
over metrics ---who has the more sensitive ones that the other
does not control for?




From mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at  Mon Dec 15 11:06:12 2003
From: mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at (privacy.at Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 20:06:12 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <7b38763ff193ee2c201126db3de204e7@remailer.privacy.at>

>The U.S. official's way of behaving like Texas rednecks are embarrassing. Not 

Crosspost from nettime:

Subject:  <nettime> wrong signals

If symbols really do matter we might conclude that American
administration's PR machine has got it badly wrong. In the carefully
orchestrated news management of Saddam's capture, once again, the public
opinion which *really* matters in the middle east: Arab public opinion,
has been conclusively misread

The image of an Arab leader (however terrible) being objectivised by a
white gloved American medic like a bug on a lab bench, will not be read in
the Arab world as a moment of liberation. It will be seen as a special
kind of humiliation, the kind which typifies the depth of ignorance which
has inspired this campaign from its outset. Once again the images (chosen
with great care one imagines, given the time lapse between Saddam's
capture and the John Wayne style triumphalism of the announcement) treats
Arab opinion to a further demonstration of the power of the west to
objectivize the world under a coolly scientific gaze. In this context no
mediaeval torturer could have conceived of a greater humiliation than the
medical torch's pencil thin beam illuminating the inside of the tyrant's
mouth.

A stupidity of almost incomprehensible proportions seems bent on
prosecuting a war against terror in which the twenty-four hour news
machine is mobilized to disseminate images that do little more than fan
the flames of hate.




From coderman at charter.net  Mon Dec 15 20:12:16 2003
From: coderman at charter.net (coderman)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 20:12:16 -0800
Subject: Textual analysis
In-Reply-To: <20031216012655.GA69026@lightship.internal.homeport.org>
References: <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com> 
  <4db65b47830226204720bc7d4070e551@erisiandiscord.de> 
  <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com> 
  <5.2.0.9.0.20031214103323.04689ab0@pop.ix.netcom.com>
  <20031216012655.GA69026@lightship.internal.homeport.org>
Message-ID: <3FDE8620.8050706@charter.net>

Adam Shostack wrote:

>...
>| It's not obvious to me how you'd change your writing style to defeat these 
>| textual analysis schemes--would it really be as simple as changing the 
>| average length of sentences and getting rid of the big words, or would 
>| there still be ways to determine your identity from that text?
>
>So, the question boils down to economics.  There's how much you need
>to communicate, how much someone is willing to spend to tag you, and
>how good their proof needs to be.  I suspect that for most purposes,
>proof does not need to be very strong in relation to your need to
>communicate.
>
An interesting ad-hoc test subject might be Eleusis/ZWITTERION from
a.d.c.; I've wanted to see someone apply these techniques against his
writing after following his posts and being amused/surprised myself.

http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&q=Eleusis+group%3Aalt.drugs.chemistry
http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&q=ZWITTERION+group%3Aalt.drugs.chemistry

Strangely enough, the powers that be showed little interest in his
electronic trail ...

 [ http://www.rhodium.ws/chemistry/eleusis/memoirs.html ]




From adam at homeport.org  Mon Dec 15 17:26:55 2003
From: adam at homeport.org (Adam Shostack)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 20:26:55 -0500
Subject: Textual analysis
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20031214103323.04689ab0@pop.ix.netcom.com>
References: <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>
  <4db65b47830226204720bc7d4070e551@erisiandiscord.de>
  <13fa94dfdddd89f05b3d1b4eeb02db87@dizum.com>
  <5.2.0.9.0.20031214103323.04689ab0@pop.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <20031216012655.GA69026@lightship.internal.homeport.org>

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 10:36:02AM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
| Textual analysis correctly identified the author of _Primary Colors_, 
| though that was from a pretty small field of people with the right level of 
| inside knowledge.  Does anyone know whether there have been real randomized 
| trials of any of the textual analysis software or techniques?  E.g., is 

Not as far as I know, and I spent a bit of time reading through both
Author Unknown, by Don Foster (who named Klien) and "Analyzing for
Authorship," by Jill Farringdon.

Foster is an English professor, and reads the work under analysis, and
then works by the potential authors.  His technique would be described
as intuitive, but the human brain has large power to make linkages.
Analysing for Authorship, from the University of Wales press.

"Analyzing for Authorship" really didn't strike me as better. It uses
a technique called "CUSUM," but the methodology and graphs (as I
recall) vary from text to text, and neither I, nor Alice, who read the
book for ZKS, wondering if we could build this stuff into a product,
was very impressed by it.

| It's not obvious to me how you'd change your writing style to defeat these 
| textual analysis schemes--would it really be as simple as changing the 
| average length of sentences and getting rid of the big words, or would 
| there still be ways to determine your identity from that text?  I'm 
| thinking especially of long discussions of technical topics--if I wrote a 
| five page essay on what to look at when trying to cryptanalyze a new block 
| cipher, I think it would be hard to keep readers who knew me from having a 
| pretty good guess about the author, even if I tried changing terms, being 
| more mathematical and less conversational, etc.  (Though this is more of a 
| problem with humans familiar with my writing style, rather than with 
| automated analysis.)

So, the question boils down to economics.  There's how much you need
to communicate, how much someone is willing to spend to tag you, and
how good their proof needs to be.  I suspect that for most purposes,
proof does not need to be very strong in relation to your need to
communicate.   That is, if Tricky Dick thinks you're Deep Throat, or
Saddam thinks you're the guy who betrayed him, etc.

Adam



-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume




From measl at mfn.org  Mon Dec 15 18:43:07 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 20:43:07 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <p06020473bc03a95edd46@[66.149.49.5]>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312152041250.12885-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> At 5:21 PM +0000 12/15/03, Dave Howe wrote:
> > Iraq was somehow involved in
> >the Trade Center attacks too....
> 
> For those who wondered why Abu Nidal took two in the hat shortly before the
> daisycutters came to play:
> 
> <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/12/14/ixportaltop.html>

This "report" contains all the earmarks of pure propaganda.  It includes
"informations" that repeats the Niger yellowcacke canard, the non-existent
AlQuaeda "connection", etc.  

99 & 44/100ths percent bullshit.


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From measl at mfn.org  Mon Dec 15 18:50:58 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 20:50:58 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <26e41b837ccf711a38dc99d58c198b71@paranoici.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312152047090.12885-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Anonymous wrote:

> I think it's about not becoming evil yourself when you're fighting evil.
> Pretty applicable, yes. We should not be tempted to act in unlawful and
> questionable ways.

Too late.  We refuse to recognize armed combatants, captured on the field of
battle as POWs; we refuse the natural right to a lawyer, to habeus, to basic
human rights.  We are EXACTLY what we claim "the enemy" is.  We are the
enemy...

> It is sticking by international treaties and handling
> everyone in accordance to law and human values that separates us from
> evil men like Saddam.

And since we have not done this, can I go string up Georgie now?  Please?

> This is a good time to show him and his followers
> that all men, even those of his sort, are treated equal and given a fair
> trial as stipulated by the universal declaration of human rights by the
> UN in 1948.

Spare me the bullshit.  Fair trial?  We won't even give them fucking
LAWYERS.  

> And this by the state they call "the great satan". Behaving
> like a lynch mob will make us loosers too.

We are already losers.  We have completely disgraced ourselves here - we are
what we hunt. 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From jya at pipeline.com  Mon Dec 15 21:04:32 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 21:04:32 -0800
Subject: An Analysis of Compromised Remailers
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031214003207.029078d0@idiom.com>
References: <f1e1cd3f0320d68c6782f67e23d15a89@ecn.org>
Message-ID: <E1AW4bH-0004y5-00@maynard.mail.mindspring.net>

This came in response to Cryptome's posting of Len Sassman's
comments on remailers.

-----


From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Mon Dec 15 22:10:22 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:10:22 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Textual analysis
In-Reply-To: <3FDE7D68.4B6A900C@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20031216061022.40534.qmail@web40611.mail.yahoo.com>

> Its like steganalysis.  Its an arms race between measuring your own
> signatures vs. what the Adversary can measure.  If sentence length
> is a metric known to you, you can write filters that warn you.
> Similarly for the Adversary.   You end up in an arms race
> over metrics ---who has the more sensitive ones that the other
> does not control for?

But unlike stego, where the issue is faking the noise, personal fingerprints
can be removed from the message more reliably. You just need the right gloves.

One way is to use automated translators. They all have an "internal language"
and modules that translate to and from it. The internal language is far more
restricted than the natural one, so it doesn't leak many aspects of the
linguistic fingerprint. Going to the internal form is "lossy" compression.
There is no way to recreate the original.

The simplest method is an englih-to-english translator. Better method, and
thicker gloves, can be used by going through several from/to modules for
different languages. In commercial engines the meaning starts to suffer after
3-4 steps but just before that happens the word ordering and use gets
completely skewed.

Of course, you have to buy the translator and not use the online
google/babelfish access. It's the small things that get you ...



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From rah at shipwright.com  Mon Dec 15 19:59:47 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:59:47 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312152041250.12885-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312152041250.12885-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <p060204d0bc04339e44e8@[66.149.49.5]>

At 8:43 PM -0600 12/15/03, J.A. Terranson wrote:
>This "report" contains all the earmarks of pure propaganda.

:-)

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From anonymous at remailer.metacolo.com  Mon Dec 15 15:12:38 2003
From: anonymous at remailer.metacolo.com (Anonymous Sender)
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 23:12:38 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: Idea: Simplified TEMPEST-shielded unit (speculative
  proposal)
Message-ID: <627a54f27ffedc140866b2279bf03169@remailer.metacolo.com>

	While I agree with much of what you say I don't think it's likely that any kind of advanced SIGINT operation was what brought him down. The most important thing to have is intelligence from humans. From insiders. This is partly the problem with the intelligence agencies today. They think too much of the technology and it's possible uses. Good old fashion "spies" will always be the most powerfull way to get information if you can get someone to cooperate. This is also why it is a bit harder in countries with a lot of people willing to kill or be killed for the sake of ideas. Even so it seems that someone sold him for the money in this case. It was bound to happen sooner or later since it's not possible to be on the run without trusting at least one or a few individuals from time to time.




From nobody at paranoici.org  Mon Dec 15 17:36:38 2003
From: nobody at paranoici.org (Anonymous)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 02:36:38 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031215184318.R11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <26e41b837ccf711a38dc99d58c198b71@paranoici.org>

I am not sure I agree. I am no expert on this however. I saw several people commenting the issue of Geneva convention on CNN during the day. Also I saw an expert on this field from another country commenting on the issue stating that it was a clear violation of the convention. In either of these interviews were there any discussion on whether it didn't apply to this specific case due to what clothings he happened to wear or whattever. I got the impression that it was clear that the U.S. treatment wasn't fully appropriate.

Nietsche quote sought: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you."

I think it's about not becoming evil yourself when you're fighting evil. Pretty applicable, yes. We should not be tempted to act in unlawful and questionable ways. It is sticking by international treaties and handling everyone in accordance to law and human values that separates us from evil men like Saddam. This is a good time to show him and his followers that all men, even those of his sort, are treated equal and given a fair trial as stipulated by the universal declaration of human rights by the UN in 1948. And this by the state they call "the great satan". Behaving like a lynch mob will make us loosers too. 




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Tue Dec 16 04:11:13 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 04:11:13 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F71YQYx3G5aYY600018559@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20031216121113.51528.qmail@web21205.mail.yahoo.com>

--- Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Well, of course "Saddam" is going to test
> positive...he's apparently an 
> actual CLONE.
> Actually, from what I understand this is the
> 'original' Saddam (note how 
> much older he seems than the Saddams we've been
> seeing in the press over the 
> last few years


may be he didnt dye is hair . Its very hard to say who
really got caught. Lets see how the attacks on
coilation troops progess in iraq. It should give us
idea who really is in control.

Sarath.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 16 08:58:37 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 08:58:37 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <pdeutv8ol0t7ps3bh96qlbghbqpdtn11mk@4ax.com>

    --
On 16 Dec 2003 at 2:36, Anonymous wrote:
> I saw several people commenting the issue of Geneva 
> convention on CNN during the day. Also I saw an expert on 
> this field from another country commenting on the issue 
> stating that it was a clear violation of the convention. In 
> either of these interviews were there any discussion on 
> whether it didn't apply to this specific case due to what 
> clothings he happened to wear or whattever. I got the 
> impression that it was clear that the U.S. treatment wasn't 
> fully appropriate.

If you were watching the BBC, you would have thought most of
the Iraqi population were outraged by his capture.

I think you are suffering from New York Times syndrome "If even 
the New York Times admits that the kulaks are happy and 
prosperous under Stalin, that shows you how great the Soviet 
Union really must be when you discount all that capitalist 
propaganda." 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     Lh9C/c3J2U0bybWlK/P0f5hnnZT1z+2QEe1K9Ev2
     4cVVWOLkCVsvYQG/u75vRB5xVrL2GjBeaEl+j6x07




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 16 09:10:01 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 09:10:01 -0800
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <3FDF29DB.7060403@cryptnet.net>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <72B91F66-2EA7-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <3FDF29DB.7060403@cryptnet.net>
Message-ID: <AF27D5AF-2FEA-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 16, 2003, at 7:50 AM, V Alex Brennen wrote:

> Tim May wrote:
>> On Dec 14, 2003, at 6:07 PM, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
>>> Hi, I've been admiring your and Tim's contributions, and I was 
>>> wondering if
>>> either of you were planning to subscribe to the (new) news list.
>>>
>>> http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
>>
>> No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the 
>> ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.
>
> I don't even plan on subscribing myself.  I just wanted to get
> the traffic off of cypherpunks.
>
> Back when I first joined this list, cypherpunks where
> known for making news, not reading it. I recognized some
> addresses posting here recently from other lists that may
> suggest a revival is possible if we can clean things up a
> bit.
>
> For the most part, the only people who subscribed to the
> new list are the people who tend to forward news
> announcements.  There seems to be very few consumers
> (4 out of 7 subscribers on the new list - there's 8 total
> so far, one person subscribed twice).
>

This figures. And I doubt subscriptions will ever climb much higher.

We've heard similar clamorings for "chat" and "technical" and 
"announcement" sub-lists many times in the past. Nevermind that the 
main list is not terribly high-volume. Nevermind that sub-lists tends 
to wither away. (As when a relatively small city like Monterey gets 
monterey.config, monterey.events, monterey.forsale, monterey.general, 
and monterey.test, all of which are nearly empty or filled only with 
Usenet spam. But, hey, someone thought that what Monterey needed to 
boost traffic was a bunch of newsgroups. Didn't happen, the traffic, 
that is.)

As for Cypherpunks, this was done. Several Usenet newsgroups, which are 
perfectly fine for news announcements, were created by someone (no 
doubt long-since gone on to other projects). Here they are:

alt.cypherpunks
alt.cypherpunks.announce
alt.cypherpunks.social
alt.cypherpunks.technical

But, hey, I hope the subscribers to the new list send their dumpings 
there.

--Tim May





"I think the root of the problem is that we tend to organize ourselves 
into tribes.  Then people in the tribe are our friends, and people 
outside are our enemies.  I think it happens like this: Someone uses 
Perl, and likes it, and then they use it some more.  But then something 
strange happens.  They start to identify themselves with Perl, as if 
Perl were part of their body, or vice versa.  They're part of the Big 
Perl Tribe.  They want other people to join the Tribe.  If they meet 
someone who doesn't like Perl, it's an insult to the Tribe and a 
personal affront to them."
--Mark Dominus, "Why I Hate Advocacy," 2000




From vab at cryptnet.net  Tue Dec 16 07:50:51 2003
From: vab at cryptnet.net (V Alex Brennen)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 10:50:51 -0500
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <72B91F66-2EA7-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <72B91F66-2EA7-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <3FDF29DB.7060403@cryptnet.net>

Tim May wrote:
> On Dec 14, 2003, at 6:07 PM, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> 
>> Hi, I've been admiring your and Tim's contributions, and I was 
>> wondering if
>> either of you were planning to subscribe to the (new) news list.
>>
>> http://lists.cryptnet.net/mailman/listinfo/cpunx-news
>
> No, we don't need a "cpunx-news" list. This is what Google and the 
> ability to see hundreds of various lists and sites is for.

I don't even plan on subscribing myself.  I just wanted to get
the traffic off of cypherpunks.

Back when I first joined this list, cypherpunks where
known for making news, not reading it. I recognized some
addresses posting here recently from other lists that may
suggest a revival is possible if we can clean things up a
bit.

For the most part, the only people who subscribed to the
new list are the people who tend to forward news
announcements.  There seems to be very few consumers
(4 out of 7 subscribers on the new list - there's 8 total
so far, one person subscribed twice).


     - VAB

-- 
V. Alex Brennen      <vab at cryptnet.net>
   http://www.cryptnet.net/people/vab/
    F A R  B E Y O N D  D R I V E N !




From nobody at dizum.com  Tue Dec 16 03:30:02 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:30:02 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Remailers and TLAs
Message-ID: <a265d84c0502cd54b86d4e21b97121c8@dizum.com>

Even though I agree this issue is important I wouldn't be surprised if NONE were run by TLAs today and NONE has ever been run by TLAs. We will never get any such answer and therefore these speculations will continue. Personally I think it sounds really stupid when I read comments like "you can only trust remailers from pre 9/11" (these kinds of silly/stupid/dumb-paranoid comments are often seen on A.P.A-S). The reason being really that I think they are too stupid and perhaps doesn't really understand what good it would do them to actually operate a few. I may be wrong I guess. When thinking of these things I also remeber having read several comments by remops that actually have been visited by police. Both in U.S. and abroad. The feeling I got from reading their comments is that the police (in case of U.S. I think it was FBI who was inviolved) actually didn't even know what a remailer was. If (and this is a bif "if") that is true in general amongst FBI agents I don't think th
 ere's a major risk of beeing flooded by TLA operated remailers any time soon. But who knows.




From wguerin at tulane.edu  Tue Dec 16 11:02:56 2003
From: wguerin at tulane.edu (wguerin at tulane.edu)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 13:02:56 -0600
Subject: CarBomb Rips Berkeley, CA
Message-ID: <1071601376.3fdf56e071942@webmail.tulane.edu>

CarBomb Rips Berkeley California

A large though prude carbomb rips through the student community of Berkeley, 
CA at exactly 4:20 am pacific time on friday Dec. 12th.

Friday December 12th, 4:20am Pacific, Berkeley California:

The device, a 10 element remotely detonated carbomb rips through the dense 
student populated section of Berkeley, CA less than 4 blocks from the 
southwest corner of the UCB campus.

An audio recording by a student preparing her oral component of a final 
documents the sequential detonation of a 3-element primary fired by a tap off 
the vehicles car horn security system, followed by between 5 and 8 secondary 
charges detonated presumably by burnout. 

Students in the area have exactly 2 comments on the event:

Most living in the adjacent appartments say in a monotonic way: "I'm sorry, I 
do NOT know what you are talking about." and a limited few others, also from 
the same areas, say "I am not at liberty to discuss these issues."

Students from the surrounding appartment complexes are concerned about the 
excessive secrecy regarding this explosion that woke over half the people 
within a quarter mile radius, early friday morning.

The explosive elements, after audio analysis, appear to be roughly equivalent 
to 10 cases of TNT.

At least one Berkeley Police Department officer has said that they had a "NO 
RESPONSE VECTOR" during and prior the time of the explosion. This author has 
not yet determined the meaning of this phrase.

Numerous appartment complexes in the surrounding area have had multiple 
unexplained fire alarms and other strange activities in the last few days.

No mass media coverage or documentation has been available to this author, and 
most parties researching this event are hesitant to discuss for obvious 
reasons.

--------

(forwarded - WLG)




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Dec 16 13:09:57 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 15:09:57 -0600
Subject: Saddam drugged says daughter.
Message-ID: <20031216210957.GA7678@cybershamanix.com>

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3324021.stm

  And probably they're using drugs to "interview" Saddam, which explains the
quick following busts. 


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From s.schear at comcast.net  Tue Dec 16 15:57:37 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 15:57:37 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031216222014.B11657-100000@localhost>
References: <23e56c72739dd8261f09d2cc1b4df618@dizum.com>
  <20031216222014.B11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031216153605.051dcf90@mail.comcast.net>

At 03:18 PM 12/16/2003, Jim Dixon wrote:
>You should try to remember how the US Civil War ended.  The armed forces
>of the South surrendered.  Lee handed his sword to Grant.  I believe that
>Grant returned it - and allowed each Southern soldier to keep a rifle and
>a mule.  Lee and the other leaders of the South lived out their lives in
>peace.  There were of course acts of terror on both sides, but on the
>whole the combatants behaved decently. There was considerable mutual
>respect, because both sides recognized that the other had behaved
>honourably.  The same cannot be said of Saddam Hussain.

I have no idea what led to believe this.  The North behaved so dishonorably
during the war that it essentially rewrote the book on the rules of war for
the rest of the world.  Most academic historians, without legal training,
have played down the war crimes issue, as if it has no bearing on those who
win a war. It does.

In the early seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius, a Dutch lawyer, came forth
with The Law of War and Peace, which was translated into English in 1646.
It immediately became the bible of the law of nations and found its way
into the courts, libraries, and governments of Europe. Grotius soon became
"the father of modern international law." Grotius held that states, like
people, are bound by a code of law, with duties and prohibitions that are
universal, reasonable, and unchangeable. One nation, for example, may not
attack another. After reviewing the practices of ancient nations,
philosophers and legists, Grotius concluded that "authorities generally
as-sign to wars three justifiable causes: defence, recovery of property,
and punishment."

Grotius noted that the German barbarians of the north had a strong code and
"were the most just: they refrained from war unless attacked." The Ro-man
lawyer Cicero would have been the father of ancient international law. In
his De Republica (30.23) he set forth the principle that "wars undertaken
without reason are unjust wars. Except for the purpose of avenging or
re-pulsing an enemy, no just war can be waged."

By the nineteenth century, the concept of a just war became a part of the
law of nations even though it had been an unwritten rule of society since
the Middle Ages. Many of the tax rebellions in Europe, Spain, and England
were resisting revenue demands of unjust wars, wars that were not for the
defense of the realms. That same principle became part of the U.S.
Constitution, which restricted tax expenditures for "the common Defense."

At West Point cadets were taught the principles of Grotius and
international law under General Order no. 12, by none other than Lincoln's
top commander, General Henry Halleck, who wrote the book. No general
dur-ing the Civil War can claim ignorance of the laws of wars, especially
the laws against the plunder and devastation of private property. Here is
an ex-cerpt from General Order no. 12, written by Halleck on the wanton
plun-der of private property: "The inevitable consequences . . . are
universal pil-lage and a total relaxation of discipline; the loss of
private property, and the violation of individual rights . . . and the
ordinary peaceful and non-combatants are converted into bitter and
implacable enemies. The system is, therefore, regarded as both impolitic
and unjust, and is coming into gen-eral disuse among the most civilized
nations."

But Halleck's book and teachings weren't the only condemnation of plunder
of civilian property. On 24 April 1863, under Lincoln's signature, the army
promulgated to its officers General Order no. 100, which came to be known
as the Lieber Code and eventually received acclaim throughout the military
in the Western world. Halleck was a close friend of its author, Professor
Francis Lieber of Columbia University. A month after this order was given
to the officers in the Union army, Professor Lieber wrote to the top
commander, General Halleck

"I know by letters . . . that the wanton destruction of property by our men
is alarming. It does incalculable injury. It demoralizes our troops, it
annihilates wealth irrevocably and makes a return to a state of peace and
peaceful minds more and more difficult. Your order [to the offi-cers] . . .
with reference to the Code, and pointing out the disastrous consequences of
reckless devastation, in a manner that it might not furnish our reckless
enemy with new arguments for his savagery."

Halleck remained general in chief until Lincoln fired him in 1864 and
appointed Grant as top commander. 1t was under Grant that the Lieber Code,
now in the hands of all leading officers, was disregarded, and pillage and
plunder became the general order of the final year of the war. Sherman and
Sheridan could not possibly have undertaken their devastation of the South
if they had followed this new military code on the laws of war. They also
turned away from their education at West Point and the laws of war they had
learned there under Halleck.

Years after the war Sherman wrote a letter to a friend in which he
acknowledged that he knew better that at West Point he had been taught that
the pillage he brought to the South was a crime, punishable by death: "1
know that in the beginning 1, too, had the old West Point notion that
pil-lage was a capital crime, and punished it by shooting."

American generals were frilly aware that Napoleon was punished and banished
from Europe for engaging in aggressive wars over a twenty year period. The
law of warfare was being enforced for the first tune against a loser. But
winners need not worry, then or now, as war crimes, by and large, are only
committed by defeated leaders. In the Civil War, Lincoln and his generals
were immune from the laws of war because they won.

Unfortunately, during the nineteenth century, Americans seemed to believe
that they had a divine right to aggression. It was the destiny of the
American people and government to rule over North America--all of it. And
this was God's plan. This made the war against Mexico justified, even
though in General Grant's memoirs he condemned the war as one of
ag-gression, and so did Lincoln as a congressman at the time. This may
explain why so much has been written about who fired the first shot of the
Civil War, as if that justifies the total war that engulfed America, even
though that Fourth of July display of cannon at Fort Sumter didn't hurt
any-one. It was not Pearl Harbor.

The laws of war not only focused on the aggressor defender issue, they also
set forth rules about how armies and especially its leaders and gen-erals
had to conduct themselves. Historians with a strongly Northern Lincoln
idolizing viewpoint do not realize the criminal element in the way the war
was conducted criminal by the laws of nations. The end clearly justified
the means. Consider this observation by a prominent historian, Stephen
Oates, who describes Lincoln's method of warfare in glowing terms:
"Lincoln's armies were mopping up the Confederacy in all direc-tions,
waging scorched earth warfare against the Rebel economy and civil-ian
morale with ruthless efficiency .... Lincoln fully endorsed Sheridan's
burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman's brutal March to the Sea through
Georgia, and the Carolina's Brigadier General James H. Wilson's destructive
raid across Alabama. Such warfare earned Lincoln and his gen-erals undying
hatred in Dixie, but it brought victory."



>The people of the South did not walk in terror of Robert E Lee and
>Jefferson Davis. The people of the North were not murdered, raped, and
>tortured by Grant and Lincoln.

In addition to abandoning the Constitution, the Lincoln administration
established another ominous precedent by deciding to abandon international
law and the accepted moral code of civilized societies and wage war on
civilians. General Sherman announced that to secessionists all of them,
women and children included--death is mercy.

Lincoln and his generals violated the laws of nations, and Northern
historians seem unaware of that. Another famous historian from Princeton,
James M. McPherson, goes even further than Oates. He doesn't hesitate to
call Lincoln's war strategy brilliant, even using the term "genius," and
Sherman, with Lincoln's adoration, is a great noble general for his
devastation of civilian property in his march to the sea. When a Southerner
called Sherman a barbarian for what he was doing, Sherman replied that a
commander "may take your house, your fields, your everything, and turn you
out helpless to starve. It may be wrong, but that don't alter the case."

His acknowledgment that "it may be wrong" may have come from his education
at West Point, and contrary to the famous general's excuse, it does alter
the case it makes Sherman a war criminal. Writing to General Halleck in
September 1864, amid his infamous destruction of civilian property and
life, Sherman again excused himself: "If people [civilians] raise a howl
against my barbarity and cruelty I will answer them that war is war." This
is the same general who later, in the Indian wars, used the same philosophy
when he said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," which he meant
literally. Incidentally, l am not the only historian to see the commission
of war crimes by Sherman and his confederates in arms. Otto Cisenschirnl,
writing in the January 1964 issue of Civil War Times, less than twenty
years after the Nuremberg war crimes trials, asserted that Sherman should
have been hanged as a war criminal.'

While the generals were quite pleased with themselves over their barbarism
and war crimes, the soldiers who had to carry out these orders were not so
pleased with the work. Robert Shaw, a student at Harvard who had risen
through the ranks to be promoted to colonel in early 1863, was commanded by
a superior officer to burn the city of Darien, Georgia. He wrote to his
wife that "for myself, I have gone through the war so far without dishonor,
and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and robber, and the same
applies to every officer in my regiment."  (This is the same Shaw portrayed
in the movie Glory.)

Too bad the top gun, General Sherman, didn't feel that way. Sherman lived,
but Shaw, this remarkable officer, was killed in action on Morris Is-land,
South Carolina, a month after writing the above letter.

Lincoln's policy of crushing dissenters with overwhelming military might
was continued after the war with the federal government's eradication of
the Plains Indians by many of the same generals who had guided the North's
war effort (particularly Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan). The stated purpose
of this campaign against the Plains Indians was to make way for the
government subsidized transcontinental railroads. The quest for empire had
become the primary goal of government in America.

Lincoln's policy of crushing dissenters with overwhelming military might
was continued after the war with the federal government's eradication of
the Plains Indians by many of the same generals who had guided the North's
war effort (particularly Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan). The stated purpose
of this campaign against the Plains Indians was to make way for the
government subsidized transcontinental railroads. The quest for empire had
become the primary goal of government in America.

steve




From rah at shipwright.com  Tue Dec 16 13:14:31 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 16:14:31 -0500
Subject: [fc-announce] FC'04: Call for Participation
Message-ID: <p0602044bbc0525e9a649@[66.149.49.5]>

--- begin forwarded text



From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 16 17:11:36 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 17:11:36 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <23e56c72739dd8261f09d2cc1b4df618@dizum.com>
References: <23e56c72739dd8261f09d2cc1b4df618@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <F617B240-302D-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 16, 2003, at 1:50 PM, Nomen Nescio wrote:

> This makes me a bit curious. Tell me, is your opinion then that the 
> U.S. has done nothing questionable here? You don't feel that treating 
> a former head of state (regardless of what you happen to think of that 
> person) in this manner and videorecording it AND transmitting it to 
> the entire globe violates the spirit of the convention? You feel this 
> was the right thing to do? You would have no problem seing a U.S. or 
> European leader being treated the same way?
>


Who is the "you" referred to here?

Please quote or refer to comments you ("you") are responding to, 
especially when you ask questions.


--Tim May




From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Dec 16 08:55:43 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 17:55:43 +0100
Subject: cpunk-like meeting report
In-Reply-To: <3FDF29DB.7060403@cryptnet.net>
References: <20031215020818.75199241AE9@gnu-darwin.org>
  <72B91F66-2EA7-11D8-A59A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <3FDF29DB.7060403@cryptnet.net>
Message-ID: <20031216165542.GS22728@leitl.org>

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 10:50:51AM -0500, V Alex Brennen wrote:

> I don't even plan on subscribing myself.  I just wanted to get
> the traffic off of cypherpunks.

Fair enough. You can remove the list, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't give a damn about posting copyrighted content; no point posting to a
closed-archive list if you've got cold feet. I can hide that information
on my own hard drive as well.

> Back when I first joined this list, cypherpunks where
> known for making news, not reading it. I recognized some

The world has moved on since, unfortunately. Wake up, and smell the Kafka.

> addresses posting here recently from other lists that may
> suggest a revival is possible if we can clean things up a
> bit.

Yeah, you and John Galt.

> For the most part, the only people who subscribed to the
> new list are the people who tend to forward news
> announcements.  There seems to be very few consumers

Which part of "collaborative news filtering" you don't understand?
Ideally, one should a producer and consumer in one person.
Alas, most people are passive slobs, so it takes a lot of them to become
critical.

> (4 out of 7 subscribers on the new list - there's 8 total
> so far, one person subscribed twice).

Transhumantech has 300 subscribers. Five of them are active posters.
I consider the list a success, and read it daily. It took several years to
get there.

Cypherpunk agenda is supposed to be a _widely_ held secret.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 16 18:17:49 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:17:49 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <23e56c72739dd8261f09d2cc1b4df618@dizum.com>
References: <pdeutv8ol0t7ps3bh96qlbghbqpdtn11mk@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FDF4C4D.29842.12DD2C4@localhost>

    --
On 16 Dec 2003 at 22:50, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> This makes me a bit curious. Tell me, is your opinion then 
> that the U.S. has done nothing questionable here? You don't 
> feel that treating a former head of state (regardless of what 
> you happen to think of that person) in this manner and 
> videorecording it AND transmitting it to the entire globe 
> violates the spirit of the convention?

I assume you are addressing me.

If I had my druthers,  I would hang him from a lamp post by one 
arm for the Iraqi populace to use as pinata.

The geneva accords are an agreement between honorable warriors 
to treat each other honorably in war and victory, and a 
explanation of what constitutes honorable war fighting.  I
doubt too many heads of state qualify.  I am quite sure Saddam
does not.

> I don't know, but I have this feeling that just maybe this
> wasn't the most appropriate way to behave all things
> considered. This is a tense and volatile region as it is. I
> think we all should exercise caution

Nothing like a bit of pinata thumping give youthful energy and
high spirits a safe outlet. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     CSjJWocwbOahKDLO63mBolSDS+4iUP3qS67zd4hs
     41KsROdMjKp3F9n3uxJmghe632ARDSHhf9s9MR276




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Tue Dec 16 15:59:59 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:59:59 -0500
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <3FDCC93C.97ED60EF@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031216182044.04688c10@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 12:34 PM 12/14/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:

...
> >One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't
> >actually make peace.
>
>Good points, but not entirely true.  For instance, we could stop the
>Jihad (tm) (including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all 
>foreign aid,
>following the good general's advice, "Trade with all, make treaties with 
>none, and
>beware of foreign entanglements."

So, I think that's pretty sound advice, but I don't think any of the top 
ten reasons for supporting it involve whether Al Qaida will stop attacking 
us.  Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be 
made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning 
American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small 
part of that calculation.  For example, we could presumably beat China in a 
war, but such a war would be enormously more expensive and dangerous than 
fighting Al Qaida.  If continuing to play world's policeman improves our 
chances of avoiding war with China, at the cost of bringing about some 
attacks from Al Qaida, that's a win for us.

Now, I suspect that playing world's policeman does *not* make us less 
likely to get into really dangerous and expensive war, and often gets us 
caught up in little wars that could expand into bigger ones.  (The Korean 
war apparently came relatively close to getting us into a war with China, 
for example.)  But there's at least some argument to be made about 
that--for example, by ensuring the security of Japan and Germany, we have 
avoided having two potentially very well-armed and dangerous opponents 
wandering around, possibly going on an empire-building spree that would 
have forced us into a nuclear war with them sooner or later.

...
> >Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the
> >lone warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that
> >we finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed
> >pro-choice activist.  What's your next move?
>
>Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the
>clinics.  Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to
>sway a govt.

Isn't he alleged to have also done the Olympic Park bombing?  (Who knows 
whether he really did, or whether the FBI just assumed he had so they'd 
only have one domestic terrorist at large.)

Anyway, my point is that it's never going to be acceptable for the US 
government to pull out of making decisions about policy within the US.  A 
campaign of terrorism against abortion clinics, or against liquor stores, 
or against bookstores, can't be responded to by changes in policy to 
appease the terrorists without giving up on any kind of a free society.


--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Tue Dec 16 19:04:43 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 19:04:43 -0800 (PST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <d1.1725104.2d1112dc@aol.com>
Message-ID: <200312170304.hBH34hUR030780@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Natt writes:

> You're one-hundred percent correct. I saw that sack of shit Rumsfeld on 
> a press conference this afternoon where he answered the specific 
> question of does parading Saddam around violate the Geneva convention.?

Rumsfeld also revealed that the CIA has taken over the Saddam
interrogation, and pundits are speculating that they will use the same
torture techniques that are being used on the "detainees."

Later today, a source close to the interrogation said that Saddam would be
subjected to stress and sleep deprivation.  Basically, teams of
interrogators will ask questions over and over again, and no one will get
any rest until answers are provided.

Bill Bennett said just a few minutes ago, that Saddam's capture made
America safer, because the world has learned that "If you mess with
America, you wind up in a hole."

A friend of mine, when asked what he wanted from Santa for Christmas,
replied, "A crater the size of DC."

Clearly, the world's leaders are looking closely at Saddam's treatment,
and realizing how easily pissing off the Bush family could result in them
being shown on International TV unbathed, unshaven, checked for fleas, and
bent over for a rectal probe.

Of course, all of this is provoking a new arms race of astronomical
proportions, as the other nations of the world realize international law
means nothing, and that the US and Israel think they can judge everyone
else on the planet, no one can judge them, and they can act with impunity.

This will, in a few years, result in the usual "force meets force plus
brains" low level format of the arrogant, and after a few hangings, and a
big round of applause, life on the planet will move on.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Tue Dec 16 16:06:24 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 19:06:24 -0500
Subject: Don't worry...it's just one of Saddam's doubles
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F71YQYx3G5aYY600018559@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031216190524.0468db90@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 02:08 PM 12/15/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
...
>Well, of course "Saddam" is going to test positive...he's apparently an 
>actual CLONE.
>Actually, from what I understand this is the 'original' Saddam (note how 
>much older he seems than the Saddams we've been seeing in the press over 
>the last few years), but he hasn't actually controlled things for a couple 
>of decades. The Saddam we're really looking for is approximately Saddam 
>#3, and he's still at large, and directing the insurgency.

_The Boys from Baghdad_, coming soon to a theater near you.

>-TD

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From hinde at xs4all.nl  Tue Dec 16 10:56:27 2003
From: hinde at xs4all.nl (Hinde ten Berge)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 19:56:27 +0100
Subject: [fc-announce] FC'04: Call for Participation
Message-ID: <mailman.824.1576007640.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

            Financial Cryptography '04
                9-12 February 2004
              Key West, Florida, USA


              Call for Participation

Financial Cryptography is the premier international
forum for education, exploration, and debate at the
heart of one theme: Money and trust in the digital
world. Dedicated to the relationship between cryptography
and data security and cutting-edge financial and payment
technologies and trends, the conference brings together
top data-security specialists and scientists with
economists, bankers, implementers, and policy makers.

Financial Cryptography includes a program of invited
talks, academic presentations, technical demonstrations,
and panel discussions. These explore a range of topics
in their full technical and interdisciplinary complexity:
Emerging financial instruments and trends, legal
regulation of financial technologies and privacy issues,
encryption and authentication techologies, digital cash,
and smartcard payment systems -- among many others.

The conference proceedings containing all accepted
submissions will be published in the Springer-Verlag
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series after
the conference. A pre-proceedings containing preliminary
versions of the papers will be distributed at the
conference.

More information on the invited speakers is available
on the web site, as well as the list of accepted papers
and the preliminary schedule (see below as well).

Registration for Financial Cryptography 2004 is now open;
details and online registration can be found at
http://fc04.ifca.ai along with information about
discounted hotel accommodation and travel.

Financial Cryptography is organized by the International
Financial Cryptography Association (IFCA). More
information can be obtained from the IFCA web site at
http://www.ifca.ai or by contacting the conference
general chair, Hinde ten Berge, at hinde at xs4all.nl.



            Financial Cryptography '04
               Preliminary Schedule


Sunday February 8

[tba] Registration and Welcome Reception


Monday February 9

08:45-09:00     Opening Remarks

09:00-10:00     Keynote Speaker: Jack Selby

10:00-11:00     Keynote Speaker: Ron Rivest

11:00-11:30     Coffee Break

11:30-12:30     Loyalty and Micropayment Systems

    Microcredits for Verifiable Foreign Service
    Provider Metering
    Craig Gentry and Zulfikar Ramzan

    A Privacy-Friendly Loyalty System Based on Discrete
    Logarithms over Elliptic Curves
    Matthias Enzmann, Marc Fischlin, and Markus Schneider

12:30-14:00     Lunch

14:00-15:00     User Authentication

    Addressing Online Dictionary Attacks with Login
    Histories and Humans-in-the-Loop
    S. Stubblebine and P.C. van Oorschot

    Call Center Customer Verification by Query-Directed
    Passwords
    Lawrence OGorman, Smit Begga, and John Bentley


Tuesday February 10


09:00-10:00     Keynote Speaker: Jacques Stern
                (Session Chair: Moti Yung)

10:00-11:00     Keynote Speaker: Simon Pugh
                (Session Chair: Moti Yung)

11:0011:30     Coffee Break

11:30-12:30     E-voting
                (Session Chair: Helger Lipmaa)

    The Vector-Ballot E-Voting Approach
    Aggelos Kiayias and Moti Yung

    Efficient Maximal Privacy in Voting and Anonymous
    Broadcast
    Jens Groth

12:30-14:00     Lunch

14:00-15:00     Panel: Building Usable Security Systems
                Moderator: Andrew Patrick

    Usability and Acceptablity of Biometric Security
    Systems
    Andrew Patrick, National Research Council of Canada

    Risk Perception Failures in Computer Security
    L. Jean Camp, Harvard University

    Visualization Tools for Security Administrators
    Bill Yurcik, NCSA, Univeristy of Illinois

20:00-21:00     General meeting

21:00-          Rump session


Wednesday February 11

09:00-10:00     Keynote Speaker: Jon Peha

10:00-10:30     Coffee Break

10:30-12:30     Auctions and Lotteries
                (Session Chair: Roger Dingledine)

    Interleaving Cryptography and Mechanism Design: The
    Case of Online Auctions
    Edith Elkind and Helger Lipmaa

    Secure Generalized Vickrey Auction without Third-Party
    Servers
    Makoto Yokoo and Koutarou Suzuki

    Electronic National Lotteries
    Elisavet Konstantinou, Vasiliki Liagokou, Paul
    Spirakis, Yannis C. Stamatiou, and Moti Yung

    Identity-based Chameleon Hash and Applications
    Giuseppe Ateniese and Breno de Medeiros

12:30-14:00     Lunch


Thursday February 12

09:0010:30     Game Theoretic and Cryptographic Tools

    Selecting Correlated Random Actions
    Vanessa Teague

    An Efficient and Usable Multi-Show Non-Transferable
    Anonymous Credential System
    Pino Persiano and Ivan Visconti

    The Ephemeral Pairing Problem
    Jaap-Henk Hoepman

10:3011:00     Coffee Break

11:0013:00     Mix Networks and Anonymous Communications
                (Session Chair: Masayuki Abe)

    Mixminion: Strong Anonymity for Financial Cryptography
    Nick Mathewson and Roger Dingledine

    Practical Anonymity for the Masses with MorphMix
    Marc Rennhard and Bernhard Plattner

    Stopping Timing Attacks in Low-Latency Mix-Based
    Systems
    Brian N. Levine, Michael K. Reiter, and Chenxi Wang

    Provable Unlinkability Against Traffic Analysis
    Ron Berman, Amos Fiat, and Amnon Ta-Shma

_______________________________________________
fc-announce mailing list
fc-announce at ifca.ai
http://mail.ifca.ai/mailman/listinfo/fc-announce

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Tue Dec 16 18:01:00 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:01:00 EST
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention? 
Message-ID: <d1.1725104.2d1112dc@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/15/2003 9:44:03 PM Eastern Standard Time,
timcmay at got.net writes:

> There are specific clauses which refer to not publically humiliating a
> prisoner. I'm surprised the Agitprop Division didn't show video of
> Saddam taking his first dump while in custody.
>
> Saddam is not a good guy. But this went beyond the pale.


You're one-hundred percent correct. I saw that sack of shit Rumsfeld on a
press conference this afternoon where he answered the specific question of
does
parading Saddam around violate the Geneva convention.  His answer was that
some
things are more important, that it was necessary to show to the world that
Saddam was in custody and he wasn't going to be back in power, etc. He added
that Saddam is being treated humanly, and he takes offense to anyone who
suggests
otherwise.

Regards,  Matt-




From roy at rant-central.com  Tue Dec 16 18:31:51 2003
From: roy at rant-central.com (Roy M. Silvernail)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:31:51 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <d1.1725104.2d1112dc@aol.com>
References: <d1.1725104.2d1112dc@aol.com>
Message-ID: <200312162131.51021.roy@rant-central.com>

On Tuesday 16 December 2003 21:01, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 12/15/2003 9:44:03 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>
> timcmay at got.net writes:
> > There are specific clauses which refer to not publically humiliating a
> > prisoner. I'm surprised the Agitprop Division didn't show video of
> > Saddam taking his first dump while in custody.
> >
> > Saddam is not a good guy. But this went beyond the pale.
>
> You're one-hundred percent correct. I saw that sack of shit Rumsfeld on a
> press conference this afternoon where he answered the specific question of
> does
> parading Saddam around violate the Geneva convention.  His answer was that
> some
> things are more important, that it was necessary to show to the world that
> Saddam was in custody and he wasn't going to be back in power, etc. He
> added that Saddam is being treated humanly, and he takes offense to anyone
> who suggests
> otherwise.

In other words, "yes".  Following in the footsteps of  Richard Perle.

bI think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right 
thing.b  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1089158,00.html)

'Scuse me whilst I go vomit.




From nobody at dizum.com  Tue Dec 16 13:50:05 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 22:50:05 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <pdeutv8ol0t7ps3bh96qlbghbqpdtn11mk@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <23e56c72739dd8261f09d2cc1b4df618@dizum.com>

This makes me a bit curious. Tell me, is your opinion then that the U.S. has done nothing questionable here? You don't feel that treating a former head of state (regardless of what you happen to think of that person) in this manner and videorecording it AND transmitting it to the entire globe violates the spirit of the convention? You feel this was the right thing to do? You would have no problem seing a U.S. or European leader being treated the same way? 

I think we do have to take into consideration too that a lot of people (I'm not saying it's the majority or anything but still a lot of people) in some arab countries like Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia do have some sympathy with Saddam. This has nothing to do with supporting his crimes like the chemical warfare but more general the fact that he was a leader in the region who stood up against U.S. and Israel. Also the Palestinians received a lot of finansial help from Saddam.

I don't know, but I have this feeling that just maybe this wasn't the most appropriate way to behave all things considered. This is a tense and volatile region as it is. I think we all should exercise caution and careful considerations and try to not humiliate the pride of the people in this region. Remember that in many cases this is almost all they have left.

Just my 2c.




From jdd at dixons.org  Tue Dec 16 15:18:45 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 23:18:45 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <23e56c72739dd8261f09d2cc1b4df618@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <20031216222014.B11657-100000@localhost>

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:

> This makes me a bit curious. Tell me, is your opinion then that the
> U.S. has done nothing questionable here?

No one seems to question certain facts:

*  Saddam had hundreds of thousands of Iraqis tortured and killed
*  he used chemical weapons casually, wiping out at least one Kurdish
   village of several thousand people
*  he deliberately destroyed the swamp Arabs and the environment that
   they lived in
*  his regime treated POWs brutally; few people in Britain will forget
   the pilot who was badly beaten during the first Gulf War and then
   displayed on TV; few Americans will forget the wounded POWs
   interrogated on TV in the second

The people on this list are less likely to remember that Saddam's coming
to power was marked by the public humiliation and hanging of Americans
unfortunate enough to be in Baghdad at the time.

>                                          You don't feel that treating
> a former head of state (regardless of what you happen to think of that
> person) in this manner and videorecording it AND transmitting it to
> the entire globe violates the spirit of the convention?

You mean, do I think that it is somehow immoral to have examined him for
head lice and then checked his teeth?  Well, no.  Do I think that the
Geneva convention is there to protect bandits, thugs, and tyrants?  Well,
no. If you read it, the focus is on protecting civilians and captured
soldiers from the sort of abuse that Saddam considered normal.

>                                                         You feel this
> was the right thing to do? You would have no problem seing a U.S. or
> European leader being treated the same way?

Hitler, you mean?  Or did you have Milosevic in mind?

You should try to remember how the US Civil War ended.  The armed forces
of the South surrendered.  Lee handed his sword to Grant.  I believe that
Grant returned it - and allowed each Southern soldier to keep a rifle and
a mule.  Lee and the other leaders of the South lived out their lives in
peace.  There were of course acts of terror on both sides, but on the
whole the combatants behaved decently. There was considerable mutual
respect, because both sides recognized that the other had behaved
honourably.  The same cannot be said of Saddam Hussain.

The people of the South did not walk in terror of Robert E Lee and
Jefferson Davis. The people of the North were not murdered, raped, and
tortured by Grant and Lincoln.

> I think we do have to take into consideration too that a lot of people
> (I'm not saying it's the majority or anything but still a lot of
> people) in some arab countries like Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi
> Arabia do have some sympathy with Saddam. This has nothing to do with
> supporting his crimes like the chemical warfare but more general the
> fact that he was a leader in the region who stood up against U.S. and
> Israel. Also the Palestinians received a lot of finansial help from
> Saddam.

Yeah, you're right.  I forgot that Saddam paid $25,000 or so to the family
of each Palestinian 'soldier' who blew himself up, slaughtering innocent
civilians in the sort of attack that the Geneva conventions were designed
to prevent.  The Palestinian suicide bombers wear no uniforms, they
conceal their weapons, they deliberately target civilians.

This has nothing to do with the justice for the Palestinians or whether
the Israelis are right or wrong.  The Geneva conventions, which you seem
to be advocating, were established to set limits on the behaviour of
combatants in war, to encourage the sort of peaceful resolution that
marked the end of the American Civil War.  What Saddam wanted was just the
opposite. He advertised and paid for routine violations of the Geneva
conventions in Israel.  He wanted hatred and endless violence.

> I don't know, but I have this feeling that just maybe this wasn't the
> most appropriate way to behave all things considered. This is a tense
> and volatile region as it is. I think we all should exercise caution
> and careful considerations and try to not humiliate the pride of the
> people in this region. Remember that in many cases this is almost all
> they have left.

The US plan appears to intend to stall until the Iraqis have regained
sovereignty and then turn Saddam over to the new government, which will
probably follow local practice and execute him.  This will please tens of
millions of Iraqis.  The UK government, which has a long tradition of
ignoring the wishes of the British people in regard to capital punishment,
will tut-tut.  The ex-governor of Texas will doubtless say again that he
does not intend to express any personal opinions in the matter -- and
smile.

I spent several years travelling in that part of the world.  From my
experience, I think that the people of the region, who are rightfully
proud of their heritage, of their traditions and beliefs, will respect the
US and the UK more for having shown obviously superior strength, and for
having then given way to the wishes of the Iraqi people.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 16 22:40:24 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:40:24 -0600 (CST)
Subject: TSA/FBI No-Fly Nexus
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312170031460.14424-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

Terrorism: The New Aviation Threat
http://www.c-spanstore.com/172153.html

Since I started loading this video stream I am now watching several hours
ago, I no longer remember where I saw the link I clicked on that has allowed
me to watch this without buying it :-(  But the regular purchase link is
above.

This presentation by an FBI Counterintel agent (Art Cummings) is mostly a
standard promo for the bureau, a bunch of rah-rah, we're great, terrorists
suck, etc., but he opens with a firm statement that the TSA no-fly list is a
direct product of the FBI itself ("we feed the information to TSA").

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the FBI stated several times (and
in several places) that TSA's list is their own, and that FBI has nothing to
do with it?

Does this data provide anything for John's suit?

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Tue Dec 16 23:31:58 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:31:58 +0000
Subject: TSA/FBI No-Fly Nexus
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312170031460.14424-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312170031460.14424-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <20031217073158.GB32152@dreams.soze.net>

J.A. Terranson (2003-12-17 06:40Z) wrote:

> Terrorism: The New Aviation Threat
> http://www.c-spanstore.com/172153.html
> 
> Since I started loading this video stream I am now watching several hours
> ago, I no longer remember where I saw the link I clicked on that has allowed
> me to watch this without buying it :-(  But the regular purchase link is
> above.

rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/ldrive/ter082102_aviation.rm

www.c-span.org and search in the "video search" input box.

-- 
I am a carnivorous fish swimming in    #+#  Banking establishments are
two waters, the cold water of art and  -*+  more dangerous than standing
the hot water of science.  - S. Dali   #-#  armies.  - Thomas Jefferson




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Tue Dec 16 23:50:24 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:50:24 +0000
Subject: TSA/FBI No-Fly Nexus
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312170031460.14424-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312170031460.14424-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <20031217075024.GC32152@dreams.soze.net>

J.A. Terranson (2003-12-17 06:40Z) wrote:

> Terrorism: The New Aviation Threat
> http://www.c-spanstore.com/172153.html

C-SPAN likes to play games splitting up videos into 2 or more parts.
The part you mention is probably in the second half...
rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/ldrive/ter082102_aviation2.rm

-- 
I am a carnivorous fish swimming in    #+#  Banking establishments are
two waters, the cold water of art and  -*+  more dangerous than standing
the hot water of science.  - S. Dali   #-#  armies.  - Thomas Jefferson




From jdd at dixons.org  Wed Dec 17 00:36:51 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 08:36:51 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <449c1931cf1a71d8829cce590a81a658@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:

> Your whole post is based on the feeling that we're gonna do what they
> did to us.

There were at least three points made in my post:

* The treatment of Saddam seems well within the rules laid down by the
  Geneva conventions.

* On the other hand, he and his government routinely violated the Geneva
  conventions and encouraged others to do so.

* The US and the UK should step back and let Iraqis decide what to do
  with Saddam.

Nowhere did I advocate gassing villages, rape, murder, torture, invasion
of neighboring countries for all that good loot, setting off explosives in
crowds, nor even the beatings handed out to captured British pilots.

>           In doing so you have manifested what has been written here
> about "gasing into the abyss" and so on.

I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked and
getting a haircut.  :-|

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From nobody at dizum.com  Wed Dec 17 00:00:05 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:00:05 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <449c1931cf1a71d8829cce590a81a658@dizum.com>

Tim, sorry it was unclear from my post whom I was referring to. It was "James A. Donald". I did put his message id in a reply-to header.

Jim Dixon wrote:
> Hitler, you mean?  Or did you have Milosevic in mind?

No what I meant was what IF somehow Bush or Blaire or some other high ranking coalition politician were captured by Iraq during the war and was treated in the same way. I can only presume you would support Saddam's soldiers checking Bush for lice then. You are also utterly missing the point and you are one pretty good example of how "the mob" are thinking. EVERYONE, including Saddam, Pol Pot or whattever should be treated in accordance with the laws by us who call ourselves the free democratic part of the world. Then they shall stand trial. A fair trial and being represented by lawyers.

What would be more satisfying for the critics of U.S. than to see U.S. not being able to get its act together and instead conducting itself in a manner inconsistent with international law during this rather criticl phase of the Iraqi campaign. Mark my words, U.S. will be in regret later.

Jim Dixon, you also wrote some half trouths on the subject of Palestinians and the support they received.

You should read up on this subject. Saddam also has a history of building up edicational institutions and so on. He recived awards by U.N. earlier on for his wellfare programs and the development Iraq was gaining. Anyone can check this up, just call U.N. in NY and you'll receive a few references I'm sure. What I mean by this is not to defend him in any way but I feel that this rewriting of history and propaganda is serving noone in the long run. If you believe that 100% of the arab world in their harts and minds hate Saddam you're wring. Very wrong.

Steve Schear: thanks for your interesting post! Some people need to learn more of that.

I also noticed on the news that CIA was conducting the questioning of Saddam. (Did anyone expect anything else?!) I guess this also means that U.S. now will join all dicatators and awful beasts in performing various forms of abuse and torture on him. Iraq formally removed the death penalty just a few weeks ago. Regardless of what you feel about that in general, I think it's embarrasing once again to see U.S. almost "lobbying" against the Iraqis to have them not honouring their own laws to satisfy Bush on this specific issue! Remember there's only one reason for Bush wanting to see Saddam dead and that he does. And that is the fact that "Saddam tried to kill my papa" as Bush put it, I've seen it in interviews myself.

Jim Dixon, going through your post again I see yet another half trough, you write
> The people on this list are less.. public humiliation and hanging of Americans..

And you seem to forget that U.S. was in bed with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war era and that there was a friendly tone then. U.S. officials met with Iraqi, I think that Tareq Azis met with Reagan even? 

Your whole post is based on the feeling that we're gonna do what they did to us. In doing so you have manifested what has been written here about "gasing into the abyss" and so on. You have become what you hunt. Be ware.

It is my opinion that we shall distinguish ourselves from these bastards by not committing their deeds ourselves. You seem not to agree on that. And that is a major mistake.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 17 09:43:32 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:43:32 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <9651uv0pdlasi26q12b07l0bfo62m1g6v7@4ax.com>

    --
On 17 Dec 2003 at 9:00, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> No what I meant was what IF somehow Bush or Blaire or some 
> other high ranking coalition politician were captured by Iraq 
> during the war and was treated in the same way. I can only 
> presume you would support Saddam's soldiers checking Bush for 
> lice then. You are also utterly missing the point and you are 
> one pretty good example of how "the mob" are thinking. 
> EVERYONE, including Saddam, Pol Pot or whattever should be 
> treated in accordance with the laws by us who call ourselves 
> the free democratic part of the world.

Firstly, the US army has not violated the Geneva convention: 
Saddam was eligible for being shot on sight.

Secondly;  It is being overly sensitive about the feelings of 
those poor fragile souls that hate us and seek to murder us,
that got us into these trouble. Our enemies take it for
weakness, reasonably enough.  We should make it obvious that
nothing will stop us from striking at our enemies, that we will
cheerfully wade knee deep through blood and the body parts of
innocents to destroy those that threaten us, as the crusaders
waded to the holy sepulchre.

As Bin laden said slaughtering the occupants of the twin towers 
made them look strong:
: :	"when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by 
: :	nature, they will like the strong horse. This is 
: :	only one goal; those who want people to worship the 
: :	lord of the people, without following that doctrine, 
: :	will be following the doctrine of Muhammad, peace be 
: :	upon him"

> You should read up on this subject. Saddam also has a history 
> of building up edicational institutions and so on. He recived 
> awards by U.N. earlier on for his wellfare programs and the 
> development Iraq was gaining.

To the best of my knowledge, the UN only grants those awards to 
those who inflict quite extraordinary ruin and horrible 
destruction on their subjects -- such awards are as infamous 
and perverse as the UN human rights commission, headed by Libya 
las time I heard.

The UN is a cartel of governments against their subjects.  Just 
as a cartel of ordinary businesses requires its members to 
charge high prices and supply low quality, and grants honor and 
recognition to those members that charge remarkably high prices 
and unusually low quality, in the same way the UN grants honor 
and recognition to unusually destructive episodes of looting 
and pillaging against formerly prosperous law abiding peaceful 
subjects.

The UN was established to protect against direct military 
conflict, but in ordinary day to day life, peaceful competition 
is a greater threat to the rulers, for example "harmful tax 
competition".  One of the major goals of the EU is to restrain 
'harmful tax competition".  Similarly one of the major goals of 
the WTO is to prevent what cypherpunks call regulatory 
arbitrage. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     wcaHHfIUZy9Tibd6zjm4+q5AQUP7EkuCy6cpPeeX
     4svV9LeL01zDRxluCthNIy5l3iiUpZS7LwmP467jH




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 17 09:53:48 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 09:53:48 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
References: <449c1931cf1a71d8829cce590a81a658@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <3FE027AC.8695.486BF01@localhost>

Truly great.

> >           In doing so you have manifested what has been written here
> > about "gasing into the abyss" and so on.

On 17 Dec 2003 at 8:36, Jim Dixon wrote:

> I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked
> and getting a haircut.  :-|
> 
> --
> Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373
> 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test
> coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications
> infrastructure




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 17 08:02:23 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:02:23 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F117IQ6mBEDU5E0003ffe8@hotmail.com>

"Later today, a source close to the interrogation said that Saddam would be
subjected to stress and sleep deprivation.  Basically, teams of
interrogators will ask questions over and over again, and no one will get
any rest until answers are provided."

At least here in NYC local news, it's common to hear newsmaggots issuing 
leadins such as, "Will the CIA be able to make Saddam talk?" and so on. I 
think this implies the "obvious", but it's an obvious that should be stated: 
The US public basically now generally knows that some forms of extreme 
measures are being applied to prisoners and detainees, and we're willing to 
look the other way. After all, 9/11 proves "they" (picture a cluster of 
darkish-skinned turbanned men wearing fatigues and huddling in caves) are 
out to take away our freedoms. so why shouldn't we do the same thing to 
them?



>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
>Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 19:04:43 -0800 (PST)
>
>Natt writes:
>
> > You're one-hundred percent correct. I saw that sack of shit Rumsfeld on
> > a press conference this afternoon where he answered the specific
> > question of does parading Saddam around violate the Geneva convention.?
>
>Rumsfeld also revealed that the CIA has taken over the Saddam
>interrogation, and pundits are speculating that they will use the same
>torture techniques that are being used on the "detainees."
>
>Later today, a source close to the interrogation said that Saddam would be
>subjected to stress and sleep deprivation.  Basically, teams of
>interrogators will ask questions over and over again, and no one will get
>any rest until answers are provided.
>
>Bill Bennett said just a few minutes ago, that Saddam's capture made
>America safer, because the world has learned that "If you mess with
>America, you wind up in a hole."
>
>A friend of mine, when asked what he wanted from Santa for Christmas,
>replied, "A crater the size of DC."
>
>Clearly, the world's leaders are looking closely at Saddam's treatment,
>and realizing how easily pissing off the Bush family could result in them
>being shown on International TV unbathed, unshaven, checked for fleas, and
>bent over for a rectal probe.
>
>Of course, all of this is provoking a new arms race of astronomical
>proportions, as the other nations of the world realize international law
>means nothing, and that the US and Israel think they can judge everyone
>else on the planet, no one can judge them, and they can act with impunity.
>
>This will, in a few years, result in the usual "force meets force plus
>brains" low level format of the arrogant, and after a few hangings, and a
>big round of applause, life on the planet will move on.
>
>--
>Eric Michael Cordian 0+
>O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
>"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

_________________________________________________________________
Have fun customizing MSN Messenger  learn how here!  
http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/reach_customize




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 17 09:43:20 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:43:20 -0600
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217203158.I11657-100000@localhost>
References: <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to>
  <20031217203158.I11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031217174320.GA10900@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 08:41:07PM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
> You have omitted a bit.  A better question might be: "how would you have
> felt if you had looted an entire country for 30 years, invaded two others,
> annihilated any who objected, butchered hundreds of thousands of people,
> dispatched assasins after enemies abroad, laughed at anyone who objected

    You don't really know that any of that is true, you only know what the
current message is from the Ministry of Truth. Twenty years ago they were
applauding him and giving him bio/chem/nuc weapons. 

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 17 10:12:55 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:12:55 -0600
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217225356.GC29175@mail.dadadada.net>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to> <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>
  <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>
  <20031217225356.GC29175@mail.dadadada.net>
Message-ID: <20031217181255.GA10989@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:53:56PM -0500, BillyGOTO wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 04:46:51PM -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
> 
> > Nice, but the problem still remains: At this point it doesn't matter 
> > what he has done (or we say he has done). This is not a punishment. 
> > "Innocent until proofen guilty" anyone? This is the basis for the 
> > "enlightened" western society, no?
> 
> This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
> We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.

  No we don't. We only know what the propaganda mills have told us. Twenty years
ago it was a different story. 


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec 17 10:11:38 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:11:38 EST
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <1d9.16b31a57.2d11f65a@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/17/2003 1:00:16 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
jamesd at echeque.com writes:

> Firstly, the US army has not violated the Geneva convention:

How so?


> we will
> cheerfully wade knee deep through blood and the body parts of
> innocents to destroy those that threaten us, as the crusaders
> waded to the holy sepulchre.
> 

I obtained the below quote from your website located at: 
http://www.jim.com/liberquo.htm

"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the 
well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator 
only of her own."

John Quincy Adams 

Regards,  Matt-




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec 17 10:56:25 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:56:25 EST
Subject: Speaking of the Geneva convention
Message-ID: <1e.1eda062b.2d1200d9@aol.com>

December 15, 2003

Uncle Sambs Guantanamo Prison:
Outside the Rule of Law

http://www.independent.org/tii/news/031215ONeil.html


By Brigid ObNeil*

The latest news from Guantanamo Bay is beginning to sound like a modern-day
Simpsons episode. After two years of imprisoning more than 600 alleged enemy
combatants without charge or counsel in a Cuban prison camp, the
Administration
announced earlier this month that two detainees -- one a U.S. citizen -- would
be permitted limited access to an attorney. As any Simpsons buff will tell
you, itbs a classic Mr. Burns move: put on a show of improving work
conditions
at the nuclear power plant by dressing Homer in thermal underwear.

While it might be an amusing tag line typical of the most noxious character
in the Simpsons repertoire, itbs a sad metaphor for the U.S. governmentbs
abysmal treatment of designated enemy combatants.

News of the American prisonerbs counsel came one day before the Justice
Department filed a brief at the Supreme Court, adding to suspicions about the
Administrationbs motives. Their brief asks the court to affirm the
governmentbs i
ndefinite detention of Americans declared b
enemy combatants,b
 without
counsel
or the ability to dispute the allegations. The Constitutional liberties at
risk in this case, including the right to a fair trial and due process,
constitute a grave danger for Americans and foreign nationals alike. And
nowhere is the
startling consequence of Constitutional b
concessionsb
 more apparent than
the
state of Guantanamo Bay.

>From the beginning, Guantanamo Bay was wrought with strife. The Geneva
Convention, with its guarantee of certain fundamental rights for all prisoners
of
war, was quickly sidelined by the Administration in favor of its own rules for
the treatment and investigation of detainees. In the absence of any rule of
law, it didnbt take long for the media to pick up reports of inhumane
treatment
-- or what one former intelligence officer brazenly called,
b
torture-lite.b

These reports include: firing rubber bullets at those in restraints, beatings
for anyone who b
made a call to prayer,b
 sleep deprivation, and forced
confessions. The situation became so dire that the International Committee of
the Red
Cross (ICRC), the only non-government organization to visit the camp, broke a
long-standing policy of silence and called the prisoner circumstances an b

intolerable situation.b
 After reading the latest official statements on the
health
of the detainees, it becomes shockingly clear why the ICRC took such an
unprecedented move. According to national news reports, 35 detainees have
attempted
suicide, 110 have been placed on a suicide watch list, and 1 out of every 5
detainees now receive medication for what one military official can only
describe as b
clinical depression.b


In response to such damning reports, the Administration contends that the
detainees are dangerous terrorists and thus do not deserve any legal
protections,
much less liberal sympathies. But after two years of investigations at the
camp, the Administration has yet to charge any detainee with a crime or bring
a
case before a military tribunal. Thus, the public has no way to determine what
alleged crimes these men are charged with committing, much less whether or
not they are guilty.

In the absence of any formidable opposition to the Executive Branchbs
actions, the Supreme Court has finally stepped into the ring. In a matter of
months
the Justices will decide two cases that will rule on a host of alleged
constitutional abuses. In the first case, Padilla v. Rumsfeld, the Court will
determine whether a U.S. citizen has the right to an attorney before
disappearing into
a military stockade without charges or contact with the outside world. The
second case, involving the two appeals of Rasul v. Bush and Odah v. U.S., will
decide if Guantanamo detainees can have access to civilian courts to challenge
their detention. The most pressing issue in both cases calls into question the
newly claimed Executive Branch power to detain any person indefinitely and
without any recourse to judicial review.

Given the blatant lack of any legal protections for these alleged combatants,
it is no wonder that former prisoner-of-war Senator John McCain expressed
concern this week about what he saw after a recent visit to Guantanamo. Even
prisoners suspected of serious crimes deserve fair and open legal proceedings
--
after all, our very Constitution was founded on the right to due process and a
presumption of innocence. By holding suspected enemies to our highest rule of
law and honoring established international treaties, we set a precedent for
the treatment we expect of U.S. troops in enemy hands. To undermine this rule
of
law risks the very livelihood of our Constitution and threatens the way our
citizens are treated both at home and abroad. No minor concessions by the U.S.
government can change the impression that the secrecy and lack of due process
for detainees at Guantanamo Bay resembles that of the Soviet gulags of old.
And it doesnbt take the antics of a Mr. Burns or the gullibility of Homer
Simpson to figure it out.

*Brigid ObNeil is a researcher at the Center on Peace & Liberty at The
Independent Institute in Oakland, California. For further articles and
studies, see
the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org.




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 17 12:49:28 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:49:28 -0600
Subject: Zombie Patriots and other musings
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20031216182044.04688c10@pop.ix.netcom.com>
References: <3FDCC93C.97ED60EF@cdc.gov>
  <5.2.0.9.0.20031216182044.04688c10@pop.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <20031217204928.GB11290@cybershamanix.com>

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 06:59:59PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
> us.  Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be 
> made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning 
> American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small 
> part of that calculation.  For example, we could presumably beat China in a 

   Oh, but our foreign policy is based on "our long term best interest", or so
our minders tell us:

    "Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present day, has
been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce
everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if
necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy of domination is not just to
make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our
exploitation of resources." - Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General  

    http://www.thesunmagazine.org/bully.html 



Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 12:19:43 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:19:43 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to>

Jim Dixon wrote:

>
>I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked and
>getting a haircut.  :-|
>  
>

And how would you have felt to be the one who got your teeth checked and 
get a haircut with the whole world watching?

M.




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 12:21:07 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:21:07 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F117IQ6mBEDU5E0003ffe8@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F117IQ6mBEDU5E0003ffe8@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <3FE0BAB3.4020008@thedarkerside.to>

Tyler Durden wrote:

> "Later today, a source close to the interrogation said that Saddam 
> would be
> subjected to stress and sleep deprivation.  Basically, teams of
> interrogators will ask questions over and over again, and no one will get
> any rest until answers are provided."
>
> At least here in NYC local news, it's common to hear newsmaggots 
> issuing leadins such as, "Will the CIA be able to make Saddam talk?" 
> and so on. I think this implies the "obvious", but it's an obvious 
> that should be stated: The US public basically now generally knows 
> that some forms of extreme measures are being applied to prisoners and 
> detainees, and we're willing to look the other way. After all, 9/11 
> proves "they" (picture a cluster of darkish-skinned turbanned men 
> wearing fatigues and huddling in caves) are out to take away our 
> freedoms. so why shouldn't we do the same thing to them?

I'll take it that was a rhetoric question but:

"Eye for an Eye and the world goes blind."

Michael




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 12:29:49 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:29:49 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <9651uv0pdlasi26q12b07l0bfo62m1g6v7@4ax.com>
References: <9651uv0pdlasi26q12b07l0bfo62m1g6v7@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FE0BCBD.9090309@thedarkerside.to>

James A. Donald wrote:

>Firstly, the US army has not violated the Geneva convention: 
>Saddam was eligible for being shot on sight.
>
>  
>

That might have been. But he was not, and he is shown and "paraded" on 
TV (and don't tell me he wasn't because showing a man in his state, 
showing how he gets examined is clearly an attempt to "break the morale").

>Secondly;  It is being overly sensitive about the feelings of 
>those poor fragile souls that hate us and seek to murder us,
>that got us into these trouble. Our enemies take it for
>weakness, reasonably enough.  We should make it obvious that
>nothing will stop us from striking at our enemies, that we will
>cheerfully wade knee deep through blood and the body parts of
>innocents to destroy those that threaten us, as the crusaders
>waded to the holy sepulchre.
>  
>
Most people outside of the US are blissfully aware of this. After all 
they had bombs dropped on them for the last 50 years, being shot at by 
people that were founded by the US Government (have a look at South 
America) and so forth.

It is almost astonishing to hear arguments like these. You (and people 
who make these arguments) sound like the kid who gets smacked after 
burning down the house and then starting to cry and call foul.


>As Bin laden said slaughtering the occupants of the twin towers 
>made them look strong:
>: :	"when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by 
>: :	nature, they will like the strong horse. This is 
>: :	only one goal; those who want people to worship the 
>: :	lord of the people, without following that doctrine, 
>: :	will be following the doctrine of Muhammad, peace be 
>: :	upon him"
>
>  
>

So you advocate to "follow Bin Ladin"? If you (as in the US Government) 
consider him evil, then following him and do the same way he does makes 
you evil as well.

Having said that: What makes you the "good guy"?


>To the best of my knowledge, the UN only grants those awards to 
>those who inflict quite extraordinary ruin and horrible 
>destruction on their subjects -- such awards are as infamous 
>and perverse as the UN human rights commission, headed by Libya 
>las time I heard.
>
>  
>
Of course Libya is evil when it doesn't fit into the US foreign policy, 
but is a "good friend' when you can send someone there to get "vital 
information". If that involves torture than this is none of your business.

It is sort of ironic that a state like the US can claim no interrest in 
how the information was obtained and cheerfully extorts people to 
countries where they know very clearly that those people will be 
tortured. It seems not even another passport (like say, Canadian) is 
protecting those people from the wrath and zeal of the US Administration 
and their henchman.

If the Henchman happens to wear a turban while doing his deed, it is 
fine, as long as it is done under US Supervision, which can be denied if 
need be.


>The UN is a cartel of governments against their subjects.  Just 
>as a cartel of ordinary businesses requires its members to 
>charge high prices and supply low quality, and grants honor and 
>recognition to those members that charge remarkably high prices 
>and unusually low quality, in the same way the UN grants honor 
>and recognition to unusually destructive episodes of looting 
>and pillaging against formerly prosperous law abiding peaceful 
>subjects.
>
>  
>
The UN is a meeting chamber. The UN is an ability for countries to meet 
and try to find solutions that do not involve dropping heavy explosives 
on other peoples head.

The UN also fails regularly because heavy weights like the US use it to 
throw their weight around. If there would be a proportional (as in 
number of people living in a country) representation the tables would 
turn very very quickly.

The UN security council should be dropped in it's current form and 
instead should be re-created without any permanent members or any 
countries power to veto the decisions.


>The UN was established to protect against direct military 
>conflict, but in ordinary day to day life, peaceful competition 
>is a greater threat to the rulers, for example "harmful tax 
>competition".  One of the major goals of the EU is to restrain 
>'harmful tax competition".  Similarly one of the major goals of 
>the WTO is to prevent what cypherpunks call regulatory 
>arbitrage. 
>
>  
>

It is not the leaders of most countries I am afraid of. It is the 
leaders of a handful of countries which possess the most power and have 
no problem in abusing it to further their own agenda.

Michael




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 17 13:50:23 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:50:23 -0600
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>
References: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>
Message-ID: <20031217215023.GD11290@cybershamanix.com>

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 03:10:35AM +0100, Tarapia Tapioco wrote:
> Harmon Seaver wrote:
> > > This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
> > > We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.
> >
> >   No we don't. We only know what the propaganda mills have told us.
> > Twenty years ago it was a different story.
> 
> The propaganda mills were working for Saddam, not against him.

   Read what I said. The propaganda mills told one story then, a different story
now -- who knows what the real truth is? 

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 12:53:52 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:53:52 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217203158.I11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031217203158.I11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE0C260.8050403@thedarkerside.to>

Jim Dixon wrote:

>
>>And how would you have felt to be the one who got your teeth checked and
>>get a haircut with the whole world watching?
>>    
>>
>
>You have omitted a bit.  A better question might be: "how would you have
>felt if you had looted an entire country for 30 years, invaded two others,
>annihilated any who objected, butchered hundreds of thousands of people,
>dispatched assasins after enemies abroad, laughed at anyone who objected
>-- and then had been submitted to what appeared to be a polite and
>conscientious public dental exam and haircut?"
>
>Damn lucky, to be honest.
>  
>
No I did not omit this little bit. This is not the question.

Guilt or not guilt is not (supposely) decided when captured but in a 
court of law. You remember, "Justice" the thing the US supposely is 
standing for?

Whatever he did before, it does not matter at this point. At this very 
moment the people who have to abide are the victors and that means the 
US Government (and thus the US Military).

Two wrongs still don't make a right.

Michael




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 13:01:03 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 16:01:03 -0500
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031217193009.G11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031217193009.G11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE0C40F.7090802@thedarkerside.to>

Jim Dixon wrote:

>If the prisoners at Guantanamo are POWs, why should they be charged with
>crimes?  It is no crime to be an enemy soldier.
>
>  
>
According to the US Government though they are not soldiers. They are 
"unlawful enemy combattants".


>However, customary practice is to lock POWs up until the conflict is over.
>This certainly is what happened in the two world wars, at least in Europe;
>it also happened during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
>
>If these are members of al-Quaeda and prisoners of war, should they not be
>released when and only when al-Quaeda declares the conflict over?  Would
>not a US government releasing them before the end of the war be derelict
>in its duty?
>  
>

The war in Afghanistan is over. This is were they were caught. Thus they 
should be released, no? If they are terrorists and they have proof of 
this they should put them in front of a court (and I guess that should 
be a civil court, not a military tribunal as I don't quite see since 
when the US Army is performing law enforcement duties).

>If they are instead unlawful combatants because they have violated the
>Geneva conventions (because they have carried arms in battle but discarded
>them and hid among civilians, say) or if they are spies (out of uniform,
>engaged in espionage), is the US not being somewhat charitable in treating
>them as POWs?
>
>  
>

But they are not POWs by their own account. If they could be charged 
with any of these crimes above, then what takes two years to actually 
convict them?

>If they are neither POWs nor unlawful combatants nor spies, if they are
>just terrorists, why is the US obliged to treat them as though they are
>in the United States?  Presumably they were captured outside the US and
>were not taken into the US after capture.  Why does the US military have
>to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
>citizens or physically present in the United States.
>
>  
>
Some of them ARE US Citizens. Others are citizens of other states. 
International Law means that if I (holding a German passport) have to be 
allowed to contact MY government in order to receive any aid that I 
might require. This right has not been given.

Granted, I would not be protected under the rights of the US 
constitution, but I do have other rights and those are clearly violated 
as well.


>If any of those at Guantanamo is an American citizen, then of course he
>should be returned to the States and tried for carrying arms against his
>country.  Treason, isn't it?
>
>  
>
Treason would need to be proofen. Considering that no charges have been 
brought forward after almost two years it is pretty clear (or at least 
appears to be) that there is no proof that any of these people did 
anything wrong.


>Let us say that by agreement between the US and the Afghan government
>(which no one seems to deny is the rightful government of the country)
>terrorists captured in Afghanistan are being held in Guantanamo.  Why
>should US law apply instead of Afghan law?
>  
>
It doesn't. But if that would be the case than the captured Afghans 
should be returned to the Afghan authorities, why is this not happening?


>I know for a fact that conditions in Afghan jails are nowhere near as
>comfortable as those in Guantanamo.
>
>  
>
May as it be, but that still doesn't make the actions of the US 
Government right. Or are you telling me right now that Guantanamo Bay 
and Diego Garcia are part of a humanitarian mission?


>An American friend of mine spent six months in a jail in Kabul.  If you
>didn't buy food from the guards, you starved. If you bought coal from them
>to heat your cell -- tiny windows high in thick stone walls, so no real
>ventilation -- you were slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide.  If you
>didn't, you froze.  It's cold in Kabul in the winter.
>
>  
>
Bad conditions, so help the Afghani government to improve the conditions.

Michael




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 13:46:51 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 16:46:51 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost> 
  <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to> <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>

Anatoly Vorobey wrote:

> If I had record like Saddam's on me?
>
>Gee, I'd be real happy I wasn't shot on the spot, or maybe cruelly 
>tortured and then shot, the way I'd behaved to people I'd captured.
>Or maybe torn into pieces by a shrieking mob.
>
>Instead of doing any of that, they check my teeth and give me a haircut
>in front of the cameras? Boo fucking hoo. I'd be real happy about 
>millions of bleeding hearts all over the world jerking their knees in 
>unison, ready to cry a fucking ocean over this unbelievably cruel 
>haircut and medical check-up I'm being given. Fucking tools.
>
>  
>
Nice, but the problem still remains: At this point it doesn't matter 
what he has done (or we say he has done). This is not a punishment. 
"Innocent until proofen guilty" anyone? This is the basis for the 
"enlightened" western society, no?

M.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 17 14:06:55 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:06:55 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F84bMC1yKXABLP000419fa@hotmail.com>

"I'd be real happy about
millions of bleeding hearts all over the world jerking their knees in
unison, ready to cry a fucking ocean over this unbelievably cruel
haircut and medical check-up I'm being given. Fucking tools."

A thread that started out quasi-interesting has descended into 
non-Cypherpunk levels of triviality.

The original point stands, and is valid. The Islamic world and, in 
particular, the Arabic part of the Islamic world, are probably going to 
forget their dislike of Saddam when they see those newreels of the great 
Dictator being rubbergloved and de-loused. For them it's almost certainly 
going to resound as a symbol of how we've systematically manipulated and 
fucked them over all these years. They're not going to respect our "Power", 
they're not going to care much that WE supported Saddam in the first place. 
They're just going to get angrier. Look for bin Laden to grow in status 
until he's just a notch or two below Mohammed. Look then for more bombings 
and 9/11s here in the US. That Saddam was a cruel, butchering dictator will 
soon be nearly irrelevant.

-Tyler Durden





>From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon at pobox.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
>Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 22:54:57 +0200
>
>You wrote on Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 03:19:43PM -0500:
> > Jim Dixon wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked and
> > >getting a haircut.  :-|
> > >
> > >
> >
> > And how would you have felt to be the one who got your teeth checked and
> > get a haircut with the whole world watching?
>
>If I had record like Saddam's on me?
>
>Gee, I'd be real happy I wasn't shot on the spot, or maybe cruelly
>tortured and then shot, the way I'd behaved to people I'd captured.
>Or maybe torn into pieces by a shrieking mob.
>
>Instead of doing any of that, they check my teeth and give me a haircut
>in front of the cameras? Boo fucking hoo. I'd be real happy about
>millions of bleeding hearts all over the world jerking their knees in
>unison, ready to cry a fucking ocean over this unbelievably cruel
>haircut and medical check-up I'm being given. Fucking tools.
>
>--
>avva

_________________________________________________________________
Working moms: Find helpful tips here on managing kids, home, work   and 
yourself.   http://special.msn.com/msnbc/workingmom.armx




From billy at dadadada.net  Wed Dec 17 14:53:56 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (BillyGOTO)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:53:56 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to> <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>
  <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031217225356.GC29175@mail.dadadada.net>

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 04:46:51PM -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:

> Nice, but the problem still remains: At this point it doesn't matter 
> what he has done (or we say he has done). This is not a punishment. 
> "Innocent until proofen guilty" anyone? This is the basis for the 
> "enlightened" western society, no?

This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Wed Dec 17 18:38:03 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 18:38:03 -0800
Subject: [dgc.chat] Fwd: [NEC] #2.12: The RIAA Succeeds Where the
  CypherPunks Failed 
In-Reply-To: <13022350-30D1-11D8-9340-000393CAB58E@fexl.com>
References: <13022350-30D1-11D8-9340-000393CAB58E@fexl.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031217182046.04f81e18@mail.comcast.net>

At 12:39 PM 12/17/2003, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
>Well, Clay Shirky has done it again, writing a very insightful article
>on the current digital scene, this time on the unintended but
>beneficial consequences of RIAA's crackdown on file sharing.
>
>Here is one particularly telling excerpt:
>
>>Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users
>>have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a
>>first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a > felon.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html

I'm not sure if Clay ever hung out on the cypherpunks list.  None of this 
comes as a surprise.  Most knew early on that widespread adoption of crypto 
would require a killer app and that cypherpunks were not delivering these 
apps because one could not predict what they would be.  They would surely 
not be PGP and other encrypted email nor digital cash unless and until 
there was a small but lucrative market that could be addressed by such 
technology or a large market with broad citizen support.  That file sharing 
could be it was also recognized a long time ago on the cypherpunks list.

The really interesting aspect of this is what it portends for the 
future.  If, as Clay suggests, the current situation is like Prohibition 
from citizen perspective can we expect a similar repeal of government 
surveillance?  If not, what will happen as large numbers of citizens adopt 
P2P systems that not only flaunt copyright law but communications more dear 
to those in power?

steve

"For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law 
of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open 
secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely 
connected with this." -- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the 
U.S.A.", 1921  




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 16:09:46 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 19:09:46 -0500
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031217222319.I11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031217222319.I11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <7D1B7CF0-30EE-11D8-A43F-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 17-Dec-03, at 5:43 PM, Jim Dixon wrote:
>
>> According to the US Government though they are not soldiers. They are
>> "unlawful enemy combattants".
>
> I can only interpret this as your saying that the US Government's
> judgement in this issue is correct, and they are not POWs.
>

I only tell you what they are telling us. I do not agree with this 
assessment personally.


>>
>> The war in Afghanistan is over. This is were they were caught. Thus 
>> they
>> should be released, no?
>
> Oh, we are back to their being POWs.  Fine.  In that case, the answer 
> to
> your question is no.
>
> The war in question was begun by an attack on the United States, by the
> murder of 3000 people in New York City.  Is this war over?  Not 
> according
> to tapes attributed to al Qaeda.  They still profess to be at war with
> the United States.
>

Where the war begun is probably debatable. The US had (and has) their 
fingerprints over a lot of things that are happening. And all of these 
you could construe as an act of war.


> Is the war in Afghanistan over?  Not according to news reports.  Osama 
> bin
> Laden remains free.  The Taliban remain active.

But the regime has been replaced, thus the war is over, no? That was 
the case in Europe. Germany was defeated, a new government installed 
(with a lot of people from the old one) and you called it "done deal". 
Same in Japan. So what's different this time?


>
>>                        If they are terrorists and they have proof of
>> this they should put them in front of a court (and I guess that should
>> be a civil court, not a military tribunal as I don't quite see since
>> when the US Army is performing law enforcement duties).
>
> Please make your mind up.  Now they are terrorists again.
>

I am answering to your statements. We have already established that if 
they are POWs then they should be released because the war is over (see 
above). If they are not POWs but held because of terrorist charges, 
than they should be tried no?


> Whose law requires that terrorists be treated in this fashion?
>

Our "enlightened" western society, led by the USofA who proclaims to 
know what right and wrong is (and who wants to teach it to all those 
"primitive" cultures in the middle east).

> The US Army's responsibility is not to enforce the law.  It is to 
> defend
> the United States.  They seem to be doing a good job at the moment.
>

Sure sure, nobody has flown another plane in a building. Is this 
because of the US Army and all those nifty security screenings at the 
airport (just last weekend I flew out of Dallas and saw more than 
enough ways to get something through security), or because nobody 
really wanted to do it right now? Guess we'll never know. But of course 
the Spinmeisters are going to say it's because of the war in Iraq and 
added security. I wonder who or what they are going to blame the next 
time someone gets blown up.


> In the United States it is the responsibility of the police to enforce 
> the
> law in their jurisdiction.  There is no US police force with
> responsiblities in Guantanamo.  US law does not apply to Cuba.

Nifty, isn't it? "Well people, we see your point. But you have to 
Understanding, even though we control Guantanamo Bay and even though 
Diego Garcia is a British Island which we just annexed, we can't really 
do anything to help those poor people. But don't fret, if they would be 
in an Afghani jail they would be off worse. Remember, we are the good 
guys, we only do what's in humanities best interrest."

If they would be held in New York State they would have more rights. So 
let's just not even try that, we might actually HAVE to treat them 
according to the gospel that we preach.

>> But they are not POWs by their own account. If they could be charged
>> with any of these crimes above, then what takes two years to actually
>> convict them?
>
> By your way of thinking, if I am taken prisoner in a war, I can decide
> that I am not a POW and walk free.

That's not what I said. What I DID say was that if they are not POWs 
and are not charged with a crime, they should be set free.

>
> In what war has this been common practice?

See above.

>> Some of them ARE US Citizens. Others are citizens of other states.
>> International Law means that if I (holding a German passport) have to 
>> be
>> allowed to contact MY government in order to receive any aid that I
>> might require. This right has not been given.
>
> What "International Law" says that unlawful combatants get to contact
> their governments in this manner?
>

The term "unlawful combatants" doesn't exist either. So the question is 
mute. Let's say "Human being" instead.


> What if the government contacted, say Afghan or Pakistani, would prefer
> that they not be contacted as you desire, or prefers that you be held 
> as
> a prisoner indefinitely?

Than you have a problem with your government. But neither British, nor 
Canadian nor French authorities were notified / could be contact OR, 
after they found out, were allowed to talk to their people.


>
>> Granted, I would not be protected under the rights of the US
>> constitution, but I do have other rights and those are clearly 
>> violated
>> as well.
>
> What's so clear about this?  Do you actually have any knowledge at all
> of customs and practices in countries in the region?  Do you care at 
> all
> about the opinions of local people, about their customary practices?  I
> think not.

It is not only about people from Afghanistan, it is also about other 
countries, see my text above.

>>
>> Treason would need to be proofen. Considering that no charges have 
>> been
>> brought forward after almost two years it is pretty clear (or at least
>> appears to be) that there is no proof that any of these people did
>> anything wrong.
>
> Do you know for a fact that there are US citizens held at Guantanamo?  
> If
> so, who are they?
>

There have been several reports. What about John Walker? Whatever 
happened to him?

>>>
>> It doesn't. But if that would be the case than the captured Afghans
>> should be returned to the Afghan authorities, why is this not 
>> happening?
>
> Perhaps the Afghan authorities don't want them back.
>
> Hello?
>
Perhaps you just look for the easy way out?

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+DwTmlCnxcrW2uuEQL6iwCeOK5U56u8xVB9aT1SAqj+yi7OULcAoOd0
bml/UV9L7YtJFFoAq77OCilk
=aXZZ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 16:12:48 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 19:12:48 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217221444.O11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031217221444.O11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <E9C3B0EC-30EE-11D8-A43F-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 17-Dec-03, at 5:23 PM, Jim Dixon wrote:

>>> Damn lucky, to be honest.
>>>
>> No I did not omit this little bit. This is not the question.
>
> Oh but it is.
>

Ah? Why?

>> Guilt or not guilt is not (supposely) decided when captured but in a
>> court of law. You remember, "Justice" the thing the US supposely is
>> standing for?
>
> Are you saying that the United States has to be a light to the world, 
> that
> it has an extraordinary responsibility to be morally correct, that its
> actions should be judged by a different standard from those of other
> countries?

The US makes these claims on their own. If they are the "good guys" 
than they should act like it. Not only when it is convenient but also 
when it is not. Morale is not about the "best bang for the buck" but 
about integrity. The US Government clearly does not possess a lot of 
integrity when it comes to morale.



> What are you, some kind of pro-American fanatic?

Last time I checked I was a human being.

>
>> Whatever he did before, it does not matter at this point. At this very
>> moment the people who have to abide are the victors and that means the
>> US Government (and thus the US Military).
>>
>> Two wrongs still don't make a right.
>
> What exactly is wrong with inspecting a prisoner's teeth and giving him
> a haircut?

Televising this for propaganda purposes.


>
> Why exactly do you say that mass murder, invasion, genocide somehow
> are outweighed in the scales of justice by a medical examination?
>

No, what I am saying is that no matter what he did, the US still has to 
play by international rules (or should at least). Using those images 
from Saddam as Propaganda clearly is wrong.

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+DxBGlCnxcrW2uuEQJqKQCgujw7xjSVAPdzXDcEW9abBkRyaF8AoNOL
H+VuSTqSPFSTA834qQS2X36C
=ULJm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 17 19:49:09 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 19:49:09 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0BCBD.9090309@thedarkerside.to>
References: <9651uv0pdlasi26q12b07l0bfo62m1g6v7@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FE0B335.6345.252BCA@localhost>

    --
Michael Kalus:
> he [Saddam] is shown and "paraded" on TV (and don't tell me
> he wasn't because showing a man in his state, showing how he
> gets examined is clearly an attempt to "break the morale").

James A. Donald;
> > Secondly;  It is being overly sensitive about the feelings
> > of those poor fragile souls that hate us and seek to murder
> > us, that got us into this trouble. Our enemies take it for 
> > weakness, reasonably enough. [...]
> >
> > As Bin laden said slaughtering the occupants of the twin
> > towers made them look strong:
> > : :	    "when people see a strong horse and a weak
> > : :	    horse, by nature, they will like the strong
> > : :	    horse."

Michael Kalus:
> It is almost astonishing to hear arguments like these. You
> (and people who make these arguments) sound like the kid who
> gets smacked after burning down the house and then starting
> to cry and call foul.

I see:  So when the US army is so unkind as to film Saddam
acting submissive, this is a shocking violation of his human
rights, and your bleeding heart feels for him deeply.

But when, however, people fly a plainload of passengers into
two tall buildings and murder thousands, those dreadful
Americans had it coming, were justly smacked like a naughty
child, and have no right to get indignant. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     /L77ce/syoKdEksHcHO1y4PFeqglQuamciRW8MD5
     43mK5CsgJ9VG1mVzKSxOu2+qywMsCse3Y+DRKaDp/




From jdd at dixons.org  Wed Dec 17 12:01:17 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 20:01:17 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <1e.1eda062b.2d1200d9@aol.com>
Message-ID: <20031217193009.G11657-100000@localhost>

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In response to such damning reports, the Administration contends that the
> detainees are dangerous terrorists and thus do not deserve any legal
> protections,
> much less liberal sympathies. But after two years of investigations at the
> camp, the Administration has yet to charge any detainee with a crime or bring
> a
> case before a military tribunal. Thus, the public has no way to determine what
> alleged crimes these men are charged with committing, much less whether or
> not they are guilty.

Interesting.

If the prisoners at Guantanamo are POWs, why should they be charged with
crimes?  It is no crime to be an enemy soldier.

However, customary practice is to lock POWs up until the conflict is over.
This certainly is what happened in the two world wars, at least in Europe;
it also happened during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

If these are members of al-Quaeda and prisoners of war, should they not be
released when and only when al-Quaeda declares the conflict over?  Would
not a US government releasing them before the end of the war be derelict
in its duty?

If they are instead unlawful combatants because they have violated the
Geneva conventions (because they have carried arms in battle but discarded
them and hid among civilians, say) or if they are spies (out of uniform,
engaged in espionage), is the US not being somewhat charitable in treating
them as POWs?

If they are neither POWs nor unlawful combatants nor spies, if they are
just terrorists, why is the US obliged to treat them as though they are
in the United States?  Presumably they were captured outside the US and
were not taken into the US after capture.  Why does the US military have
to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
citizens or physically present in the United States.

If any of those at Guantanamo is an American citizen, then of course he
should be returned to the States and tried for carrying arms against his
country.  Treason, isn't it?

Let us say that by agreement between the US and the Afghan government
(which no one seems to deny is the rightful government of the country)
terrorists captured in Afghanistan are being held in Guantanamo.  Why
should US law apply instead of Afghan law?

I know for a fact that conditions in Afghan jails are nowhere near as
comfortable as those in Guantanamo.

An American friend of mine spent six months in a jail in Kabul.  If you
didn't buy food from the guards, you starved. If you bought coal from them
to heat your cell -- tiny windows high in thick stone walls, so no real
ventilation -- you were slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide.  If you
didn't, you froze.  It's cold in Kabul in the winter.

The beatings were free.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From jdd at dixons.org  Wed Dec 17 12:41:07 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 20:41:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031217203158.I11657-100000@localhost>

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Michael Kalus wrote:

> >I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked and
> >getting a haircut.  :-|
>
> And how would you have felt to be the one who got your teeth checked and
> get a haircut with the whole world watching?

You have omitted a bit.  A better question might be: "how would you have
felt if you had looted an entire country for 30 years, invaded two others,
annihilated any who objected, butchered hundreds of thousands of people,
dispatched assasins after enemies abroad, laughed at anyone who objected
-- and then had been submitted to what appeared to be a polite and
conscientious public dental exam and haircut?"

Damn lucky, to be honest.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Wed Dec 17 20:49:28 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 20:49:28 -0800 (PST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0B335.6345.252BCA@localhost>
Message-ID: <200312180449.hBI4nSij028508@artifact.psychedelic.net>

James A, Donald writes:

> I see:  So when the US army is so unkind as to film Saddam
> acting submissive, this is a shocking violation of his human
> rights, and your bleeding heart feels for him deeply.

> But when, however, people fly a plainload of passengers into
> two tall buildings and murder thousands, those dreadful
> Americans had it coming, were justly smacked like a naughty
> child, and have no right to get indignant. 

The two events are completely unrelated, except for the fact that 9/11
gave the US the additional hubris it needed to launch an unprovoked war of
agression against another sovereign nation, in violation of international
law and the wishes of the world community.

Saddam's capture is the poisoned fruit of an illegal occupation, which is
itself the poisoned fruit of an illegal invasion, whose clear purpose,
despite the lies about Saddam's ready to launch nuclear weapons, was to
control Iraq's oil, and eliminate support for the oppressed Palestinians.

Bush knew that as long as he managed to attack Iraq, using any pretense,
he would never be forced to leave once the excuses were revealed as lies,
because if there's two things America is structurally incapable of doing,
it's accepting blame and apologizing.

Every American soldier in Iraq right now is a war criminal.  Every dead
Iraqi is a murder victim.

As one writer so aptly put it...

"For months we have wanted to get our hands on the warmonger who
terrorized the world with weapons of mass destruction. But, as we couldn't
get George Bush, we had to make do with Saddam Hussein."

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 17 20:50:45 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 20:50:45 -0800
Subject: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed 
Message-ID: <3FE0C1A5.29298.5D8FAA@localhost>

    --
Clay Shirky: 
http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html

tells us "The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed"

[...]

The Government's failure to get the Clipper implemented came at 
a heady time for advocates of digital privacy -- the NSA was 
losing control of cryptographic products, Phil Zimmerman had 
launched his Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email program, and the 
Cypherpunks, a merry band of crypto-loving civil libertarians, 
were on the cover of the second issue of Wired. The floodgates 
were opening, leading to...

...pretty much nothing. Even after the death of Clipper and the 
launch of PGP, the Government discovered that for the most 
part, users didn't want to encrypt their communications. [...]

[...]

In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share music 
files are adopting tools like WINW and BadBlue, that allow them 
to create encrypted spaces where they can share files and 
converse with one another. [...] Note that the broadening 
adoption of encryption is not because users have become 
libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a 
first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now 
a felon.

[...]

And the second effect, of course, is the long-predicted and 
oft-delayed spread of encryption. The RIAA is succeeding where 
the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but 
penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their 
personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your 
peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service 
users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a 
background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because 
encryption is becoming something that must run in the 
background, there is now an incentive to make it's adoption as 
easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to 
say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't 
too early to see that the shift is both profound and 
irreversible. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     wLK7Dc2wMIugparyQpFCHa89wES4ntXo7L+st+YX
     4hxJwRJeTzuUKuQ0sTXvnvLTI/EeUy2RRjum92Pp8




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Wed Dec 17 18:16:04 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: 17 Dec 2003 21:16:04 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violaton of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031216222014.B11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031216222014.B11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <1071713763.5548.16.camel@localhost.localdomain>

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 18:18, Jim Dixon wrote:

> I spent several years travelling in that part of the world.

Well, that just blew your credibility with this crowd. You're supposed
to spout off on topics about which you know nothing. Bonus points for
reflexive anti-state-ism [1] [2], and in particular antiamericanism. And
for idealistic crypto solutions to the world's problems, which
unfortunately will never work in a world inhabited by real people. (Not
that you're expected to admit that.)

The sheltered children on this list need to get out into the nastier
parts of the world. They need to see what life is like when the
government is _really_ bad, not just some warts on a mostly benevolent
institution. They also need to get a better feel for the cultural
differences around the world -- even though we're all humans, what seems
like a great idea in Berkeley might not fly in Baghdad or Beijing.

[1] As contrasted with anti-statism.

[2] Just let the market solve everything. And strong cryptography makes
your place of residence irrelevant. Unless, of course, the police goon
squad burst in and raped your children in front of you because you were
trying to change your place of residence.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Wed Dec 17 21:57:40 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 21:57:40 -0800
Subject: [dgc.chat] Fwd: [NEC] #2.12: The RIAA Succeeds Where the
  CypherPunks Failed 
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031217215652.05208c30@mail.comcast.net>

At 12:39 PM 12/17/2003, Patrick Chkoreff on the dgcchat at lists wrote:
>Well, Clay Shirky has done it again, writing a very insightful article
>on the current digital scene, this time on the unintended but
>beneficial consequences of RIAA's crackdown on file sharing.
>
>Here is one particularly telling excerpt:
>
>>Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users
>>have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a
>>first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a > felon.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html

I'm not sure if Clay ever hung out on the cypherpunks list.  None of this 
comes as a surprise.  Most knew early on that widespread adoption of crypto 
would require a killer app and that cypherpunks were not delivering these 
apps because one could not predict what they would be.  They would surely 
not be PGP and other encrypted email nor digital cash unless and until 
there was a small but lucrative market that could be addressed by such 
technology or a large market with broad citizen support.  That file sharing 
could be it was also recognized a long time ago on the cypherpunks list.

The really interesting aspect of this is what it portends for the 
future.  If, as Clay suggests, the current situation is like Prohibition 
from citizen perspective can we expect a similar repeal of government 
surveillance?  If not, what will happen as large numbers of citizens adopt 
P2P systems that not only flaunt copyright law but communications more dear 
to those in power?

steve

"For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law 
of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open 
secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely 
connected with this." -- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the 
U.S.A.", 1921  




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 17 19:54:08 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 22:54:08 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>
References: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>
Message-ID: <D50A4AA8-310D-11D8-84CD-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and countless Iraqi refugees all report 
> similar stories of widespread torture and murder.  Is it your position 
> that these are all propagandists?
>
> Dismissing as "propaganda" any reports that oppose your argument, 
> while accepting as truth any claim that supports it, is simple 
> intellectual dishonesty.
>
No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't matter while 
Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by that I mean the 
Western world general).

To use those people as a reason to wage war (even if the outcome would 
better their lives and the votes on this is still out) still has moral 
implications, and if it is only by the sanctions that did nothing to 
prevent those cruelties from happening but actually adding more to 
their daily lives.

I don't know about you. But I know that if I would have lost family 
members in the past 12 years because of Sanctions and Saddam I would 
(at best) find the current arguments FOR the war (if I would know about 
them) more than cynical.

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+Ek5GlCnxcrW2uuEQL2mgCgu51ILwv30Oa8V8te8IRfSMnCySkAn08A
DF9dO7ROZY/QsT33q7Qp2r7E
=TqNF
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 17 12:54:57 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 22:54:57 +0200
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>

You wrote on Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 03:19:43PM -0500:
> Jim Dixon wrote:
> 
> >
> >I have gazed into the abyss and seen a man having his teeth checked and
> >getting a haircut.  :-|
> > 
> >
> 
> And how would you have felt to be the one who got your teeth checked and 
> get a haircut with the whole world watching?

If I had record like Saddam's on me?

Gee, I'd be real happy I wasn't shot on the spot, or maybe cruelly 
tortured and then shot, the way I'd behaved to people I'd captured.
Or maybe torn into pieces by a shrieking mob.

Instead of doing any of that, they check my teeth and give me a haircut
in front of the cameras? Boo fucking hoo. I'd be real happy about 
millions of bleeding hearts all over the world jerking their knees in 
unison, ready to cry a fucking ocean over this unbelievably cruel 
haircut and medical check-up I'm being given. Fucking tools.

-- 
avva




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 17 23:12:37 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 23:12:37 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <79dc9b4f1e9b56ad8223d8c755f398c0@remailer.privacy.at>
Message-ID: <3FE0E2E5.24544.DF70E2@localhost>

    --
On 18 Dec 2003 at 5:40, privacy.at Anonymous Remailer wrote:
> I think you might have forgotten about the other half the
> system, due process. Even if you "KNOW" something, you've got
> to go through the motions.

Different rules apply in war.

Despite the fact that he looked like a homeless drunk, Saddam
was running the war effort from that farmhouse.  So the US army
can, if it should feel inclined, proceed by the rules of war,
hack his head off, and nail it to a lamp post in central
Baghdad with a nine inch nail. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     qi/zj9+XkASvvabTmtYfnHfq2IA9qHlMQUO8EhnG
     4ILJnbXqg640CqrvRC2+jQXaK/Vy2+lnCjywdjNdO




From patrick at fexl.com  Wed Dec 17 21:24:48 2003
From: patrick at fexl.com (Patrick Chkoreff)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 00:24:48 -0500
Subject: [dgc.chat] Fwd: [NEC] #2.12: The RIAA Succeeds Where the
  CypherPunks Failed 
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031217182046.04f81e18@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <7F6008F5-311A-11D8-9340-000393CAB58E@fexl.com>

On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, at 09:38 PM, Steve Schear wrote:

>>> Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users
>>> have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to 
>>> a
>>> first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a 
>>> felon.
>
> http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html
>
> I'm not sure if Clay ever hung out on the cypherpunks list.  None of 
> this comes as a surprise.
>  Most knew early on that widespread adoption of crypto would require a 
> killer app and that cypherpunks were not delivering these apps because 
> one could not predict what they would be.


Right, a fair point.  I've heard cypherpunks say that and I do think 
Clay was being a bit hard on them.  To place the cypherpunks in the 
best possible light, perhaps better than they deserve, we might say 
it's sort of like criticizing Nikola Tesla for not routing an AC power 
grid through rural Tennessee.


> They would surely not be PGP and other encrypted email nor digital 
> cash unless and until there was a small but lucrative market that 
> could be addressed by such technology or a large market with broad 
> citizen support.  That file sharing could be it was also recognized a 
> long time ago on the cypherpunks list.

Yes, I have seen statements to that effect.

Mind you, I only had occasional exposure to the cypherpunks list via 
Hettinga's feed.  Which is probably fine because I have heard that 
receiving the cypherpunks list is like drinking from a fire hose, and 
Hettinga seems to forward the really informative and entertaining stuff 
from Tim May, Adam Back, et al anyway.


> The really interesting aspect of this is what it portends for the 
> future.  If, as Clay suggests, the current situation is like 
> Prohibition from citizen perspective can we expect a similar repeal of 
> government surveillance?  If not, what will happen as large numbers of 
> citizens adopt P2P systems that not only flaunt copyright law but 
> communications more dear to those in power?

Right, on the one hand it's cool that hordes of otherwise ordinary 
computer users can become interested in "darknets," but on the other 
hand it's a bit scary that the sheer scale of it is orders of magnitude 
beyond getting a whiskey in a speakeasy.  This could either thoroughly 
discourage the government or motivate them to do really draconian 
things like requiring computers and chips to meet a specific government 
specification which severely limits how they function.  They're working 
on it.


> steve
>
> "For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the 
> law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an 
> open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is 
> closely connected with this." -- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression 
> of the U.S.A.", 1921

Yes, a good observation from the time of the first big "War on Drugs," 
that is, the demon alcohol, wrecker of homes and corrupter of public 
morals, as anyone who has watched "Cops" can attest.  Now I need a 
drink -- a glass of port sounds good.

-- Patrick




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Thu Dec 18 00:56:09 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 00:56:09 -0800
Subject: Zombie Attorneys General and other musings
In-Reply-To: <20031217204928.GB11290@cybershamanix.com>
References: <5.2.0.9.0.20031216182044.04688c10@pop.ix.netcom.com>
  <3FDCC93C.97ED60EF@cdc.gov>
  <5.2.0.9.0.20031216182044.04688c10@pop.ix.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031218004807.028e3780@idiom.com>

At 02:49 PM 12/17/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 06:59:59PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
> > us.  Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be
> > made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning
> > American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small
> > part of that calculation.  For example, we could presumably beat China 
> in a
>
>    Oh, but our foreign policy is based on "our long term best interest", 
> or so
>our minders tell us:
>
>     "Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present 
> day, has
>been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce
>everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if
>necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy of domination is not just to
>make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to 
>facilitate our
>exploitation of resources." - Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General
>
>     http://www.thesunmagazine.org/bully.html

I'm mostly trying to stay out of this rather than going off on rants,
but there's an issue of fact to be dealt with here...

Ramsey Clark is _not_ one of "our minders", stating official policy to the 
sheeple,
which is what you're implying here.  He was at one time, but that was
long, long ago, in a job title far, far away.
For the last umpteen years, he's been a major anti-establishment figure,
beating up on the US government when they do things that are wrong or illegal.
I'm not sure when it was that he rehabilitated himself, probably during the
Nixon administration, and I don't know if he beat up on Jimmy Carter
or only on all the Republicans (+Clinton) since Jimmy.

In any case, what he's saying here is his analysis of US policy,
spoken years after he was out of office, not that it's any the less correct 
for that.




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 17 15:08:46 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 01:08:46 +0200
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F84bMC1yKXABLP000419fa@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F84bMC1yKXABLP000419fa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20031217230846.GA25416@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:06:55PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
> A thread that started out quasi-interesting has descended into 
> non-Cypherpunk levels of triviality.

I thought it was trivial all along.

> The original point stands, and is valid. The Islamic world and, in 
> particular, the Arabic part of the Islamic world, are probably going to 
> forget their dislike of Saddam when they see those newreels of the great 
> Dictator being rubbergloved and de-loused. 

Oh please. They (well, many of them) sure didn't forget their dislike of 
the US when they saw those newsreels of the twin towers tumbling down. 

> For them it's almost certainly 
> going to resound as a symbol of how we've systematically manipulated and 
> fucked them over all these years.

Actually, they mostly systematically manipulated and fucked themselves 
over, with occassional help from different factions in the rest of the 
world. 

And they already have a "symbol of how we've", etc. - American military 
presence in the most holy of Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia. That's 
one of the largest reasons for Al-Qaeda growth in recent years. Compared 
to infidel military bases somewhere near Mecca and Medina, whatever's 
done to some dictator who has presided over a mostly secular regime is 
insignificant. And American military presence in Saudi Arabia is 
actually subsiding now because Iraq is no longer a threat. 

> They're not going to respect our "Power", 
> they're not going to care much that WE supported Saddam in the first place. 
> They're just going to get angrier. 

This is just so much armchair psychology. Most of it is silly 
theoretising that has no grounding in reality.

One side says: look, we had to humuliate him publicly, because those 
Arabs only understand power, they only respect you if you clearly show 
them who's the boss, bla bla bla.

The other side says: we shouldn't humiliate him, because the Arab 
culture is built around the all-powerful concept of pride, and they'll 
never forget how we hurt their pride, bla bla bla.

Both sides are spewing idiotic garbage with some marginal relevance to 
reality, which is much, much more complicated than that. You can't 
predict what "the crowd" will say, and the Arab "crowd" is no more 
symplistic than the American one. It does "work" somewhat differently, 
and does display different "mentality", whatever that means, but none of 
it is exploitable with any useful degree of certainty by cheap armchair 
psychologising.

> Look for bin Laden to grow in status 
> until he's just a notch or two below Mohammed.

This is inane.

> That Saddam was a cruel, butchering dictator will 
> soon be nearly irrelevant.

Truth is always relevant.

-- 
avva




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 17 15:35:21 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 01:35:21 +0200
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to> <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>
  <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031217233521.GA25689@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 04:46:51PM -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
> Nice, but the problem still remains: At this point it doesn't matter 
> what he has done (or we say he has done). 

Of course it matters.

> This is not a punishment. 
> "Innocent until proofen guilty" anyone? This is the basis for the 
> "enlightened" western society, no?

This is a principle of civilian life, not military conflicts. There's 
no "innocent until proven guilty" in military conflicts, surely you 
understand that.

Oh, and BTW, do you know that in the enlightened western society (give 
up the sarcastic quotes shtick, it's died and its corpse stinks pretty 
badly) judges commonly allow or deny bail, or set its amount, based on
hypothesised accusations against a detained person, when nothing at all 
has been proven, in the court of law or otherwise? Why don't you go and 
fight that grievious injustice?

-- 
avva




From mellon at pobox.com  Wed Dec 17 15:38:02 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 01:38:02 +0200
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031217181255.GA10989@cybershamanix.com>
References: <20031217081755.R11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE0BA5F.2030108@thedarkerside.to> <20031217205457.GA24751@pobox.com>
  <3FE0CECB.9070406@thedarkerside.to>
  <20031217225356.GC29175@mail.dadadada.net>
  <20031217181255.GA10989@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <20031217233802.GA25709@pobox.com>

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 12:12:55PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> > This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
> > We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.
> 
>   No we don't. We only know what the propaganda mills have told us. Twenty years
> ago it was a different story. 

Right. We don't know that he's a murdering son of a bitch, that's all 
propaganda, but we DO know that we've supported him in the past and IT'S 
ALL OUR FAULT. That is no propaganda, surely. There's never any need to 
qualify *those* kinds of assertons with the "propaganda mills" line.

-- 
avva




From anonymous at remailer.metacolo.com  Wed Dec 17 19:01:07 2003
From: anonymous at remailer.metacolo.com (Anonymous Sender)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 03:01:07 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <a49be3fdcf3abb50ad2485ebba140f20@remailer.metacolo.com>

Harmon Seaver wrote:
> > This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
> > We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.
>
>   No we don't. We only know what the propaganda mills have told us.
> Twenty years ago it was a different story.

The propaganda mills were working for Saddam, not against him.

http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/04/1599076.php

"Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard - awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/041103H.html

"It appears there is another, more troubling, reason Jordan decided not to report these hideous crimes until the regime was safely out of the way: CNN didn't want to lose its on-the-ground access to a big story."


Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and countless Iraqi refugees all report similar stories of widespread torture and murder.  Is it your position that these are all propagandists?

Dismissing as "propaganda" any reports that oppose your argument, while accepting as truth any claim that supports it, is simple intellectual dishonesty.




From comesefosse at ntani.firenze.linux.it  Wed Dec 17 18:10:35 2003
From: comesefosse at ntani.firenze.linux.it (Tarapia Tapioco)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 03:10:35 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>

Harmon Seaver wrote:
> > This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
> > We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.
>
>   No we don't. We only know what the propaganda mills have told us.
> Twenty years ago it was a different story.

The propaganda mills were working for Saddam, not against him.

<http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/04/1599076.php>

"Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard - awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

<http://www.techcentralstation.com/041103H.html>

"It appears there is another, more troubling, reason Jordan decided not to report these hideous crimes until the regime was safely out of the way: CNN didn't want to lose its on-the-ground access to a big story."


Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and countless Iraqi refugees all report similar stories of widespread torture and murder.  Is it your position that these are all propagandists?

Dismissing as "propaganda" any reports that oppose your argument, while accepting as truth any claim that supports it, is simple intellectual dishonesty.




From mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at  Wed Dec 17 20:40:34 2003
From: mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at (privacy.at Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:40:34 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <79dc9b4f1e9b56ad8223d8c755f398c0@remailer.privacy.at>

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, BillyGOTO wrote:

>> Nice, but the problem still remains: At this point it doesn't matter 
>> what he has done (or we say he has done). This is not a punishment. 
>> "Innocent until proofen guilty" anyone? This is the basis for the 
>> "enlightened" western society, no?

>This isn't a ski mask burglary.  We KNOW Saddam ruled Iraq.
>We KNOW what crimes were committed.  Simple syllogism.

I think you might have forgotten about the other half the system, due process. Even if you "KNOW" something, you've got to go through the motions. 




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Dec 18 04:50:44 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 07:50:44 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F22T0giSftNtzs0004379c@hotmail.com>

"You can't
predict what "the crowd" will say, and the Arab "crowd" is no more
symplistic than the American one. It does "work" somewhat differently,
and does display different "mentality", whatever that means, but none of
it is exploitable with any useful degree of certainty by cheap armchair
psychologising."

Again, I think you're missing the point here. All you need is one bin Laden 
to cause us a decent amount of agony. Half a dozen multimillionares with a 
fanatical hatred of the US and we might have a regime change over here.

As for the rest of your post, you didn't respond to the one point so obvious 
I didn't bother making it: Israel. Add to that images of us running around 
any country with a drop of oil or two and they have the right picture: "You 
Arabs can continue living here as long as our access remains unimpeded."

And again, the politics and local history are very near irrelevant. The US 
is there in Saudi, Israel, Iraq, and wherever...not the French, not the 
Italians, and not the Chinese or the Russians.

-TD



>From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon at pobox.com>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
>Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 01:08:46 +0200
>
>On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:06:55PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
> > A thread that started out quasi-interesting has descended into
> > non-Cypherpunk levels of triviality.
>
>I thought it was trivial all along.
>
> > The original point stands, and is valid. The Islamic world and, in
> > particular, the Arabic part of the Islamic world, are probably going to
> > forget their dislike of Saddam when they see those newreels of the great
> > Dictator being rubbergloved and de-loused.
>
>Oh please. They (well, many of them) sure didn't forget their dislike of
>the US when they saw those newsreels of the twin towers tumbling down.
>
> > For them it's almost certainly
> > going to resound as a symbol of how we've systematically manipulated and
> > fucked them over all these years.
>
>Actually, they mostly systematically manipulated and fucked themselves
>over, with occassional help from different factions in the rest of the
>world.
>
>And they already have a "symbol of how we've", etc. - American military
>presence in the most holy of Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia. That's
>one of the largest reasons for Al-Qaeda growth in recent years. Compared
>to infidel military bases somewhere near Mecca and Medina, whatever's
>done to some dictator who has presided over a mostly secular regime is
>insignificant. And American military presence in Saudi Arabia is
>actually subsiding now because Iraq is no longer a threat.
>
> > They're not going to respect our "Power",
> > they're not going to care much that WE supported Saddam in the first 
>place.
> > They're just going to get angrier.
>
>This is just so much armchair psychology. Most of it is silly
>theoretising that has no grounding in reality.
>
>One side says: look, we had to humuliate him publicly, because those
>Arabs only understand power, they only respect you if you clearly show
>them who's the boss, bla bla bla.
>
>The other side says: we shouldn't humiliate him, because the Arab
>culture is built around the all-powerful concept of pride, and they'll
>never forget how we hurt their pride, bla bla bla.
>
>Both sides are spewing idiotic garbage with some marginal relevance to
>reality, which is much, much more complicated than that. You can't
>predict what "the crowd" will say, and the Arab "crowd" is no more
>symplistic than the American one. It does "work" somewhat differently,
>and does display different "mentality", whatever that means, but none of
>it is exploitable with any useful degree of certainty by cheap armchair
>psychologising.
>
> > Look for bin Laden to grow in status
> > until he's just a notch or two below Mohammed.
>
>This is inane.
>
> > That Saddam was a cruel, butchering dictator will
> > soon be nearly irrelevant.
>
>Truth is always relevant.
>
>--
>avva

_________________________________________________________________
Check your PC for viruses with the FREE McAfee online computer scan.  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 18 10:07:01 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:07:01 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <D50A4AA8-310D-11D8-84CD-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>
Message-ID: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>

    --
On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:
> No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't 
> matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by 
> that I mean the Western world general).

You are making up your own history.  When Saddam came to power, 
he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially 
Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo. Saddam was 
always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy.  He was 
at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at 
times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of 
slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with 
Stalin.

Evil men, by their nature, find themselves in conflict with 
other evil men for the same reasons as good men do.  Thus evil 
men and good men will often find themselves in a temporary 
alliance of convenience against a common enemy, an alliance
that both sides know will end in war or near war fairly soon.
This however seldom leads good men to mistake evil men for
'good guys" 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     x2lNKlbCvNFyDbzcIL3WupJdqL2kOOQGo3OhgraM
     4X1HqIxqyVSPO+wzMqnLKSAznJWvSZg0qzwl74LB/




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 18 10:47:14 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:47:14 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
Message-ID: <pgt3uv8chj16iqf28at56r07gd1dp5al80@4ax.com>

    --
Encryption is a defense against threats.  For people to adopt
encryption, they need to be threatened.

All businessmen are guilty of insider trading and destruction 
of evidence.   In consequence all businessmen use encrypted vpn 
internally within companies, but not, however, in external 
communications, rendering a public key infrastructure quite 
useless.  For widespread tax evasion to take off, we would like 
widespread use of public keys.

Now the entire population is guilty of file trading.   Pretty 
soon, therefore, the entire population will be using 
encryption, but it is far from clear that this encryption will 
enable all the potential uses of encryption that cypherpunks 
foresaw. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     5fFQJC040+P9QrkF8BhWR4nUBWhNmexs1EH0ej6o
     4a8EuzGFht8mQloFG16q2B76njPoWM/jVAzYAxKoQ




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Thu Dec 18 08:23:35 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 11:23:35 EST
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
Message-ID: <11b.2c237ed7.2d132e87@aol.com>

December 15, 2003

Uncle Sambs Guantanamo Prison:
Outside the Rule of Law



By Brigid ObNeil*

http://www.independent.org/tii/news/031215ONeil.html


The latest news from Guantanamo Bay is beginning to sound like a modern-day
Simpsons episode. After two years of imprisoning more than 600 alleged enemy
combatants without charge or counsel in a Cuban prison camp, the
Administration
announced earlier this month that two detainees -- one a U.S. citizen -- would
be permitted limited access to an attorney. As any Simpsons buff will tell
you, itbs a classic Mr. Burns move: put on a show of improving work
conditions
at the nuclear power plant by dressing Homer in thermal underwear.

While it might be an amusing tag line typical of the most noxious character
in the Simpsons repertoire, itbs a sad metaphor for the U.S. governmentbs
abysmal treatment of designated enemy combatants.

News of the American prisonerbs counsel came one day before the Justice
Department filed a brief at the Supreme Court, adding to suspicions about the
Administrationbs motives. Their brief asks the court to affirm the
governmentbs
indefinite detention of Americans declared b
enemy combatants,b
 without
counsel
or the ability to dispute the allegations. The Constitutional liberties at
risk in this case, including the right to a fair trial and due process,
constitute a grave danger for Americans and foreign nationals alike. And
nowhere is the
startling consequence of Constitutional b
concessionsb
 more apparent than
the
state of Guantanamo Bay.

>From the beginning, Guantanamo Bay was wrought with strife. The Geneva
Convention, with its guarantee of certain fundamental rights for all prisoners
of
war, was quickly sidelined by the Administration in favor of its own rules for
the treatment and investigation of detainees. In the absence of any rule of
law, it didnbt take long for the media to pick up reports of inhumane
treatment
-- or what one former intelligence officer brazenly called,
b
torture-lite.b

These reports include: firing rubber bullets at those in restraints, beatings
for anyone who b
made a call to prayer,b
 sleep deprivation, and forced
confessions. The situation became so dire that the International Committee of
the Red
Cross (ICRC), the only non-government organization to visit the camp, broke a
long-standing policy of silence and called the prisoner circumstances an b

intolerable situation.b
 After reading the latest official statements on the
health
of the detainees, it becomes shockingly clear why the ICRC took such an
unprecedented move. According to national news reports, 35 detainees have
attempted
suicide, 110 have been placed on a suicide watch list, and 1 out of every 5
detainees now receive medication for what one military official can only
describe as b
clinical depression.b


In response to such damning reports, the Administration contends that the
detainees are dangerous terrorists and thus do not deserve any legal
protections,
much less liberal sympathies. But after two years of investigations at the
camp, the Administration has yet to charge any detainee with a crime or bring
a
case before a military tribunal. Thus, the public has no way to determine what
alleged crimes these men are charged with committing, much less whether or
not they are guilty.

In the absence of any formidable opposition to the Executive Branchbs
actions, the Supreme Court has finally stepped into the ring. In a matter of
months
the Justices will decide two cases that will rule on a host of alleged
constitutional abuses. In the first case, Padilla v. Rumsfeld, the Court will
determine whether a U.S. citizen has the right to an attorney before
disappearing into
a military stockade without charges or contact with the outside world. The
second case, involving the two appeals of Rasul v. Bush and Odah v. U.S., will
decide if Guantanamo detainees can have access to civilian courts to challenge
their detention. The most pressing issue in both cases calls into question the
newly claimed Executive Branch power to detain any person indefinitely and
without any recourse to judicial review.

Given the blatant lack of any legal protections for these alleged combatants,
it is no wonder that former prisoner-of-war Senator John McCain expressed
concern this week about what he saw after a recent visit to Guantanamo. Even
prisoners suspected of serious crimes deserve fair and open legal proceedings
--
after all, our very Constitution was founded on the right to due process and a
presumption of innocence. By holding suspected enemies to our highest rule of
law and honoring established international treaties, we set a precedent for
the treatment we expect of U.S. troops in enemy hands. To undermine this rule
of
law risks the very livelihood of our Constitution and threatens the way our
citizens are treated both at home and abroad. No minor concessions by the U.S.
government can change the impression that the secrecy and lack of due process
for detainees at Guantanamo Bay resembles that of the Soviet gulags of old.
And it doesnbt take the antics of a Mr. Burns or the gullibility of Homer
Simpson to figure it out.

*Brigid ObNeil is a researcher at the Center on Peace & Liberty at The
Independent Institute in Oakland, California. For further articles and
studies, see
the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org.




From cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com  Thu Dec 18 09:20:15 2003
From: cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com (Tim Meehan)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 12:20:15 -0500
Subject: Nextel chills radio station into disciplining disgruntled
  customer (and show host)
Message-ID: <d9o3uv4mi8m6i8fl5vdpe25q6aari7l95s@4ax.com>

Pubdate: Thu, 18 Dec 2003
Source: City Paper (PA)
Copyright: 2003 CP Communications, Inc.
Contact: editorial at citypaper.net
Website: http://www.citypaper.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/88
Author: Morris Bracy
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Forchion

THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY

The first time self-described marijuana-legalization spokesperson
Patrick Duff smoked weed, he was an 11-year-old kid in Delran, N.J. "I
was a very adventurous young man," says Duff, who, when he didn't get
high that first time, wondered what all the hype was about.

He couldn't have known that he and Mary Jane would have such an
enduring, committed relationship.

Sixteen years later, Duff found himself hosting Open Minds, an
hourlong weekly program on New World Radio 1540 AM. For an eight-week,
buy-your-own-airtime stint that began in October, Duff -- along with a
ganja-themed local hip-hop act, Herbillest -- provided a local forum
for legalization activists to state their case to Philadelphians.

Unlike other shows with similar themes, Duff says that he "wasn't
going to go on there and be irate and get real crazy about the
situation, [but] actually find people who could solve the problem."
Past guests include Cannabis Hall of Fame inductee and author of The
Emperor Wears No Clothes Jack Herer, Vancouver's "Prince of Pot," Marc
Emery, and our very own "NJ Weedman," Ed Forchion.

Duff just couldn't keep the topic on weed the whole time, though, and
took on cell phone giant Nextel Communications when his i90 cell gave
out. He says he trusted that his $4.95-a-month manufacturer's
insurance policy, along with a $35 deductible, would guarantee a new
replacement. But as he went through three replacements in six months,
he read the fine print and found that Nextel reserved the right to
replace broken phones with "refurbished" ones.

Duff, who felt like he was getting hustled, demanded the company tell
consumers new phones weren't an option and that all phones were used.
He then challenged a Nextel rep to defend the company's policies on
the air. Nextel responded by calling his station and apparently
convincing the general manager to do some in-house censorship. In a
letter from the station, Duff was threatened with being "immediately
canceled" should he "even breathe the name Nextel."

Chris Doherty, Nextel's senior director of public affairs, admits they
called but says they didn't threaten the station with a libel suit.
According to Doherty, the company's main concern was preventing an
irate Duff from publicly making slanderous comments. Doherty claims
that during a phone exchange, Duff drew a parallel between Nextel's
actions and the Columbine massacre. He feared similar comments might
be expressed on the airwaves. New World GM Sam Speiser had no comment.

Though his show's off the air, Duff is considering buying more New
World time slots. Duff's next move will be his most ambitious yet --
assuming it works. To celebrate the end of the NJ Weedman's
drug-possession parole, he's helping the local counterculture
celebrity organize a smokeout at the Liberty Bell.

Originally scheduled for Dec. 6 -- it was canceled due to snow -- the
smokeout is slated to be held this Saturday. Unlike past smokeouts,
where everyone quits smoking cigarettes, this will be more of a
"smoke-in," where everyone present will celebrate "with the sacrament
of marijuana," Duff says.

The rally is slated to begin at 3 p.m. and last until 5 p.m., with the
"sacrament" to be lit at precisely 4:20 p.m. (Wink, wink, nudge,
nudge.) According to Duff, invitations went out to Woody Harrelson,
Ashton Kutcher, Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

"People aren't going to be able to stop us. There's going to be
hundreds and hundreds of us," says Duff, who's confident that the
event will be an unprecedented success despite ramped-up security
around national monuments since the 9/11 attacks. Holding the event on
federal property is by design, since participants -- arrested
participants, hypothetically -- could seek protection from prosecution
under religious-freedom claims. (Forchion, who got pinched with 40
pounds, is a Rastafarian who says court rulings have defended his
right to smoke weed during religious rituals.) The location also keeps
the Philadelphia Police Department out of the mix, as Independence
Mall lies under the National Park Service's purview.

As of earlier this week, Park Service spokesperson Phil Sheridan said
he hadn't heard about the planned protest, so no responses were available.

"There are areas designated for exercising your First Amendment
rights," says Sheridan, "but you cannot break the law [to do so]." 




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Thu Dec 18 05:07:19 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:07:19 +0000
Subject: Speaking of Reason
In-Reply-To: <p06020415bbffc1bd94b1@[66.149.49.5]>
References: <41.37cd8f0b.2d09fe3a@aol.com>
  <3FD9D7A0.9070204@students.bbk.ac.uk>
  <p06020415bbffc1bd94b1@[66.149.49.5]>
Message-ID: <3FE1A687.4080707@students.bbk.ac.uk>

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> At 2:58 PM +0000 12/12/03, ken wrote:
> 
>>Bruce is a lefty, but not a statist
> 
> 
> riiiighhht...
> 
> That's like saying that he's a sow, but not a boar...


grunt grunt




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Thu Dec 18 11:07:24 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:07:24 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
References: <34bc9938ba6a0aec7d0e4819a6118e09@firenze.linux.it>
  <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE1FAEC.2040502@thedarkerside.to>

James A. Donald wrote:

>    --
>On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:
>  
>
>>No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't 
>>matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by 
>>that I mean the Western world general).
>>    
>>
>
>You are making up your own history. 
>
Am I? The west traded heavily with him, be it the US, France, Germany, 
the UK. Nobody was left out. All dealt with Saddam and made a lot of 
money off of him.


>When Saddam came to power, 
>he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially 
>Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo.
>
Who is "you lot"?

[...]

So in September 1980, Hussein's troops crossed the border into Iran. At 
first the war went well for Iraq, but eventually Iranian forces pushed 
the invaders out of their country. By spring 1982, the Iranians had gone 
on the offensive. And that greatly worried the Reagan White House, 
knowing that an Iranian victory could have a disastrous effect on 
America's power base in the oil-rich Middle East.

Before long the Reagan administration began openly courting Saddam 
Hussein. In 1982, the United States removed Iraq from its list of 
countries that supported state-sponsored terrorism. In December 1983, 
President Reagan sent to Baghdad none other than Donald Rumsfeld, then 
special envoy to the Middle East and today one of Hussein's harshest 
critics as U.S. secretary of defense. Rumsfeld's visit opened up 
America's relations with Iraq for the first time since the Arab-Israeli 
war in 1967. Later, Rumsfeld said that "it struck us as useful to have a 
relationship" and revealed that Hussein had indicated he wasn't 
interested in causing problems in the world.

[...]

http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/iraqwar/timeline/timeline_03.html

> Saddam was 
>always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy. 
>
Does the " mean anything to you? He was our "good guy" as long as we 
though we could use him.


> He was 
>at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at 
>times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of 
>slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with 
>Stalin.
>  
>

I think the circumstances where a bit different at this point in time. 
Besides. Nobody (at least not I) said anything about "supporting" him or 
"cheering" for Saddam. The Question here is not if he is a bad man or a 
good man. It is not if he did or did not do what they accuse him of. But 
it is about the double morale that the west has been advocating for the 
past 50 years. Especially when it comes to Oil.

It is astonishing that it was okay for Saddam to be as evil as be and we 
(as a society) turned a blind eye to it, until WE (for whatever reason) 
felt threatened by him and than dragged it all out again, just to proof 
how bad he is. Face it. If the West didn't want Saddam in Power they 
could have removed him a long time ago. The matter of fact is, we are as 
much to blame for what happened to the people in Iraq as is Saddam, if 
not more so.


>Evil men, by their nature, find themselves in conflict with 
>other evil men for the same reasons as good men do. 
>
So where do your enlightened Western Politicians fit in? Good or Evil?


> Thus evil 
>men and good men will often find themselves in a temporary 
>alliance of convenience against a common enemy, an alliance
>that both sides know will end in war or near war fairly soon.
>  
>

I suggest you read Chomsky's new book, and if only as a reference to the 
sources he lists.

>This however seldom leads good men to mistake evil men for
>'good guys" 
>  
>
No, but it leads good men to become evil. If you ally with the enemy 
than you are giving up what makes you good. Turning away when someone is 
abused doesn't make the abuse stop and it makes you just as guilty as 
the one who commits the abuse.

Ignorance might be bliss for most people, but from an ethical and moral 
standpoint it is not.

Parading Saddam around and humiliating him just shows how low we really 
are, despite the fact that we don't want to acknowledge it ourselves.

Michael




From billy at dadadada.net  Thu Dec 18 11:40:35 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (BillyGOTO)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:40:35 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
  <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031218194035.GA10761@mail.dadadada.net>

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 07:18:04PM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
> Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January
> 2003:  from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of
> weapons.  19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie
> Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China.  Sales from the
> United States were inconsequential and did not make the list.  From
> earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales
> were a small fraction of 1%.

I smell statistical acrobatics by the USAF...
Do we really measure weapons in pounds?

I'd rather see a listing of weapons imports from JUST the period of
the Iran-Iraq war than a listing of weapons imports from 1980-1990.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Dec 18 11:51:21 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:51:21 -0500
Subject: The killer app for encryption
Message-ID: <BAY7-F80fyWOxbCJnEM000050fa@hotmail.com>

Uh...I assume you're quoting somebody here?

The last point is actually a very good one, but getting there requires 
hacking through gobbledeegook. What's this "all businessmen" silliness? And 
using vpns WITHIN a company? As an employee of a major Wall Street firm, I 
can tell you that's completely wrong.

But the interesting thing, which again is "obvious" is, "How will P2P 
Networks morph into something like blacknet?"

I'm very interested in hearing about whether any P2P networks support 
encrypted transactions of any sort yet (ie, can one yet pay for some files 
via P2P)? Are there any P2P Networks being designed deliberately to support 
anything/everything, including peered IP Telephony?

-TD


>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>To: cypherpunks at algebra.com
>Subject: The killer app for encryption
>Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:47:14 -0800
>
>     --
>Encryption is a defense against threats.  For people to adopt
>encryption, they need to be threatened.
>
>All businessmen are guilty of insider trading and destruction
>of evidence.   In consequence all businessmen use encrypted vpn
>internally within companies, but not, however, in external
>communications, rendering a public key infrastructure quite
>useless.  For widespread tax evasion to take off, we would like
>widespread use of public keys.
>
>Now the entire population is guilty of file trading.   Pretty
>soon, therefore, the entire population will be using
>encryption, but it is far from clear that this encryption will
>enable all the potential uses of encryption that cypherpunks
>foresaw.
>
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      5fFQJC040+P9QrkF8BhWR4nUBWhNmexs1EH0ej6o
>      4a8EuzGFht8mQloFG16q2B76njPoWM/jVAzYAxKoQ

_________________________________________________________________
Working moms: Find helpful tips here on managing kids, home, work   and 
yourself.   http://special.msn.com/msnbc/workingmom.armx




From s.schear at comcast.net  Thu Dec 18 15:18:25 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 15:18:25 -0800
Subject: [dgc.chat] Fwd: [NEC] #2.12: The RIAA Succeeds Where the
  CypherPunks Failed 
In-Reply-To: <7F6008F5-311A-11D8-9340-000393CAB58E@fexl.com>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031217182046.04f81e18@mail.comcast.net>
  <7F6008F5-311A-11D8-9340-000393CAB58E@fexl.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218150822.052b6dc0@mail.comcast.net>

At 09:24 PM 12/17/2003, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
>>The really interesting aspect of this is what it portends for the 
>>future.  If, as Clay suggests, the current situation is like Prohibition 
>>from citizen perspective can we expect a similar repeal of government 
>>surveillance?  If not, what will happen as large numbers of citizens 
>>adopt P2P systems that not only flaunt copyright law but communications 
>>more dear to those in power?
>
>Right, on the one hand it's cool that hordes of otherwise ordinary 
>computer users can become interested in "darknets," but on the other hand 
>it's a bit scary that the sheer scale of it is orders of magnitude beyond 
>getting a whiskey in a speakeasy.  This could either thoroughly discourage 
>the government or motivate them to do really draconian things like 
>requiring computers and chips to meet a specific government specification 
>which severely limits how they function.  They're working on it.

True, but if the masses understand what s at stake for them they will 
reject all such solutions where it counts: at the sales counter.  The 
following is from a posting by John Gilmore, early employee of Sun 
Microsystems, founder of the EFF and founding cypherpunk extraoridair.  I 
usually don't forward so much content from another list, in this case the 
cryptography list, but John's rants are usually quite coherent and 
incisive.  This one is no exception.

--begin forward
At 01:53 PM 12/16/2003, John Gilmore wrote:

TCPA is being built specifically at the behest of Hollywood.  It is
built around protecting "content" from "subscribers" for the benefit
of a "service provider".  I know this because I read, and kept, all
the early public design documents, such as the white paper

   http://www.trustedcomputing.org/docs/TCPA_first_WP.pdf

(This is no longer available from the web site, but I have a copy.)
It says, on page 7-8:

   The following usage scenarios briefly illustrate the benefits of TCPA
   compliance.

   Scenario I: Remote Attestation

   TCPA remote attestation allows an application (the "challenger") to
   trust a remote platform. This trust is built by obtaining integrity
   metrics for the remote platform, securely storing these metrics and
   then ensuring that the reporting of the metrics is secure.

   For example, before making content available to a subscriber, it is
   likely that a service provider will need to know that the remote
   platform is trustworthy. The service provider's platform (the
   "challenger") queries the remote platform. During system boot, the
   challenged platform creates a cryptographic hash of the system BIOS,
   using an algorithm to create a statistically unique identifier for the
   platform. The integrity metrics are then stored.

   When it receives the query from the challenger, the remote platform
   responds by digitally signing and then sending the integrity
   metrics. The digital signature prevents tampering and allows the
   challenger to verify the signature. If the signature is verified, the
   challenger can then determine whether the identity metrics are
   trustworthy. If so, the challenger, in this case the service provider,
   can then deliver the content. It is important to note that the TCPA
   process does not make judgments regarding the integrity metrics. It
   merely reports the metrics and lets the challenger make the final
   decision regarding the trustworthiness of the remote platform.

They eventually censored out all the sample application scenarios like
DRM'd online music, and ramped up the level of jargon significantly,
so that nobody reading it can tell what it's for any more.  Now all
the documents available at that site go on for pages and pages saying
things like "FIA_UAU.1 Timing of authentication. Hierarchical to: No
other components. FIA_UAU.1.1 The TSF shall allow access to data and
keys where entity owner has given the 'world' access based on the
value of TCPA_AUTH_DATA_USAGE; access to the following commands:
TPM_SelfTestFull, TPM_ContinueSelfTest, TPM_GetTestResult,
TPM_PcrRead, TPM_DirRead, and TPM_EvictKey on behalf of the user to be
performed before the user is authenticated."

But the historical record is clear that DRM was "Usage Scenario #1"
for TCPA.

Now, back to Hollywood.  If you have not read "This Business of Music"
(a thick book on how musicians can arm themselves with knowledge to
get slightly less screwed by the record industry -- including sample
contracts and explanations of the impact and history of each
provision), you won't know the long history of why Hollywood can be
trusted only to cheat everyone they deal with.

A music-industry contract equivalent to charging for 30% more seconds
than you deliver, is the provision for "breakage".  No artist gets
paid for more than 90% of the albums that the record company sells,
because in the days of shellac records, about 10% of them would break
in shipping.  That problem largely went away with vinyl records, and
went even further away with CDs.  Today's actual breakage is way under
1%.  But record companies won't sign a contract that pays the artist
for more than 90% of the albums shipped on CD.  That 10% underpayment
of musicians goes straight back to the record company's profits.

Their DRM software will cheat users the same way -- or a different
way -- or a hundred different ways.  And TCPA will make it un-auditable
by us.

--end forward

steve




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Thu Dec 18 12:42:37 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 15:42:37 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2113D.4020802@thedarkerside.to>

Jim Dixon wrote:

>On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't
>>>matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by
>>>that I mean the Western world general).
>>>      
>>>
>>You are making up your own history.  When Saddam came to power,
>>he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially
>>Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo. Saddam was
>>always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy.  He was
>>at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at
>>times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of
>>slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with
>>Stalin.
>>    
>>
>
>Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January
>2003:  from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of
>weapons.  19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie
>Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China.  Sales from the
>United States were inconsequential and did not make the list.  From
>earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales
>were a small fraction of 1%.
>  
>
 From the same site I linked to before:

[...]

By January 1984, /The Washington Post/ was reporting that the United 
States had told friendly nations in the Persian Gulf that the defeat of 
Iraq would "be contrary to U.S. interests." That sent the message that 
America would not object to U.S. allies offering military aid to Iraq. 
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait sent howitzers, bombs and other 
weapons to Iraq. And later that year the U.S. government pushed through 
sales of helicopters to Hussein's government.

But that was just the beginning of Reagan's pro-Iraq campaign. The 
United States sold the Iraqis military jeeps and Lockheed L-100 
transports. And, according to a recent report in /The New York Times/, 
as many as 60 American intelligence officers provided Iraq with 
"critical battle planning assistance," lending detailed information on 
Iranian deployments, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments. 
The /Times/ story further reported that this intelligence assistance was 
offered even though American officers knew the Iraqi commanders would 
probably use chemical weapons against the Iranians.

The military aid helped Iraq hold off the Iranians, and the war dragged 
on until 1988. That year the U.S. Senate passed the Prevention of 
Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions against Hussein's 
regime. But the Reagan White House opposed the bill, calling it 
premature. When it eventually passed, the White House made little effort 
to enforce it.

[...]

Just because they didn't sell the weapons directly doesn't mean they 
didn't sell them. It is an age old practice to sell weapons to a middle 
man in order to get them where they are not supposed to be.

And in regards to arms sales:

[...]

    * U.S. arms exports in 1995 amounted to $15.6 billion, three times
      that of the next supplier and 49 percent of the world's. Over the
      1993-1995 period, U.S. exports went equally to developed and
      developing countries.
    * The six next largest suppliers, with over $0.5 billion each and
      together accounting for 42 percent of the world total, were:

U.K. 	$5.2 billion 	Germany 	1.2
Russia 	3.3 	Israel 	0.8
France 	2.2 	China, Mainland 	0.6

    * The Middle East imported over 30 percent of the total number of
      major weapons in trade over the last 12 years (1984-1995). In
      1993-1995, Western Europe became the main importing region with 32
      percent.

[...]

http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/acda/factshee/conwpn/wmeatfs.htm





>It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to
>taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia,
>Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.
>  
>

http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1991/C231.html

[...]

*Kroft. *And other arms dealers and countries did. Brazil provided 
thousands of armored vehicles. China and the Soviet Union sent tanks, 
missiles and munitions. German companies sold Saddam poison gas 
technology, and France, not only approved the sale of artillery to Iraq, 
but [also sold] armed helicopters and antiaircraft missile systems.

This Chilean arms manufacturer [shown on screen] sold Saddam deadly 
cluster bombs--reportedly with technical assistance from U.S. companies, 
and the United States allowed American computer technology to go to Iraq 
as well. It allowed Sarkis to sell Hughes and Bell helicopters. The U.S. 
government approved the sale after Iraq promised that they would only be 
used for civilian purposes. Sarkis told us that the helicopters were 
used as transportation during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

*Sarkis. *I did it with the knowledge of U.S. authorities, policy 
makers--and also they have delivered weapons that are equally weapons as 
I did. I do not have anything on my conscience. I did not sell the 
weapons to kill the American boys.

*Kroft. *Which agencies of the U.S. government knew about Sarkis and his 
deals with Iraq? Well, according to Sarkis, almost all of them. And 
federal court documents show that Sarkis Soghanalian had a relationship 
with U.S. intelligence agencies for decades, and has performed work on 
their behalf.

Not all of Sarkis's deals with Iraq involve weapons. He arranged the 
sale of $280 million in uniforms to the Iraqi army. And Sarkis's 
partners in the deal included former Vice President Spiro Agnew, a 
former Attorney General, Colonel Jack Brennan.

The partners used their influence to get ex-President Nixon to provide 
them with these letters of introduction [shown on screen] to heads of 
state around the world.

[To Sarkis] Do you think there was anything unusual about a former Vice 
President and a former Attorney General and a former Chief of Staff for 
the President of the United Stateas to want to be selling military 
uniforms to the Iraqis?

*Sarkis. *They were not only in the uniform business. They would sell 
their mothers if they could, just to make the money.

[...]


>These repeated claims that Saddam was somehow the US's boy in the Middle
>East are puzzling.  The US did not supply any significant number of
>weapons or other military aid to Iraq. 
>

The word "directly" is missing here.

> They did give limited support to
>Iraq in its war against Iran, a direct consequence of the Irani occupation
>of the US embassy in Teheran and kidnapping of its staff.  If you look at
>the tactics and weapons used by Saddam in the invasion of Kuwait and in
>the resulting Gulf War, they were Soviet.
>
>  
>

That may be, but they also had Hughes Helicopters (see quote above) as 
well as other weapons that clearly came from the US. The US was very 
well aware of what Saddam had because if they didn't sell it to him 
directly they at least acted as facilitator. And so did pretty much 
Western Europe.

>Chirac's personal relations with Saddam go back to at least 1975, the year
>that France signed an agreement to sell two nuclear reactors to Iraq.
>There have been rumors for a long time that Saddam provided financial
>support to Chirac in various election campaigns.
>
>  
>

 From the TLC page again:

[...]

In December 1983, President Reagan sent to Baghdad none other than 
Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy to the Middle East and today one of 
Hussein's harshest critics as U.S. secretary of defense. Rumsfeld's 
visit opened up America's relations with Iraq for the first time since 
the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Later, Rumsfeld said that "it struck us as 
useful to have a relationship" and revealed that Hussein had indicated 
he wasn't interested in causing problems in the world.

[...]

So was apparantly Rumsfeld.

>The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that
>goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany.
>  
>
And the US was just drawn into it by accident?


>Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the
>beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not
>the beginning of a great romance.
>
>  
>
No Government ever cared about the individual if greater gains could be 
amassed. Be it the US or any other country in the world.

BTW, can you provide me with a reference for the "dangling bodies'? 
Because I was unable to find anything on this so far.

Michael




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Dec 18 15:47:44 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 15:47:44 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
Message-ID: <3FE23CA0.7C0531A0@cdc.gov>

At 08:16 PM 12/18/03 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:

>What exactly do you mean by "peered IP telephony"?
>
>Voice telephony requires delays measured in tens of milliseconds.  A
bit
>difficult if you also want encryption, anonymity, etc.

The problem handling the delay comes with the network, not the
encryption.  The encryption can be symmetric, and must be used
in a mode that tolerates drops, but its not a big cost when sending
8kbytes/sec.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Thu Dec 18 16:42:01 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:42:01 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <3FE23CA0.7C0531A0@cdc.gov>
References: <3FE23CA0.7C0531A0@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218160352.050fd2b8@mail.comcast.net>

At 03:47 PM 12/18/2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>At 08:16 PM 12/18/03 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
>
> >What exactly do you mean by "peered IP telephony"?

What I'd like to see is a P2P telephony that also supports end-user 
gateways to the POTS.  I'm not certain, but I think there are some MS 
certified modems which have a generalized A/D-D/A capability sufficient to 
handle voice.  Although it opens up the possibility of end-user 
eavesdropping some of this might be thwarted by randomizing user node 
selection and detecting/reporting line impedance changes (indicating an 
extension going off-hook) to the 'client' wising to use the POTS. I 
suggested this idea to Jeff Pulver, now a VoIP champion, in 1999 but he 
thought it was too out of the mainstream to be interesting.  Now that P2P 
is beginning to branch out from file sharing maybe this is no longer a far 
out idea.

steve 




From s.schear at comcast.net  Thu Dec 18 17:11:53 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:11:53 -0800
Subject: Wired: -- Debka: Conflict's Drudge Report? 
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218170840.0529d220@mail.comcast.net>

Debka: Conflict's Drudge Report?

By Noah Shachtman

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47325,00.html

02:00 AM Oct. 05, 2001 PT

The Iraqis are training Osama bin Laden's troops in chemical and biological 
weapons; Russian commando units packing newly acquired American arms are 
poised to storm Afghanistan; Israel is about to be charged with damaging 
the mosques on Jerusalem's contested Temple Mount.

Stories like these- are making the free-wheeling Israeli news site 
Debkafile an increasingly popular destination for Americans looking for the 
inside scoop on the conflict with terrorism.

<snip>

John Ghazivinian, an editor at news professionals' site Mediabistro, added, 
"There's a real strong sense that the mainstream media have scaled back 
their operations so much that they're basically incapable of covering this 
from the ground."

Debkafile -- based in the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill, 
equidistant from both Palestinian villages and the walls of the Old City -- 
has shown an ability to get that kind of coverage. USA Today, CNN and NBC 
all reported last Friday that American and British forces were in 
Afghanistan scouting out terrorist hiding places; Debkafile had the same 
story days earlier, and included details about Russian intelligence 
officers and German commandos joining in the incursions.

On the Saturday before, Debkafile ran a story that Saudi Arabia had refused 
to let the U.S. use its air bases to stage attacks on Afghanistan; it took 
The New York Times another two days to report this information.

Like the Drudge Report, which it resembles, Debkafile clearly reports with 
a point of view; the site is unabashedly in the hawkish camp of Israeli 
politics and has partnered with the far-right news site WorldNetDaily for a 
weekly, $120 subscription product.

<snip>

"Not everything Debka says is going to be confirmed, but I guarantee you 
three days later you'll find at least one item in The New York Times," said 
Greg Clayman, a New York City Internet marketing executive. "When (White 
House press secretary) Ari Fleischer tells the mainstream media, 'Watch 
what you say,' you've got to look for other sources."


A foolish Constitutional inconsistency is the hobgoblin of freedom, adored 
by judges and demagogue statesmen.
- Steve Schear 




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Thu Dec 18 14:19:41 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:19:41 -0500 (EST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <200312180449.hBI4nSij028508@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <200312182231.hBIMVkhQ071161@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

I would like to throw in with the OTO gunners here.  If you are
interested in an expanded and predictive analysis, check here.

US aggression leads predictably to bad results: Take action to stop the war now
http://proclus.tripod.com/radical/wartext4.html

I wrote it in April, while US bombs were turning Baghdad into a second
9/11.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


On 17 Dec, Eric Cordian wrote:
> > But when, however, people fly a plainload of passengers into 
> > two tall buildings and murder thousands, those dreadful 
> > Americans had it coming, were justly smacked like a naughty 
> > child, and have no right to get indignant.  
>  
> The two events are completely unrelated, except for the fact that 9/11 
> gave the US the additional hubris it needed to launch an unprovoked war of 
> agression against another sovereign nation, in violation of international 
> law and the wishes of the world community. 
>  
> Saddam's capture is the poisoned fruit of an illegal occupation, which is 
> itself the poisoned fruit of an illegal invasion, whose clear purpose, 
> despite the lies about Saddam's ready to launch nuclear weapons, was to 
> control Iraq's oil, and eliminate support for the oppressed Palestinians. 
>  
> Bush knew that as long as he managed to attack Iraq, using any pretense, 
> he would never be forced to leave once the excuses were revealed as lies, 
> because if there's two things America is structurally incapable of doing, 
> it's accepting blame and apologizing. 
>  
> Every American soldier in Iraq right now is a war criminal.  Every dead 
> Iraqi is a murder victim. 
>  
> As one writer so aptly put it... 
>  
> "For months we have wanted to get our hands on the warmonger who 
> terrorized the world with weapons of mass destruction. But, as we couldn't 
> get George Bush, we had to make do with Saddam Hussein." 

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Thu Dec 18 14:38:46 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:38:46 -0500 (EST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <200312182250.hBIMoohQ072466@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

I would like to throw in with the OTO gunners here.  If you are
interested in an expanded and predictive analysis, check here.

US aggression leads predictably to bad results: Take action to stop the war now
http://proclus.tripod.com/radical/wartext4.html

I wrote it in April, while US bombs were turning Baghdad into a second
9/11.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


On 17 Dec, Eric Cordian wrote:
> > But when, however, people fly a plainload of passengers into 
> > two tall buildings and murder thousands, those dreadful 
> > Americans had it coming, were justly smacked like a naughty 
> > child, and have no right to get indignant.  
>  
> The two events are completely unrelated, except for the fact that 9/11 
> gave the US the additional hubris it needed to launch an unprovoked war of 
> agression against another sovereign nation, in violation of international 
> law and the wishes of the world community. 
>  
> Saddam's capture is the poisoned fruit of an illegal occupation, which is 
> itself the poisoned fruit of an illegal invasion, whose clear purpose, 
> despite the lies about Saddam's ready to launch nuclear weapons, was to 
> control Iraq's oil, and eliminate support for the oppressed Palestinians. 
>  
> Bush knew that as long as he managed to attack Iraq, using any pretense, 
> he would never be forced to leave once the excuses were revealed as lies, 
> because if there's two things America is structurally incapable of doing, 
> it's accepting blame and apologizing. 
>  
> Every American soldier in Iraq right now is a war criminal.  Every dead 
> Iraqi is a murder victim. 
>  
> As one writer so aptly put it... 
>  
> "For months we have wanted to get our hands on the warmonger who 
> terrorized the world with weapons of mass destruction. But, as we couldn't 
> get George Bush, we had to make do with Saddam Hussein." 

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Thu Dec 18 14:49:02 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:49:02 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A741B@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:

>I would like to throw in with the OTO gunners here. [...]

OTO????
Ordo Templi Orientalis?

You don't mean *that*, do you? 
I suspect I'm suffering from acronym overloading. 

Peter




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Thu Dec 18 14:59:04 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:59:04 -0500 (EST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A741B@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <200312182311.hBINBBhQ074045@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 18 Dec, Trei, Peter wrote:
> proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> 
>>I would like to throw in with the OTO gunners here. [...]
> 
> OTO????
> Ordo Templi Orientalis?
> 
> You don't mean *that*, do you? 

Why not?

> I suspect I'm suffering from acronym overloading. 

I was simply agreeing with the post of Eric Cordian, and hopefully
adding support to the argument, while alluding to his interesting sig.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/



-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Thu Dec 18 18:14:55 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:14:55 -0800 (PST)
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218160352.050fd2b8@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20031219021455.63302.qmail@web40608.mail.yahoo.com>

> What I'd like to see is a P2P telephony that also supports end-user 
> gateways to the POTS.  I'm not certain, but I think there are some MS 

I don't get what does this have to do with crypto.

Outside crypto, this didn't quite work with (almost) public fax gateways of
'90s. In theory, you could send e-mail that would be rasterized and faxed using
gateway that was in local calling area and presumably did not incur any charge
from the local POTS monopoly.

However, I don't see people letting others use their POTS lines, nor I see them
using their own for this purpose. Yes, this would essentially eliminate long
distance charges for those so equipped ... but if A and B have these gateways
and use them, what is the chance of them not being AT the gateway (ie. not
having laptops) at any given moment - why bother using POTS in the loop in the
first place ?

VoIP companies are already doing this and the cost is quite low (calling cards)
- why bother?



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 18 18:34:12 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:34:12 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE1FAEC.2040502@thedarkerside.to>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>

    --
On 18 Dec 2003 at 14:07, Michael Kalus wrote:
> The west traded heavily with [Saddam], be it the US, France,
> Germany, the UK.

The west, including the US traded and continues to trade
heavily with Castro, yet somehow that does not lead you to
believe they think Castro a good guy, nor does it lead you to
believe they are actively supporting him.

> It is astonishing that it was okay for Saddam to be as evil
> as be and we (as a society) turned a blind eye to it

Yet you show no similar astonishment concerning the evil of
Stalin.

James A. Donald:
> > Evil men, by their nature, find themselves in conflict with 
> > other evil men for the same reasons as good men do. Thus
> > evil men and good men will often find themselves in a
> > temporary alliance of convenience against a common enemy,
> > an alliance that both sides know will end in war or near
> > war fairly soon.

Michael Kalus
> I suggest you read Chomsky's new book, and if only as a
> reference to the sources he lists.

Every citation Chomsky gives is fraudulent.

I recently posted a paragraph by paragraph examination of one
of his more notorious articles.  Every single citation he gave
was false in some central and crucial way.

See my very long posting: 
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=739htvsqv3bteggtq8p2ht5ae1fl8g3rj
u at 4ax.com
http://tinyurl.com/yzao

> If you ally with the enemy than you are giving up what makes
> you good.

It merely means you are dealing with one enemy at a time,
rather than all of them at once. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     BD9mhUcJ2fu+5AnOrsX/j+E5S6NXUuQ40Qk4617u
     4fiAQszFxSm820AMu8akts9Cg5A/AkwHtkQLXCm8z




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 18 18:34:12 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:34:12 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE2113D.4020802@thedarkerside.to>
References: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE1F324.12184.506E96D@localhost>

    --
On 18 Dec 2003 at 15:42, Michael Kalus wrote:
> By January 1984, /The Washington Post/ was reporting that the
> United States had told friendly nations in the Persian Gulf
> that the defeat of Iraq would "be contrary to U.S.
> interests." That sent the message that America would not
> object to U.S. allies offering military aid to Iraq. Egypt,
> Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait sent howitzers, bombs and 
> other weapons to Iraq. And later that year the U.S.
> government pushed through sales of helicopters to Hussein's
> government.

This does not resemble in the slightest sending collossal
amounts of logistic aid to Stalin, or even supplying the
murderous marxist Mengistu with free cattle trucks to ship the
peasants to death camps in the course of imposing forced
collectivisation, yet somehow I never hear the fans of terror
and slavery complaining about those episodes.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     5ibjDrK757xI4qlX/NW0eJQnWdI267xZu+oMuBEO
     4esmiD8ZBiOaoKK48vXdGpqBQjC43P2L5EtUa9k+i




From measl at mfn.org  Thu Dec 18 16:41:15 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:41:15 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE0E2E5.24544.DF70E2@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181838540.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> On 18 Dec 2003 at 5:40, privacy.at Anonymous Remailer wrote:
> > I think you might have forgotten about the other half the
> > system, due process. Even if you "KNOW" something, you've got
> > to go through the motions.
> 
> Different rules apply in war.

One leettllleee problem: we are not really at war.  Or, to put this another
way, we are only "at war" when it is convenient for us to be.  Our Gitmo
guests aren't POWs because there was no declared war.  Anyone we grabbed on
the fields in Irq were just "illegal combatants", while our own troops
(Jessica Lynch) were "POWs".

The whole thing is through and through bullshit.


 -- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From s.schear at comcast.net  Thu Dec 18 18:41:42 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:41:42 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <20031219021455.63302.qmail@web40608.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218160352.050fd2b8@mail.comcast.net>
  <20031219021455.63302.qmail@web40608.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218183255.05377dc0@mail.comcast.net>

At 06:14 PM 12/18/2003, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > What I'd like to see is a P2P telephony that also supports end-user
> > gateways to the POTS.  I'm not certain, but I think there are some MS


>However, I don't see people letting others use their POTS lines, nor I see 
>them
>using their own for this purpose. Yes, this would essentially eliminate long
>distance charges for those so equipped ... but if A and B have these gateways
>and use them, what is the chance of them not being AT the gateway (ie. not
>having laptops) at any given moment - why bother using POTS in the loop in the
>first place ?
>
>VoIP companies are already doing this and the cost is quite low (calling 
>cards)
>- why bother?

Because it means you can complete call to the POTs with no 
company-controlled switch involved, meaning no where to serve a court 
order.  Since the call could be routed through a few intermediate nodes and 
still not have too much latency traffic analysis could take longer than 
short calls.  Since the last gateway could be selected from a potentially 
large group, in major cities anyway, obtaining a phone tap in time could be 
come problematic.

Also, if long distance charges don't drop to zero soon, it means 
participating residential users could actually resell their POTS.

steve 




From measl at mfn.org  Thu Dec 18 17:09:03 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:09:03 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181908020.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:

<huge snip>

> The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that
> goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany.
> Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the
> beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not
> the beginning of a great romance.

And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to invade a foreign,
*sovereign* nation.

> 
> --
> Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
> http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
> http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From jdd at dixons.org  Thu Dec 18 11:18:04 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:18:04 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:
> > No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't
> > matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by
> > that I mean the Western world general).
>
> You are making up your own history.  When Saddam came to power,
> he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially
> Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo. Saddam was
> always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy.  He was
> at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at
> times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of
> slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with
> Stalin.

Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January
2003:  from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of
weapons.  19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie
Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China.  Sales from the
United States were inconsequential and did not make the list.  From
earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales
were a small fraction of 1%.

It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to
taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia,
Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.

These repeated claims that Saddam was somehow the US's boy in the Middle
East are puzzling.  The US did not supply any significant number of
weapons or other military aid to Iraq.  They did give limited support to
Iraq in its war against Iran, a direct consequence of the Irani occupation
of the US embassy in Teheran and kidnapping of its staff.  If you look at
the tactics and weapons used by Saddam in the invasion of Kuwait and in
the resulting Gulf War, they were Soviet.

Chirac's personal relations with Saddam go back to at least 1975, the year
that France signed an agreement to sell two nuclear reactors to Iraq.
There have been rumors for a long time that Saddam provided financial
support to Chirac in various election campaigns.

The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that
goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany.
Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the
beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not
the beginning of a great romance.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 18 19:34:00 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:34:00 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181838540.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <3FE0E2E5.24544.DF70E2@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE20128.13688.53DA72B@localhost>

    --
On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:
> > Different rules apply in war.

J.A. Terranson wrote:
> One leettllleee problem: we are not really at war.

Sure looks like war to me.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     m/LKiwI0Eg2NXtaztjmDl/9QH5F9MEMwCm99tMfj
     4bhp8+U4+fNf8UBFLRCgyXRN6YbQnvk+Z6xVkFcnO




From jamesd at echeque.com  Thu Dec 18 19:34:00 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:34:00 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181908020.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE20128.3240.53DA77B@localhost>

    --
On 18 Dec 2003 at 19:09, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to
> invade a foreign, *sovereign* nation.

Although you probably do not know it, you are invoking the
rules of the peace of Westphalia.

The Soviet Union never respected the peace of Westphalia.
After the election of Ronald Reagan, neither did the US, and
the US has never resumed respecting it, so that stuff is
ancient history now.   National Sovereignty, like the divine
right of kings, just is not taken seriously any more, and the
only people weeping big salt tears about its passing are those
who enthusiastically hailed all the Soviet violations of it as
wars of national liberation. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     MG21u2rXbbd8Gv6a0KI33gOfB0dq3Rj0+8QLf9Zu
     475GB3UNm+fRK0Tmju1skiWzb5gB5QGgnIdyidhHM




From measl at mfn.org  Thu Dec 18 17:41:42 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:41:42 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031217193009.G11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181939500.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:

<SNIP>
> Why does the US military have
> to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
> citizens or physically present in the United States.

In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.  It does
not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be faithful to this
premise, physical location is a non-sequitor. 


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Thu Dec 18 19:57:55 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:57:55 -0800 (PST)
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218183255.05377dc0@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20031219035755.49551.qmail@web40609.mail.yahoo.com>

> Because it means you can complete call to the POTs with no 
> company-controlled switch involved, meaning no where to serve a court 
> order.  Since the call could be routed through a few intermediate nodes and 

I see.

So, in the real world, X uses this to make telephone threats, your POTS gets
picked up by random selection as the outgoing node, and gets traced back to
from the victim's telephone, LEA visits you and you say ... "I know nothing".

Yes, I can see it working and widely adopted.

Looks like someone is pumping dumbing gas into cpunks homes.


=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/




From jdd at dixons.org  Thu Dec 18 12:13:14 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:13:14 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218194035.GA10761@mail.dadadada.net>
Message-ID: <20031218200553.Y11657-100000@localhost>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, BillyGOTO wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 07:18:04PM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
> > Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January
> > 2003:  from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of
> > weapons.  19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie
> > Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China.  Sales from the
> > United States were inconsequential and did not make the list.  From
> > earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales
> > were a small fraction of 1%.
>
> I smell statistical acrobatics by the USAF...
> Do we really measure weapons in pounds?

In the UK we measure sales in pounds sterling.  One pound = $1.75 and
rising.

> I'd rather see a listing of weapons imports from JUST the period of
> the Iran-Iraq war than a listing of weapons imports from 1980-1990.

One is included in the other.  From memory, total US military sales
to Iraq in the decade were $3 million.  As we all know, in Washington DC
"a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there -- pretty soon you are
talking real money".  Three million dollars will buy you a few coffee
pots and a monkey wrench for your AWACS aircraft.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From jdd at dixons.org  Thu Dec 18 12:16:03 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:16:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F80fyWOxbCJnEM000050fa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20031218201411.D11657-100000@localhost>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> I'm very interested in hearing about whether any P2P networks support
> encrypted transactions of any sort yet (ie, can one yet pay for some files
> via P2P)? Are there any P2P Networks being designed deliberately to support
> anything/everything, including peered IP Telephony?

What exactly do you mean by "peered IP telephony"?

Voice telephony requires delays measured in tens of milliseconds.  A bit
difficult if you also want encryption, anonymity, etc.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From daniel at roe.ch  Thu Dec 18 12:47:57 2003
From: daniel at roe.ch (Daniel Roethlisberger)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:47:57 +0100
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
  <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031218204757.GA10685@dragon.roe.ch>

Jim Dixon <jdd at dixons.org> [2003-12-18/19:18]:
> 19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia),
> East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China.
[...]
> It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to
> taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia,
> Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.

You are confusing todays Germany with the communist pre-1989 Eastern
Germany, two *very* different things (I thought the British had better
knowledge of the "Olde Europe" than the fellow Americans do?)

As to the rest, always look at who published the "facts". It's the same
sources that claimed the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It's
unfortunate that most people fall for this kind of manipulative
misinformation.

Cheers,
Dan


--
    Daniel Roethlisberger <daniel at roe.ch>
    OpenPGP key id 0x804A06B1 (1024/4096 DSA/ElGamal)
    144D 6A5E 0C88 E5D7 0775 FCFD 3974 0E98 804A 06B1
!->

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From measl at mfn.org  Thu Dec 18 19:53:22 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:53:22 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE20128.13688.53DA72B@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312182152450.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:34:00 -0800
> From: James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com>
> To: cypherpunks at lne.com
> Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
> 
>     --
> On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:
> > > Different rules apply in war.
> 
> J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > One leettllleee problem: we are not really at war.
> 
> Sure looks like war to me.

I guess that's why the congresscritters told Shrub to GFY when he tried to
get a declaration?

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From measl at mfn.org  Thu Dec 18 19:57:07 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:57:07 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE20128.3240.53DA77B@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312182154260.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> On 18 Dec 2003 at 19:09, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to
> > invade a foreign, *sovereign* nation.
> 
> Although you probably do not know it, you are invoking the
> rules of the peace of Westphalia.
> 
> The Soviet Union never respected the peace of Westphalia.

Which was evil.

> After the election of Ronald Reagan, neither did the US,

Living proof that you can become what you hate.

> and
> the US has never resumed respecting it, so that stuff is
> ancient history now.

So what you are saying is that we have become the Soviet Union?

> National Sovereignty, like the divine
> right of kings, just is not taken seriously any more, and the
> only people weeping big salt tears about its passing are those
> who enthusiastically hailed all the Soviet violations of it as
> wars of national liberation. 

Spare me.  I was no Soviet apologist.  And until Reagan I was a dyed in the
wool republican.  Yet, I shed and continue to shed tears for a race of people
that refuses to respect the rights of men and their nations.  Like the
Soviets.  Or [now], the Americans...

 
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      MG21u2rXbbd8Gv6a0KI33gOfB0dq3Rj0+8QLf9Zu
>      475GB3UNm+fRK0Tmju1skiWzb5gB5QGgnIdyidhHM
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From s.schear at comcast.net  Thu Dec 18 22:31:34 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 22:31:34 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <20031219035755.49551.qmail@web40609.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218183255.05377dc0@mail.comcast.net>
  <20031219035755.49551.qmail@web40609.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031218222920.05399210@mail.comcast.net>

At 07:57 PM 12/18/2003, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > Because it means you can complete call to the POTs with no
> > company-controlled switch involved, meaning no where to serve a court
> > order.  Since the call could be routed through a few intermediate nodes 
> and
>
>I see.
>
>So, in the real world, X uses this to make telephone threats, your POTS gets
>picked up by random selection as the outgoing node, and gets traced back to
>from the victim's telephone, LEA visits you and you say ... "I know nothing".
>
>Yes, I can see it working and widely adopted.
>
>Looks like someone is pumping dumbing gas into cpunks homes.

I'd have no problem letting my phone be so used.  What's the difference 
between that and allowing unknown others using your WiFi?  It provides 
plausible deniability when you decide to do the calling yourself.

steve 




From jdd at dixons.org  Thu Dec 18 15:06:05 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 23:06:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE2113D.4020802@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031218212501.N11657-100000@localhost>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Michael Kalus wrote:

> BTW, can you provide me with a reference for the "dangling bodies'?
> Because I was unable to find anything on this so far.

I was travelling in the area (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey)
at the time.  In the 1960s the usual overland traveller's route through
the region to Europe had been Bombay - Gulf - Iraq (Basra) - Turkey.  In
the 1970s, when I was there, the route had shifted to Pakistan -
Afghanistan - Iran - Turkey because of attacks on foreigners and in
particular the hanging of several Americans as supposed CIA agents, spies.
The Baath Party took over in 1968 and nationalized the oil industry in
1972; the surge in anti-western agitation occurred in that period.

Googling provides a lot of hits, mostly propaganda for one side or the
other.  One interesting quote regarding the Baath takeover:

"To the end Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad.
After his execution, his supporters refused to believe he was dead until
the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in
the newspapers."  (From "Out of the Ashes, the Resurrection of Saddam
Hussain", by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn.)  The coup leaders included one
Saddam Hussian, who of course killed the rest over the next few years.

This time around the president's bullet-riddled body has not been
displayed on TV.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From jdd at dixons.org  Thu Dec 18 15:24:39 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 23:24:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218204757.GA10685@dragon.roe.ch>
Message-ID: <20031218230653.A11657-100000@localhost>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Daniel Roethlisberger wrote:

> > 19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia),
> > East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China.
> [...]
> > It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to
> > taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia,
> > Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.
>
> You are confusing todays Germany with the communist pre-1989 Eastern
> Germany,

I am not confusing them at all.  There is ample evidence that the Germans
sold to Saddam both before and after the reunification of Germany.

>         two *very* different things (I thought the British had better
> knowledge of the "Olde Europe" than the fellow Americans do?)
>
> As to the rest, always look at who published the "facts". It's the same
> sources that claimed the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It's

The _UN_ claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  They ordered
them destroyed, and actually watched some being destroyed until Saddam
threw them out in the late 1990s.  They subsequently reported that they
could not account for tons of chemical weapons; this was one of the
reasons for the second war.

> unfortunate that most people fall for this kind of manipulative
> misinformation.

The manipulative misinformation is the claim that the US somehow armed
Saddam Hussein.  He had French planes, Czech weapons, Russian tanks; we
saw them burning on TV in both wars.  There is no evidence at all that the
US supplied weapons in any quantity to Iraq, just unsubstantiated claims
from the usual mob, the ones who supposedly know all those secrets hidden
from the rest of us.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Dec 19 08:38:22 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 08:38:22 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
References: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219081719.05112cc8@mail.comcast.net>

At 02:00 AM 12/19/2003, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>After WWI the "winners" humiliated the loosers badly. This is one of the 
>main reasons Hitler came to power and got support from the Germans for the 
>aggressions that started the war. He managed to use these feelings of 
>being treated as dogs and paying to heavy for the first war. Also they 
>were very humiliated by the fact that France then occupied part of western 
>Germany.

That was certainly one of the most overt reasons for the war.  An equally 
plausible reason has it as an inevitable climax of a centuries-long 
philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of 
unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice and the elevation of society or the 
state above the individual.  These three ideas spewed forth from some of 
the most respected philosophers of the late 19th Century (e.g., Kant).  An 
excellent book "Ominous Parallels," by Leonard Peikoff builds the case that 
the rise of Nazism was facilitated by the philosophical content of 
mainstream German culture, and that the basic anti-individualist, 
anti-reason orientations of this culture are also apparent in modern 
American culture (hence the "Ominous Parallels").

steve 




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Fri Dec 19 06:44:27 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 09:44:27 EST
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
Message-ID: <102.3b2ce87d.2d1468cb@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/19/2003 8:33:48 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
jdd at dixons.org writes:

> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> 
> >>Why does the US military have
> >>to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
> >>citizens or physically present in the United States.
> >
> >In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.  It 
> does
> >not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be faithful to this
> >premise, physical location is a non-sequitor.
> 
> This is a valid and probably commendable political position.  I do not
> believe, however, that it reflects current practice in the USA or
> elsewhere.
> 
> I say "probably" because it seems likely that adopting this as a practice
> would have very high costs.

You deserve a Tim response, but that ain't my style- 

Of course the USA doesn't currently practice upholding the universal rights 
that our constitution recognizes, this is why Tim suggests that people need to 
be shot, or be fucked till dead.

And why would you think that American judicial morality and justice should be 
dependent on cost? After all it would be cheaper for the cops on a traffic 
stop to administratively just shoot you in the head for an offense then go 
through the costs and rigors of a trial.

Regards,  Matt-




From rfiero at pophost.com  Fri Dec 19 09:59:16 2003
From: rfiero at pophost.com (Richard Fiero)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 09:59:16 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <dfcfe25c7f6ba6b05892343e523eae6f@remailer.privacy.at>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20031219094638.00a98b58@pop.pophost.com>

privacy.at Anonymous Remailer wrote:
>Greetings
>
>Has Saddam recieved a lawyer yet?
>Will Saddam be judged by a court having jurisdiction and being 
>recognized internationally?

The Hague has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in the past 
due to the "Henry Kissinger" clause insisted upon by the US. 
Saddam's guilt in a smaller number of deaths is being pushed 
hard to justify the exercise in the Mid-East so the outcome is 
certain and will be dressed appropriately I'm sure. My guess is 
that a suitable Iraqi court won't take note of the number of 
civilian deaths due to bombings and economic sanctions by its liberators. 




From sunder at sunder.net  Fri Dec 19 07:11:32 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 10:11:32 -0500 (est)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181908020.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312190957580.11603-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

That all depends on your definition of sovereign.  After all, "we" put, or
at least helped, that monster into power.  No different an action than we
the many times before putting tyrants into control of small, but important
nations under the guise of "protecting democracy."  

So, while he was our puppet, he was the good guy, and no matter how many
he murdered, he was a benevolent leader.

Once he turned on our interests, he was no longer useful and had to be
removed.  It just took Jr. to do it.

Now, we'll put a different "democratic" government in place.  Of course,
it won't be as free as the USA, nor have the same kind of constitution -
that would be a problem since we couldn't control it's oil.

Nothing new, nothing to be surprised about.  We couldn't give a fuck
less if Sadam was given an anal probe on TV, or if he was put in the
colliseum for donkeys to use as a sex toy, as in Roman times.  As
entertaining as it would be for some, it's utterly unimportant.

Pax Americana will march on.  We have their oil - we can throw some crumbs
to some other "friendly" countries of the COW, and lesser crumbs to those
who complained, but the rest is just meaningless green colored icing on
the cake.

The war on terror itself will go on for as long as the voters will
tolerate it, or until it's true goals succeede and it becomes impossible
for the voters to do anything but accept it - or be disappeared in the
middle of the night...  Not much different than in Stalin or Hitler's
days.

Perhaps a democrat will make it back in power again, but that too is
meaningless, as the infrastructure for the super surveillance, terror
police state is already in place and won't likely go away.  It no longer
makes a difference, even if a few of the teeth of the DHS are
removed... people will still be disappeared in the middle of the night,
warantless searches, secret shadow trails, et al.


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:
> 
> <huge snip>
> 
> > The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that
> > goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany.
> > Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the
> > beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not
> > the beginning of a great romance.
> 
> And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to invade a foreign,
> *sovereign* nation.




From mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at  Fri Dec 19 01:14:00 2003
From: mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at (privacy.at Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 10:14:00 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <dfcfe25c7f6ba6b05892343e523eae6f@remailer.privacy.at>

Greetings

Has Saddam recieved a lawyer yet?
Will Saddam be judged by a court having jurisdiction and being recognized internationally?




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Dec 19 10:57:19 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 10:57:19 -0800
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
References: <102.3b2ce87d.2d1468cb@aol.com>
  <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219103509.0510b1c8@mail.comcast.net>

At 07:19 AM 12/19/2003, Jim Dixon wrote:
>On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

>If Saddam had been less of an idiot, if he had left Kuwait alone, he would
>be relaxing in one of his palaces today and his sons would be out
>snatching women off the street, torturing people who had annoyed them --
>you know, having a good night out.

[Jim, don't you ever do a bit of research on historical topics before
spouting off?  Google is your friend.  Use it.]

 From Ramsey Clark's excellent "The Fire This Time".
http://www.firethistime.org/linesscript.htm TRACK 3 : LINES IN THE SAND

-----------------------------------------
One day after the Cease Fire, Kuwait announced plans to increase oil
exports in defiance of OPEC quotas. The price of crude began to slide. In
June '89, they stepped up production again. Iraq was hard hit.

[1/74.] SHAKIB OUTAKI  OIL ANALYST

For every fall of a dollar in the price of a barrel of oil, Iraq lost a
billion dollars in income.

While Iraq was at war, Kuwait had moved into the Rumailia oil field,
shifting a border disputed since colonial times. In November, Kuwaiti
officials met with the CIA and agreed:

"to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq [] To
put pressure on that countrys government to delineate our common border.
The CIA gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure." [1]

As oil prices collapsed, Kuwait demanded that Iraq repay its wartime debts.

In December, the United States invaded Panama  without rebuke from the UN
Security Council. The Soviet Empire was in chaos, the global pattern of
relationships changing. US War Plan 1002  devised to counter a Russian
threat in the Gulf - was updated, and now posed Iraq as the enemy.

Early in 1990, General Norman Schwarzkopf briefed congress:

"Middle East oil is the Wests lifeblood. [.] It is going to fuel us when
the rest of the world has run dry." [2]

Schwarzkopf advocated a permanent US presence in the Gulf. But in the wake
of Soviet collapse, there were calls to cut military spending. New enemies
had to be found. A white paper was drawn up which identified Iraq and
Saddam Hussein as:

".the optimum contenders to replace the Warsaw pact." [3]

There was just one problem. According to the US Army War College:

"Baghdad should not be expected to deliberately provoke military
confrontations with anyone." [4]

US intelligence indicated that Iraqs desire was to reduce the army and
repay their debts.

But high unemployment made de-mobilisation impossible, inflation on the
dinar was forty percent and rising, and the price of oil continued to fall.



In May 1990, Saddam Hussein protested at Kuwaits continuing overproduction:

"Were it possible we would have endured [] but I say that we have reached
a point where we can no longer withstand pressure." [5]

The Kuwaitis were dismissive, as an American official recalled:

"When Iraqis came and said: Cant you do something about it? the Kuwaitis
said: Sit on it. And they didnt even say it nicely. they were
arrogant...they were terrible." [6]


Charles Allen, the CIAs Officer for Warning predicted that Iraq would
invade Kuwait. His report was shelved.

In a diplomatic offensive, Iraq sent envoys to Arab states until Kuwait
agreed to a summit. On July 10th new quotas were settled. On the 11th,
Kuwait rejected them and announced plans to further increase production by
October. Saddam Husseins patience was exhausted.

[9/63.] Dr. PHOEBE MARR - US NATIONAL DEFENCE UNIVERSITY

I think he came to believe [.] that Kuwait was over-producing oil not in
its own interests but because it was goaded into that by the United States,
in an effort to weaken Iraq.

On July 15th, the Iraqis wrote to the Arab League and the UN Secretary
General listing their grievances; on the 17th Saddam Hussein accused Kuwait
of economic warfare; on the 18th, troops were sent to the border.

Saddam Hussein summoned US Ambassador Glaspie and asked her to clarify the
American position.

"I have direct instructions from the President to seek better relations
with Iraq. [] Our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to
rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like
your border disagreement with Kuwait." [7]

As the crisis escalated, King Hussein of Jordan went to Kuwait to try and
broker a compromise, to be told:

"We are not going to respond..... If they don't like it, let them occupy
our territory..... we are going to bring in the Americans." [8]

As Iraqi forces moved to the front line, the Assistant Secretary of State
was questioned in Congress:

"If Iraq, for example, charged across the border into Kuwait [.] in that
circumstance, is it correct to say [.] that we do not have a treaty
commitment which would oblige us to engage US forces?"

"That is correct." [9]

On the 2nd of August, Iraq invaded.



---------------------------------------

steve
Charles Allen, the CIAs Officer for Warning predicted that Iraq would
invade Kuwait. His report was shelved.

  "War is just a racket ... something that is not what it seems to the
majority of people. Only a small group knows what its about. It is
conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the
masses."  --- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933




From nobody at dizum.com  Fri Dec 19 02:00:10 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:00:10 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>

After WWI the "winners" humiliated the loosers badly. This is one of the main reasons Hitler came to power and got support from the Germans for the aggressions that started the war. He managed to use these feelings of being treated as dogs and paying to heavy for the first war. Also they were very humiliated by the fact that France then occupied part of western Germany.

After WWII the "winners" had learned their lesson from WWI pretty well. Now they did not humilate the people of Germany like after the first war. We got the Marshal plan and so on.

Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated in the way Saddam has been treated.

Is this something U.S. should feel comfortable with then? Some people on this list seem to have these disturbing thoughts.

It will backfire sooner or later I'm afraid. And then it may be our kids who pay the price.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 11:35:09 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:35:09 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312182154260.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <3FE20128.3240.53DA77B@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2E26D.14606.8AD9EAC@localhost>

    --
On 18 Dec 2003 at 21:57, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> Yet, I shed and continue to shed tears for a race of people
> that refuses to respect the rights of men and their nations.
> Like the Soviets.  Or [now], the Americans...

Such high moral sentiments from someone who claims that
Americans deserved 9/11 and have no right to whine about it.

Nations are not morally entitled to any rights.  They have
rights merely by habit and convention, a convention formalized
in the peace of Westphalia, and now at long last fading. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     3yfr0GecQwe20bSktePyxcgzRbYACoCVtp2B2nh6
     4JmeFrAK15vo5iCWM20k8VWJqumUYsOuIky75CWgC




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 11:35:10 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:35:10 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <3FE2E26E.28194.8ADA303@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 11:00, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated
> in the way Saddam has been treated.

Oh no, he got a shave and a dental examination, the horror, the
horror.

And in due course he is going to get an execution, which is
exactly what the nazi war criminals got. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     1Lc+zlzr6cys1/DeraqXfhpuVH9FvHHd5rtUuv/E
     4gp4fEG6nAev5a7thtLVe+M7bqpvkok78SJyY0f1N




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 11:35:10 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:35:10 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312182152450.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <3FE20128.13688.53DA72B@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2E26E.5033.8ADA00A@localhost>

    --
J.A. Terranson:
> > > One leettllleee problem: we are not really at war.

James A. Donald:
> > Sure looks like war to me.

J.A. Terranson:
> I guess that's why the congresscritters told Shrub to GFY
> when he tried to get a declaration?

After 9/11 Congress gave the president a blank declaration of
war -- names to be filled in later by presidential fiat.  In
addition, the original declaration of war on Iraq is still in
effect, a fact that congress re-affirmed recently.

The blank declaration of war is what the supreme court deemed
to be an unconstitutional delegation of powers back in the
1930s.  Roosevelt responded by threatening to stack the court,
and the court reversed itself.

The blank declaration is supposed to last for the duration of
the war on terror, which was expected to last a generation, but
which has proven so convenient for the government that it may
well become permanent. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     HljLjS7+W9LEuxbq7VnSuM5kR+tZolVcQvGN3514
     4f+D7vVmteFZvOSc2OURJhqQrdzVGAEtdAvDPRaf4




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 11:35:10 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:35:10 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <dfcfe25c7f6ba6b05892343e523eae6f@remailer.privacy.at>
Message-ID: <3FE2E26E.4903.8ADA1A5@localhost>

    --
> Has Saddam recieved a lawyer yet?  Will Saddam be judged by a
> court having jurisdiction and being recognized
> internationally?

Saddam will be judged by his victims, who have jurisdiction
enough for me.  Who cares whether the guys at the Hague agree?

Hague claims of jurisdiction have unfailingly led to bad
results, as in the current disastrous trial of Milosevic.

This is the same problem as occurred when the Westphalian state
took over police powers from the local gentry, but in even more
extreme form.

The more distant the police and courts are from the crime, the
criminals, and the victims, the less likely they are to provide
justice, and the slower, more expensive, and less effectual
that justice will be, if justice comes at all, which it
probably will not.

Hague justice does not work.  It is failing with Milosevic. It
would fail with Saddam.  The court at the Hague is apt to
convict the innocent and acquit the guilty in the face of all
evidence, illustrating in more extreme form the problems that
occur with the police powers of the Westphalian state.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     IiS2b9l7DPo2NQXOdJr115U+lCtla97DXp8x4D8z
     4bCeKZNEInAT6Ra8UWqc7RyU+Uo6+JH777FclJ48e




From dog3 at eruditium.org  Fri Dec 19 08:44:04 2003
From: dog3 at eruditium.org (cubic-dog)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 11:44:04 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312191142400.21666-100000@ns.eruditium.org>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:
>  The cost for politicians mandating such a policy
> would be equally high: they would be out of office and facing criminal
> charges themselves.

No, I think they would be dead. At first opportunity. 
Or at least, I like to think so. 




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 12:01:25 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:01:25 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312190957580.11603-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181908020.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <3FE2E895.23658.8C5AAD4@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 10:11, Sunder wrote:
> That all depends on your definition of sovereign.  After all,
> "we" put, or at least helped, that monster into power.

No we did not.

in 1958 pro soviet socialists gained ascendency in Iraq, but a
power struggle proceeded between the communist and baathist
wings of the socialist movement.  In 1963, the baathists
launched a coup, intended to be launched simultaneously in all
arab countries, to establish a united supranational arab state
based on the arab race and socialism. The coup succeeded in
Syria, succeeded only temporarily in Iraq. Allegedly this coup
was supported by the CIA, but there is no evidence for this,
nor does it seem very believable that the CIA would wish to see
the arabs united under a pan arab socialist regime.

Shortly thereafter there was a counter coup against the
baathists in iraq, which established a conventional military
regime, whch was eventually overthrown by Baathists in 1967.

If the CIA gave support to either coup, which one do you think
it more likely to support?

>  No different an
> action than we the many times before putting tyrants into
> control of small, but important nations under the guise of
> "protecting democracy."

The trouble with your account of events is that the baathists
were then as they are today socialist, pan arabist, anti
american and anti colonialist, hence improbable as
beneficiaries of CIA benevolence.

> So, while he was our puppet, he was the good guy, and no
> matter how many he murdered, he was a benevolent leader.

Saddam was no more "our puppet" than Stalin or Pol Pot was, nor
was he ever deemed a good guy, any more than they were.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     vBqQagnGXwPK05ONAmls2anbapINr8iAonZNkXey
     4iqeeJi9vST/28skvcS3MLX6xe/UAtn9L94MWRoIS




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 12:35:34 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:35:34 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2F096.19744.8E4EF26@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > Every citation Chomsky gives is fraudulent.
> >
> > I recently posted a paragraph by paragraph examination of 
> > one of his more notorious articles.  Every single citation 
> > he gave was false in some central and crucial way.
> >
> > See my very long posting: http://tinyurl.com/yzao

Michael Kalus
> I'll have a look at it. But I guess you also tell me that 
> anything Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" is 
> wrong too?

Have not seen it, in large part because I would not expect 
anything written by Michael Moore to contain even a grain of 
truth, and various people have asserted that everything said in 
"Bowling for Columbine' is untrue.

For all I know it could be gospel, but that would surprise me 
considerably.

Michael Kalus
> > > If you ally with the enemy than you are giving up what 
> > > makes you good.

James A. Donald:
> > It merely means you are dealing with one enemy at a time,  
> > rather than all of them at once.

Michael Kalus
> Ethics and morales are non negotiable.

So I am always told by those who support the slavery, terror, 
and the mass murder of innocents.

There was nothing unethical about allying with Stalin, Pol Pot, 
or Saddam against their and our common enemies.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     kM1bypSGohBUgdks4GawJ7BcA9DBm/iwPIm78xvn
     4cqJAgrtl7lhOhmpgr9yawDyC1ZsbI20LXl034Dxa




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 12:35:35 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:35:35 -0800
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <20031219181737.B25C92462FE@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <3FE2F097.23655.8E4F21F@localhost>

     --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 13:17, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> Saddam is being wrongly held by illegal invaders and 
> occupiers.  He should be immediately released or turned over 
> to legitimate authorities, such as the international courts.

To judge by its current woeful performance in the Serbian war
crimes trials, the Hague would acquit Saddam and convict
Carter. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     Ga9C18O27qHMYLen4874q63qGOwoEIBltLGk1rpk
     48Vn4yKSHVY79B6oGsC+HdHn879C2BBXjKu204wKw




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 12:35:35 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:35:35 -0800
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219103509.0510b1c8@mail.comcast.net>
References: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2F097.19373.8E4F0D5@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 10:57, Steve Schear wrote:
> Saddam Hussein summoned US Ambassador Glaspie and asked her 
> to clarify the American position.
>
> "I have direct instructions from the President to seek better 
> relations with Iraq. [] Our opinion is that you should have 
> the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no 
> opinion on Arab- Arab conflicts like your border disagreement 
> with Kuwait." [7]

This "green light" story is a commie lie (originally a Baathist 
lie, but these days mostly repeated by commies)

Nathan Folkert exposes it at some length in

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4b923300.0209111645.3b67a32 at posti
ng.google.com

http://tinyurl.com/2tdwk

In fact Glaspie told Saddam that if he invaded Kuwait, the shit 
would hit the fan.

(That was not her words.  Her words were "subject of concern",
which the kind of thing that diplomats say when what they
actually mean is "We are going to cut off your head and nail it
to a lamp post with a nine inch nail") 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     UGe4zfpi4sWf5MssuvgX1tOdNtw539Km+25pzq7s
     4mkjwbGPuDy/LJkiMtzHD8na/Fnn2ocm+LNkAhuX0




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 12:35:36 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:35:36 -0800
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219103509.0510b1c8@mail.comcast.net>
References: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2F098.26702.8E4F3BA@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 10:57, Steve Schear wrote:
> [Jim, don't you ever do a bit of research on historical
> topics before spouting off? Google is your friend. Use it.]
>
> From Ramsey Clark's excellent "The Fire This Time". 
> http://www.firethistime.org/linesscript.htm TRACK 3 : LINES
> IN THE SAND

Ramsey Clark is a commie liar, and nothing he says can be
believed.

Saddam was warned that if he took Kuwait, terrible consequences
might well follow.

The USG did not say 'If you invade, we will destroy you', but
it dropped some big hnts.

Similarly the USG has not said that if China invades Taiwan,
the USG will intervene, but it would be as big a lie to claim
that China has been given a green light to invade Taiwan, as it
is for Ramsey to claim that Iraq was given a green light to
invade Kuwait.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     6nmQ6oALALYVD6KMm0uQKHLydJjRTz9vOdEDXU2D
     4u6vntrCQzPWGzEVTMYO8Vn5JtY6VgucabFVa03fH




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Dec 19 12:35:42 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 12:35:42 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
  <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>
  <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219123349.050c6fa8@mail.comcast.net>

At 11:06 AM 12/19/2003, Michael Kalus wrote:
>I'll have a look at it. But I guess you also tell me that anything
>Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" is wrong too?

http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html


"We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others that write what men do, not 
what they ought to do."
-Francis Bacon 




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 10:17:28 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:17:28 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Release Saddam now
Message-ID: <20031219181737.B25C92462FE@gnu-darwin.org>

Saddam is being wrongly held by illegal invaders and occupiers.  He
should be immediately released or turned over to legitimate
authorities, such as the international courts.  Advocate for the
release of Saddam Hussein, and the withdrawal of the USurpers.  Pass the
word.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From jdd at dixons.org  Fri Dec 19 05:30:29 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:30:29 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181939500.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <20031219132036.Y11657-100000@localhost>

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> > Why does the US military have
> > to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
> > citizens or physically present in the United States.
>
> In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.  It does
> not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be faithful to this
> premise, physical location is a non-sequitor.

This is a valid and probably commendable political position.  I do not
believe, however, that it reflects current practice in the USA or
elsewhere.

I say "probably" because it seems likely that adopting this as a practice
would have very high costs.  How far would you have this go?  Is the US
government to be obligated to ensure these rights to everyone everywhere?
Does this mean liberating slaves in China and Saudi Arabia, for example?
Opening up Russian jails?  Forcing countries everywhere to grant the vote
to women, to educate children?

Hmmm.  Does the application of this principle mean that the US government
is going to require the British government to recognize the right to keep
and bear arms?  ;-)

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 13:35:47 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:35:47 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <200312192039.hBJKcxhQ003873@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>
References: <3FE2E26E.4903.8ADA1A5@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE2FEB3.21945.91C0E89@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > Saddam will be judged by his victims, who have jurisdiction 
> > enough for me.

proclus at gnu-darwin.org
> It is tempting to say that the victims have some kind of
> natural right to see justice done against this tyrant.  The
> problem is that the there is no one in Iraq with legitimate
> authority

Well if there is no legitimate authority, then state of nature
applies. Give him the justice that Mussolini and Ceasescu got.
Hang him by his feet from a lamp post in central Baghdad for
his victims to use as pinata

But I think we can find a legitimate authority somewhat better
than that.  And if we cannot, the mob has more legitimacy than
the Hague.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     CH40CSgX5Tgdj/SDJtnV3WgkBxSNswHYXJRRtrPl
     4nJVivIV8DTmP2YOHTrLI5FBALdL8ZRNG8SGqcbVH




From sunder at sunder.net  Fri Dec 19 10:37:45 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:37:45 -0500 (est)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181939500.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312191335430.11603-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Right, the Declaration of Independance starts off with "We hold these
truths to be self evident..." and lists that some rights are inalienable,
and granted to us just because we are human, so therefore they apply to
all humans everywhere...

Well, in practice between what was done to Native Americans, and African
Americans didn't exactly reflect that... but they got away with it by
changing the definition of what's a human being...

Just like now they're getting away with removing all of one's rights by
defining them as a "terrorist" or "illegal combattant" instead of as a
human being, etc.

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:
> 
> <SNIP>
> > Why does the US military have
> > to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
> > citizens or physically present in the United States.
> 
> In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.  It does
> not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be faithful to this
> premise, physical location is a non-sequitor. 




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 10:56:18 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:56:18 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE20128.3240.53DA77B@localhost>
References: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE20128.3240.53DA77B@localhost>
Message-ID: <072B68CC-3255-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>  National Sovereignty, like the divine
> right of kings, just is not taken seriously any more, and the
> only people weeping big salt tears about its passing are those
> who enthusiastically hailed all the Soviet violations of it as
> wars of national liberation.
>
>
the more I read of you the more I get the feeling that you think 
McCarthy was the best thing that ever happened to the US. It also seems 
to me you don't have any real argument. You just like to point to the 
Soviet Union for everything.

Who brainwashed you if I may ask?

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NJ1WlCnxcrW2uuEQLcegCgj3ZP50alQEzNLWlB7LX7TROD57QAoKal
OtP9wE1e+KrM4t/aLTCz61J4
=/gHZ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 11:02:08 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:02:08 -0500
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
References: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <D7D8E116-3255-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> The US has global hegemony because in reality its policies are 
> reasonable,
> because it isn't worth anyone's while to try to oppose it.
>

that I would like to oppose. It is rather the fact that in the past it 
wasn't very feasible. The world is getting smaller. People can fly 
airplanes now in every part of the world. What you see happening right 
now is what happened back in the late 1800s and in the early 20th 
century when the colonies started to rise up.

The difference this time around is that the oppressed have the ability 
to strike back where it hurts: In the homeland.

None of the colonial powers got away with it forever, sooner or later 
the price was too high and to think that the US is above the lesson 
learned it will be in for a rude awakening.


> European calculations are the same: the potential cost of challenging 
> the
> US is incalculable, the potential gain relatively miniscule.  Come on,
> let's go down to the pub instead.
>
>

Still... I wouldn't count on it though. China is picking up steam, the 
EU is expanding and the fight over Iraq let Europe to move closer 
together, not further apart.

Aznar and Berlusconi did what they did because they tried to have a 
voice in the EU that was mightier than it really is (they are afraid to 
loose subsidies when the EU expands eastward). Berlusconi also is on a 
power trip and tries to become the next Duce in Italy.

Chances are neither of them will survive for much longer. Even with the 
Berlusconi controlled media in Italy people took notice.

The little bit of democracy we have might still make a change.

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NLM2lCnxcrW2uuEQK5ZQCeJrNQDq5J7C6Sfl3ePoAid9cH9OIAmwQZ
X0cFkSbhnj4LxvYuOgMtO7w+
=ETH9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 11:03:10 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:03:10 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE32D99.7000008@students.bbk.ac.uk>
References: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
  <3FE32D99.7000008@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FCFF615F-3255-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 19-Dec-03, at 11:55 AM, ken wrote:

> Nomen Nescio wrote:
>
>> Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated in the 
>> way Saddam has been treated.
>
>
> Eh?
>
> And have you heard about the Soviet Union?
>
I'll take it then that the US has become the USSSR these days? After 
all this is the argument that gets brought up here all the time "But 
the USSSR did it....".

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NLbmlCnxcrW2uuEQLq0ACgilN5t6kaUb2ypyTgt/KoX6jv4r4Ani/c
hGl1/s2A2eO1C8yPb0x9n5+x
=mDsf
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 11:06:21 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:06:21 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost>
  <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>
Message-ID: <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> The west, including the US traded and continues to trade
> heavily with Castro, yet somehow that does not lead you to
> believe they think Castro a good guy, nor does it lead you to
> believe they are actively supporting him.
>

I don't think Castro is a bad guy either. Believe it or not but not 
everything that is not Freetrade made in America is bad.


>> It is astonishing that it was okay for Saddam to be as evil
>> as be and we (as a society) turned a blind eye to it
>
> Yet you show no similar astonishment concerning the evil of
> Stalin.

Stalin has been dealt with. His empire has fallen. I am very well aware 
of the past. But my concern right now is the present and the future. 
Also, what you don't seem to get. This is not about Saddam, it is about 
how the US acts.

>
> Every citation Chomsky gives is fraudulent.
>
> I recently posted a paragraph by paragraph examination of one
> of his more notorious articles.  Every single citation he gave
> was false in some central and crucial way.
>
> See my very long posting:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=739htvsqv3bteggtq8p2ht5ae1fl8g3rj
> u at 4ax.com
> http://tinyurl.com/yzao
>

I'll have a look at it. But I guess you also tell me that anything 
Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" is wrong too?


>> If you ally with the enemy than you are giving up what makes
>> you good.
>
> It merely means you are dealing with one enemy at a time,
> rather than all of them at once.
>

Ethics and morales are non negotiable. Either you have it or you don't. 
If you don't have them, fine, but don't pretend you act because of 
them.

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NMMWlCnxcrW2uuEQK0PACg5wJOlgUm6JQkkeTJx8tpxvalTxUAoPe6
tkln3VpG4iX/435Sdu1OlMGD
=NKYl
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 11:08:02 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:08:02 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE1F324.12184.506E96D@localhost>
References: <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE1F324.12184.506E96D@localhost>
Message-ID: <AB35D07F-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 18-Dec-03, at 9:34 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 18 Dec 2003 at 15:42, Michael Kalus wrote:
>> By January 1984, /The Washington Post/ was reporting that the
>> United States had told friendly nations in the Persian Gulf
>> that the defeat of Iraq would "be contrary to U.S.
>> interests." That sent the message that America would not
>> object to U.S. allies offering military aid to Iraq. Egypt,
>> Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait sent howitzers, bombs and
>> other weapons to Iraq. And later that year the U.S.
>> government pushed through sales of helicopters to Hussein's
>> government.
>
> This does not resemble in the slightest sending collossal
> amounts of logistic aid to Stalin, or even supplying the
> murderous marxist Mengistu with free cattle trucks to ship the
> peasants to death camps in the course of imposing forced
> collectivisation, yet somehow I never hear the fans of terror
> and slavery complaining about those episodes.
>

Could we move into the current time zone for a moment? Thanks. Now 
re-read what was written there... Got the words? Good, now try to 
understand the meaning of those words, done? Okay. Now try to 
understand the implications of these actions... Getting somewhere now? 
Yes? Perfect.

So maybe now we can start to have a constructive discussion about the 
way the US is saying one thing and doing the other without trying to 
point at someone who is worse.

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NMk2lCnxcrW2uuEQKn3gCfSgNIFsMO0J8EbNqBpB6l0TTKVWcAniKC
OVHhPVNujXiw7SpeO2qV8pj9
=1nR9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 14:35:56 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:35:56 -0800
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <200312192111.hBJLBkhQ006385@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>
References: <3FE2F097.23655.8E4F21F@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE30CCC.24669.953222F@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 15:59, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> If there is no one with legitimate jurisdiction to try 
> Saddam, then he should be released.

You are making De Sade's argument against natural law, to which 
his prosecutors rightly made the riposte, that if no one had 
the right to condemn him for torturing a maid, then no one had 
the right to condemn them for imprisoning De Sade. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     jkBw+1ppB608HDF/i3TGAf3V3tn86/2Zx81Bzzgl
     41d/b0S3hcKy4vACibaBmS0tL0LXFt64XwXRKkQ4G




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Dec 19 14:35:57 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:35:57 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <f1944c4390af0a4c6faacd2c9dcd9749@dizum.com>
References: <3FE32D99.7000008@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <3FE30CCD.14095.953231F@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 19:50, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> I don't think I've ever heard that the Nazi prisoners where
> drugged, abused or otherwice tortured or mistreated and
> humiliated. Feel free to enlighten me on this.

if you count a haircut as abuse, torture, and mistreatment, I
expect that they were. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     LMgH3KrVc01cxKGLDz79xYZZW/NEDRXgsNqjdHep
     4N3mLSiFXrfdllK8ARj0Y2Aj3QjP3ZT0efID0sD5Z




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Fri Dec 19 14:36:36 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 14:36:36 -0800 (PST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <200312192225.hBJMPjhQ011744@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <200312192236.hBJMaaMs014375@artifact.psychedelic.net>

James A. Donald wrote:

> Well if there is no legitimate authority, then state of nature applies.
> Give him the justice that Mussolini and Ceasescu got. Hang him by his 
> feet from a lamp post in central Baghdad for his victims to use as 
> pinata

Bear in mind that we could probably find plenty of victims of the Bush 
administration who would be willing to provide this variety of justice to 
America's dictator and a couple dozen of his closest Neocon advisors.

Invading a country, and then turning its leader over to his political 
enemies for a quick show trial and execution, while singing the "tried by 
his own people" propaganda tune, hardly qualifies as justice.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Fri Dec 19 07:12:16 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:12:16 +0000
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031219132036.Y11657-100000@localhost>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181939500.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <20031219132036.Y11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031219151216.GA9255@dreams.soze.net>

Jim Dixon (2003-12-19 13:30Z) wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> 
> > In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.
> > It does not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be
> > faithful to this premise, physical location is a non-sequitor.
> 
> This is a valid and probably commendable political position.  I do not
> believe, however, that it reflects current practice in the USA or
> elsewhere.

If these rights apply to everyone at all times, how does war work?  War
is clearly a deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due
process.  Which of those three are suffering deprivation depends on the
type of war and particular battle plans.

-- 
I am a carnivorous fish swimming in    #+#  Banking establishments are
two waters, the cold water of art and  -*+  more dangerous than standing
the hot water of science.  - S. Dali   #-#  armies.  - Thomas Jefferson




From jdd at dixons.org  Fri Dec 19 07:19:47 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:19:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <102.3b2ce87d.2d1468cb@aol.com>
Message-ID: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> > >In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.  It
> > does
> > >not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be faithful to this
> > >premise, physical location is a non-sequitor.
> >
> > This is a valid and probably commendable political position.  I do not
> > believe, however, that it reflects current practice in the USA or
> > elsewhere.
> >
> > I say "probably" because it seems likely that adopting this as a practice
> > would have very high costs.
...
> And why would you think that American judicial morality and justice should be
> dependent on cost? After all it would be cheaper for the cops on a traffic
> stop to administratively just shoot you in the head for an offense then go
> through the costs and rigors of a trial.

The personal cost for the police concerned would be very high: those who
weren't really good at running away would be shot dead.  The cost for
those hiring the police would be astronomical:  wages would have to rise
to reflect the danger.  The cost for politicians mandating such a policy
would be equally high: they would be out of office and facing criminal
charges themselves.

If the US tried to export its notion of rights, the global reaction would
be similar.

In either case you could not put a cost on the ensuing chaos.

The US has global hegemony because in reality its policies are reasonable,
because it isn't worth anyone's while to try to oppose it.

If Saddam had been less of an idiot, if he had left Kuwait alone, he would
be relaxing in one of his palaces today and his sons would be out
snatching women off the street, torturing people who had annoyed them --
you know, having a good night out.

China would like to have more power in its region, but the cost of
really pushing for this is much higher than any conceivable gain, and
anyway they can provoke the US a great deal with no particular reaction.
So the political elite concentrates on increasing the production of
Barby dolls and stacking up hundred dollar bills.

European calculations are the same: the potential cost of challenging the
US is incalculable, the potential gain relatively miniscule.  Come on,
let's go down to the pub instead.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 12:26:48 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:26:48 -0500 (EST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE2E26E.4903.8ADA1A5@localhost>
Message-ID: <200312192039.hBJKcxhQ003873@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, James A. Donald wrote:
>     --
> Saddam will be judged by his victims, who have jurisdiction
> enough for me.  

It is tempting to say that the victims have some kind of natural right
to see justice done against this tyrant.  The problem is that the there
is no one in Iraq with legitimate authority to convene such a court,
least of all the US or their puppet regime.  In my opinion, Saddam
should be released, or shipped out to an international court with
recognized authority.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 12:28:22 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:28:22 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <20031219200008.GA6727@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <200312192040.hBJKeUhQ004078@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> And here I thought the fuckwits couldn't get any dumber.

Ahh yes, and such a clever riposts as well.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 12:57:56 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:57:56 -0500 (EST)
Subject: President of Flies
In-Reply-To: <256bf6a334b55aafd510dbfd242bb8bd@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <200312192110.hBJLAAhQ006309@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> US is currently run by thugs supported by the cheering consumer crowds that have been bred and conditioned to be infantile.

Your analysis hangs on this assertion.  You may be underestimating the
revulsion of the US electorate towards the actions of the current
administration.

Here is a related question: How do you think "infantile" US citizens
would respond, if we were wrongly invaded by an outside power spilling
blood on American soil?   Iraq happened exactly because Bush is
exploiting the outrage of US citizens over the 9/11 attack.  

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 12:59:38 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:59:38 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <3FE2F097.23655.8E4F21F@localhost>
Message-ID: <200312192111.hBJLBkhQ006385@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, James A. Donald wrote:
>      --
> On 19 Dec 2003 at 13:17, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
>> Saddam is being wrongly held by illegal invaders and 
>> occupiers.  He should be immediately released or turned over 
>> to legitimate authorities, such as the international courts.
> 
> To judge by its current woeful performance in the Serbian war
> crimes trials, the Hague would acquit Saddam and convict
> Carter. 

If there is no one with legitimate jurisdiction to try Saddam, then he
should be released.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/



-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 13:24:49 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:24:49 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE2E26D.14606.8AD9EAC@localhost>
References: <3FE20128.3240.53DA77B@localhost>
  <3FE2E26D.14606.8AD9EAC@localhost>
Message-ID: <C6C08D24-3269-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 19-Dec-03, at 2:35 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 18 Dec 2003 at 21:57, J.A. Terranson wrote:
>> Yet, I shed and continue to shed tears for a race of people
>> that refuses to respect the rights of men and their nations.
>> Like the Soviets.  Or [now], the Americans...
>
> Such high moral sentiments from someone who claims that
> Americans deserved 9/11 and have no right to whine about it.
>
> Nations are not morally entitled to any rights.  They have
> rights merely by habit and convention, a convention formalized
> in the peace of Westphalia, and now at long last fading.
>

Interresting note. Did they deserve 9/11? If you go by "eye for an eye" 
then yes.

If you think that Ossama (if it was him) and his cronies are evil, then 
yes, they deserved it too (wasn't Jesus all about suffering for the 
greater good?).

If you think that nobody has the right to terrorism than they didn't. 
But neither did the Iraqis during the sanctions, nor the countless 
people who died in South America because the "good guys" were waging a 
war. Let's not even talk about all the things that were done by the 
"good guys" in Vietnam.

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NspWlCnxcrW2uuEQIQRACeLIEpk760YpoNgMSsa1IZzg20ZusAoKmI
IIo6dnih7/pjDBcd1sbkVB0C
=kya6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 19 13:31:29 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:31:29 -0500
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <3FE2F097.19373.8E4F0D5@localhost>
References: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE2F097.19373.8E4F0D5@localhost>
Message-ID: <B530E1A4-326A-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> This "green light" story is a commie lie (originally a Baathist
> lie, but these days mostly repeated by commies)
>
>

I take it then that the heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch is also 
the truth, while the story about the use of excessive (and unnecessary) 
to "free" her is also a commie lie.

I am just wondering, but is anything that has happened (or is 
happening) in Iraq and done by the US / Western powers wrong in your 
eyes, or simply can they do no wrong?

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+NuNWlCnxcrW2uuEQJ/PQCcDO5sjq/Gs/2sVK31cVl/Zdq0v/YAoIuW
HYwUlpWDsjD/OUpdCRooFbSZ
=FKfd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From dog3 at eruditium.org  Fri Dec 19 13:33:18 2003
From: dog3 at eruditium.org (cubic-dog)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:33:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312191624370.23013-100000@ns.eruditium.org>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Michael Kalus wrote:

> I'll have a look at it. But I guess you also tell me that anything 
> Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" is wrong too?

Not wrong exactly, just completely biased, wrong headed, 
snuffling at the ass of anti-gun Hollywood so it would be 
hailed in the "film" world as a great work. 

Moore says guns are bad. So fucking what. What could Moore
say that would be a suprise? The film is a blow-job for the anti-gun 
crowd. Nothing more. 

Moore makes me laugh, because he does have his moments. I really enjoyed
Rodger and me. He got a little mean sometimes, but so what? But
BfC was a worthless piece of garbage all in all. I'm not a big
fan of The Omega Man either. But that crap Moore pulled at
Hestons house was inexcuseble. He should have had the shit beat 
out of him for that. 




From bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk  Fri Dec 19 08:55:53 2003
From: bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk (ken)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:55:53 +0000
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
References: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <3FE32D99.7000008@students.bbk.ac.uk>

Nomen Nescio wrote:

> Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated in the way Saddam has been treated.


Eh?

And have you heard about the Soviet Union?




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 14:00:34 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 17:00:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <20031219212548.GA7288@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <200312192212.hBJMCkhQ010761@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> But Saddam's regime itself stemmed from illegal takeover of a previous  
> regime -- doesn't that make all of his regime illegitimate and his  
> authority void? 

No, by this argument nearly all the regimes of the world
would be illegitimate. Saddam ruled a terrible regime, but he
also overthrew a terrible regime.  Anyway, Saddam enjoyed the authority
of democratic acquiescence, which is the accepted standard.  Even if
Saddam's regime were illegitimate, which it was not, the aggresive acts
of the US were still illegal.  No authority can be derived from an
aggressive and illegal invasion.

> > By extension, the US puppet government in Iraq also has no 
> > plausible claim to authority. 
>  
> Why not? 

By definition, a puppet government rules by the leave of the military
power, the US, which has no claim in this case to any legitimacy in
Iraq. Thus, the puppet government can have no claim to legitimacy
either.  

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 14:13:33 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 17:13:33 -0500 (EST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE2FEB3.21945.91C0E89@localhost>
Message-ID: <200312192225.hBJMPjhQ011744@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, James A. Donald wrote:
> 
> Well if there is no legitimate authority, then state of nature
> applies. Give him the justice that Mussolini and Ceasescu got.
> Hang him by his feet from a lamp post in central Baghdad for
> his victims to use as pinata

This would be an argument that the victims have a natural right to
administer judgment against Saddam, which might be a valid point.  In
order to rightly exercise that perogative, the people of Iraq will be
required to elect judges, or have them appointed by their elected
representative.  This would be a legitimate court in Iraq, but US
military justice is illegitimate in Iraq, because of the illegal
aggression.

> But I think we can find a legitimate authority somewhat better
> than that.  And if we cannot, the mob has more legitimacy than
> the Hague.

I'm afraid that due to the imperious actions of the Bush
administration, you may be right about this.  Moreover, the US is in a
bind, because the US rulers were complicit in Saddam's only credible war
crimes.  For this reason they will never turn him over to the
international courts, where this truth would be spoken loudly and
repeatedly.  

It appears to me that elected judges is the way to go.  Thank you for
this stimulating discussion.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/




-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Dec 19 14:53:15 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 17:53:15 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <3FE30CCC.24669.953222F@localhost>
Message-ID: <200312192305.hBJN5RhQ014779@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Dec, James A. Donald wrote:
>     --
> On 19 Dec 2003 at 15:59, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
>> If there is no one with legitimate jurisdiction to try 
>> Saddam, then he should be released.
> 
> You are making De Sade's argument against natural law, to which 
> his prosecutors rightly made the riposte, that if no one had 
> the right to condemn him for torturing a maid, then no one had 
> the right to condemn them for imprisoning De Sade. 

Interesting, did De Sade concur?  ;-}

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/



-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Fri Dec 19 19:07:51 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:07:51 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE2E26E.28194.8ADA303@localhost>
References: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031219184446.029273b0@idiom.com>

>On 19 Dec 2003 at 11:00, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> > Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated
> > in the way Saddam has been treated.

So far he's avoided being treated like Mussolini.

At 11:35 AM 12/19/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>Oh no, he got a shave and a dental examination, the horror, the horror.

While James has been wrong about 90% of this discussion (:-),
I have to agree with him here - while the US was clearly propagandizing
that they had him in their absolute control, they were also
initially treating him in a quasi-civilized manner.
The dude's been hiding in a hole in the ground,
so checking him for lice is reasonable treatment.
(I'm puzzled by the comment about the shave, though -
all the "fair and balanced" news coverage still shows him with the beard....)

On the other hand, various spokescritters keep saying
that they're going to stop treating him in a civilized manner,
and that while they're not quite going to torture him,
they're going to put him in a high-stress sleep-deprivation environment.
I'm not sure if they're going more for the Vietnamese tiger cage model,
or the Israeli army Palestinian Detainee model, or the
Soviet purged general model, but it's No More Mr. Civilized
until he confesses his crimes against the society.

>And in due course he is going to get an execution, which is
>exactly what the nazi war criminals got.

In general, between the times the Nazi war criminals were captured
and the times they got tried and hanged or shot, the US mostly
treated most of them in a civilized manner, except during the active
parts of the war where sometimes they wanted operational information.
Apparently not the case here.




From jdd at dixons.org  Fri Dec 19 11:36:37 2003
From: jdd at dixons.org (Jim Dixon)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:36:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219103509.0510b1c8@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20031219193520.E11657-100000@localhost>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Steve Schear wrote:

> >If Saddam had been less of an idiot, if he had left Kuwait alone, he would
> >be relaxing in one of his palaces today and his sons would be out
> >snatching women off the street, torturing people who had annoyed them --
> >you know, having a good night out.
>
> [Jim, don't you ever do a bit of research on historical topics before
> spouting off?  Google is your friend.  Use it.]

Steve, do you ever find a propagandist whose BS you didn't swallow?

The tone of this conversation is deteriorating ;-)

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
http://jxcl.sourceforge.net                       Java unit test coverage
http://xlattice.sourceforge.net         p2p communications infrastructure




From nobody at dizum.com  Fri Dec 19 10:50:08 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:50:08 +0100 (CET)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <3FE32D99.7000008@students.bbk.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <f1944c4390af0a4c6faacd2c9dcd9749@dizum.com>

Ken, Eh what?

Yes I've heard a lot of the Soviet union, however I don't see what you meant by that comment here.

What I was referring to was the winning powers' treatment of the Nazi war criminals after WWII, Nurnburg trials and so on. (Note the word "trials" here)

I don't think I've ever heard that the Nazi prisoners where drugged, abused or otherwice tortured or mistreated and humiliated. Feel free to enlighten me on this.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Fri Dec 19 17:18:32 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 20:18:32 -0500
Subject: The killer app for encryption
Message-ID: <BAY7-F18Iv6EybqfAj8000497da@hotmail.com>

"I'm not certain, but I think there are some MS certified modems which have 
a generalized A/D-D/A capability sufficient to handle voice."

They do. And I'm not so sure POTS is going to be where things will be the 
most interesting...cable modem telephony might be where things get 
interesting.

As for the Telcos allowing a call to be terminated on their copper, they'll 
never let this happen without going through the 5ESS, and recent legislation 
means they probablyt won't have to let you use some higher frequency band 
either.

I've heard of some P2P startups that leverage the discovery mechanisms in 
P2P networks in order to setup a SIP session for telephony. It's interesting 
to consider the possibility that, depending on the P2P system, it's 
conceivable that one could call another user without having any way to 
"trace" that call, or payment for that matter. So if bin Laden were feelin' 
lonely one day and signed onto the network, you could give him a call, 
without him worrying about the missles falling within a few minutes.

-TD


>From: Steve Schear <s.schear at comcast.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: RE: The killer app for encryption
>Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:42:01 -0800
>
>At 03:47 PM 12/18/2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>>At 08:16 PM 12/18/03 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
>>
>> >What exactly do you mean by "peered IP telephony"?
>
>What I'd like to see is a P2P telephony that also supports end-user 
>gateways to the POTS.  I'm not certain, but I think there are some MS 
>certified modems which have a generalized A/D-D/A capability sufficient to 
>handle voice.  Although it opens up the possibility of end-user 
>eavesdropping some of this might be thwarted by randomizing user node 
>selection and detecting/reporting line impedance changes (indicating an 
>extension going off-hook) to the 'client' wising to use the POTS. I 
>suggested this idea to Jeff Pulver, now a VoIP champion, in 1999 but he 
>thought it was too out of the mainstream to be interesting.  Now that P2P 
>is beginning to branch out from file sharing maybe this is no longer a far 
>out idea.
>
>steve

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of slow downloads? Compare online deals from your local high-speed 
providers now.  https://broadband.msn.com




From nobody at dizum.com  Fri Dec 19 12:20:06 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 21:20:06 +0100 (CET)
Subject: President of Flies
Message-ID: <256bf6a334b55aafd510dbfd242bb8bd@dizum.com>

US is currently run by thugs supported by the cheering consumer crowds that have been bred and conditioned to be infantile.

So the situation is best evaluated in the "Lord of Flies" context. As long as masters are winning and have stronger army than anyone else, nothing will change. You will notice that they never engage army unless they have several orders of magnitude strength advantage.

Which means that only small countries are in danger.

There are two consequences of this:

(a) there is no likely grouping of bigger entities to strike back - and that is the only response that will change US behavior. Until US is beaten and have suffered occupation and complete military defeat nothing much will change. This will eventually happen as history demonstrates that empires are not capable of sustained supremacy (due to the negative selection within among other factors - incidentally, the brain drain in the last 3-4 years have changed direction - this is the most significant metric.) But not any time soon.

(b) smaller countries will strive to arm themselves with effective weaponry. The window for this is closing and in few years there will be two clearly defined clubs: untouchables and fair game. It looks that most of the arab world is heading for the fair game status and they are understandably unhappy with it.

The main question is - will the income from newly and soon to be acquired colonies be sufficient to prevent confrontation between US and the rest of developed and armed world? 




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Dec 19 21:21:14 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 21:21:14 -0800
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <1d4.170b9b78.2d150fd4@aol.com>
References: <1d4.170b9b78.2d150fd4@aol.com>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219211922.05454480@mail.comcast.net>

At 06:37 PM 12/19/2003, you wrote:
>In a message dated 12/19/2003 3:38:36 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>jamesd at echeque.com writes:
>
> > Saddam was warned that if he took Kuwait, terrible consequences
> > might well follow.
> >
> >
>
>That's bullshit.  Saddam was told by our Chick ambassador (I can't remember
>her name) that the US had no interest in his dispute with Kuwait, in effect
>giving Saddam a green light.

Yep, it was a set-up.

Saddam Hussein summoned US Ambassador Glaspie and asked her to clarify the
American position.

"I have direct instructions from the President to seek better relations
with Iraq. [] Our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to
rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like
your border disagreement with Kuwait." [7]

steve 




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Fri Dec 19 18:37:08 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 21:37:08 EST
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
Message-ID: <1d4.170b9b78.2d150fd4@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/19/2003 3:38:36 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
jamesd at echeque.com writes:

> Saddam was warned that if he took Kuwait, terrible consequences
> might well follow.
> 
> 

That's bullshit.  Saddam was told by our Chick ambassador (I can't remember 
her name) that the US had no interest in his dispute with Kuwait, in effect 
giving Saddam a green light.

Regards,  Matt-




From mellon at pobox.com  Fri Dec 19 12:00:08 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 22:00:08 +0200
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <20031219181737.B25C92462FE@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <20031219181737.B25C92462FE@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <20031219200008.GA6727@pobox.com>

On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 01:17:28PM -0500, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> Saddam is being wrongly held by illegal invaders and occupiers.  He
> should be immediately released or turned over to legitimate
> authorities, such as the international courts.  Advocate for the
> release of Saddam Hussein, and the withdrawal of the USurpers.  Pass the
> word.

And here I thought the fuckwits couldn't get any dumber.

Boy oh boy.

-- 
avva




From mellon at pobox.com  Fri Dec 19 12:07:00 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 22:07:00 +0200
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312190957580.11603-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312181908020.947-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312190957580.11603-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>
Message-ID: <20031219200700.GB6727@pobox.com>

On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 10:11:32AM -0500, Sunder wrote:
> That all depends on your definition of sovereign.  After all, "we" put, or
> at least helped, that monster into power.

Not really, no.

> So, while he was our puppet,

He was never out puppet.

> he was the good guy,

He was never the good guy, and was never called a good guy by "us".

Well, except for the idiots who are now calling for his release, I 
guess.

> and 
> no matter how many
> he murdered, he was a benevolent leader.

Not really, no.

> Now, we'll put a different "democratic" government in place.  Of course,
> it won't be as free as the USA, nor have the same kind of constitution -
> that would be a problem since we couldn't control it's oil.

If all we wanted was to control its oil we wouldn't try to put a 
democratic government in place, with or without the quote.

Gosh, the oil-conspiracy nutcases are so dumb, it's tiring.

> Nothing new, nothing to be surprised about. 

Exactly, a bunch of lies from the usual quarters. A stream of 
revisionist history from useful idiots hell-bent on making it ALL OUR 
FAULT, ever and ever again.

It's a movable feast.

> The war on terror itself will go on for as long as the voters will
> tolerate it, or until it's true goals succeede and it becomes impossible
> for the voters to do anything but accept it - or be disappeared in the
> middle of the night...  Not much different than in Stalin or Hitler's
> days.

You don't know much about Stalin's or Hitler's times, do you?

-- 
avva




From nobody at cryptofortress.com  Fri Dec 19 20:23:57 2003
From: nobody at cryptofortress.com (Anonymous)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 22:23:57 -0600 (CST)
Subject: (No Subject)
Message-ID: <3c5638e5ad6a21715a42b98ef169d865@remailer.cryptofortress.com>

Re saddam et all...
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL19Ak01.html

The war of words over Saddam & Bush is quite amusing. The blind faith in ones
govt structure and the willingness to support force that is in such extreme
measure overpowering and statist such as the dropping of tons of depleted uranium
high explosives shows that some on this list have not broadened their news
reading beyond fox news.

What courage is required to fly at 40000 ft and drop the MOAB containing DU
on essentially defenceless targets? How can people think that Bush would never
harm civilians? It does not really matter if there are democrats in the whitehouse
or "republican" kings appointed by courts. Just because you choose not to deeply
examine the effects of the policies of your govt does not make them "reasonable".
Successful policies  and reasonable policies can be two different things. Its
possible to be both successful and reasonable. Its also possible to be successful
and un-reasonable...

http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html
http://www.robert-fisk.com/depleted_uranium_links.htm

Saddam merely gassed a few thousand people maybe. Bush senior's gulf war and
now Shrub's fine legacy will ensure the slow torturous death of many generations
of Iraqis and those American soldiers involved. The awful horrors of Stalin,
Hitler and Saddam will pass with a few generations... the half-life of DU is
in billions of years.Re American soldiers: Bush has cut medical care for active
duty personnel as well as veterans.(link via google search: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/bush_cuts_vet_benefits_041503.htm)

The childish blind faith in US statist instituitions does not make their pronouncements
right.This is no better than those that blindly followed their communist or
nazi leaders.

The USA is at the heights of its power because of a well defined strategy of
monetary and military control of the world (the dollar as the currency of international
trade and its consequences, see links below).

Only the people of the USA can prevent the degeneration of their vaunted state
into a hellhole that will make the Soviets blush. The seeds are in place -
fine grained monetary oversight, 99.99% unsecured easily intercepted private
conversation, the shredding of the "bill of rights", willing armies of police
and other govt organized thugs, the impending death of the dollar as the only
currency of international trade, the overvalued stock market with absurd PEs,
the willingness to scam for a buck (Enrons, Halliburton etc), the lack of true
capitalism and open competition in certain sectors [eg medical cos, microsoft].
Those on this list should know better. Note: I'm not suggesting that this is
going to happen overnight, but as I said the seeds are in place...

Some links to ponder:

Why is the width of damage to the pentagon not as wide as a 757 (flt 77)?
http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/pentagon/index.html
http://911research.wtc7.net/
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/index.html

Dollar:
http://home.flash.net/~rhmjr/c1219.html
http://home.flash.net/~rhmjr/index.html
http://thoughts.editthispage.com/
http://www.justiceplus.org/bankers.htm

Dollar and war: 
http://www.pressurepoint.org/pp_iraq_dollars_euro_war.html
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html

USS liberty [or the lies the US govt will tell]
http://home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/liberty/
http://www.ussliberty.org/

Former KGB head consults for US Dept of homeland security:
http://www.impeach-bush-now.org/Articles/Americans/USSA.htm
http://www.threadcity.com/cgi-local/social/config.pl?read=27

Of course there will be the chest pounders vouching for their wonderful state...
about how all this is Internet garbage. Those unwilling to make a deep and
wide investigation are unteachable. Bush needs you.




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Fri Dec 19 23:00:35 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 23:00:35 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
In-Reply-To: <20031218201411.D11657-100000@localhost>
References: <BAY7-F80fyWOxbCJnEM000050fa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <v03110709bc09a3711d8c@[192.168.1.5]>

At 12:16 PM -0800 12/18/03, Jim Dixon wrote:
>Voice telephony requires delays measured in tens of milliseconds.  A bit
>difficult if you also want encryption, anonymity, etc.

Voice memo (messaging) systems are a way around this limitation.  I don't
know of any that exist.  (Encrypted to receivers(s), mixed, and signed for
strong pseudo-anonymity)

Cheers - Bill


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz        | "There's nothing so clear as a | Periwinkle
(408)356-8506      | vague idea you haven't written | 16345 Englewood Ave
www.pwpconsult.com | down yet." -- Dean Tribble     | Los Gatos, CA 95032




From mellon at pobox.com  Fri Dec 19 13:25:48 2003
From: mellon at pobox.com (Anatoly Vorobey)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 23:25:48 +0200
Subject: Release Saddam now
In-Reply-To: <200312192138.hBJLcXhQ008417@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>
References: <20031219211107.GA7193@pobox.com>
  <200312192138.hBJLcXhQ008417@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <20031219212548.GA7288@pobox.com>

[taken from private exchange back to the list with mutual agreement]

> >> > Why?
> >> 
> >> If there is no one with legitimate authority to try Saddam, then they
> >> cannot rightly hold him, and he must be released.  
> > 
> > What was different about Saddam's regime from the current US-installed 
> > regime, that made Saddam's regime legitimate authority and this one not 
> > a legitimate authority?
> 
> Care to take this back to the list?  I'm answering a parallel thread
> there.   
> 
> Clearly Saddam has more authority than the US to rule Iraq, because he
> was a sitting head of state, and the US aggressed in an illegal
> invasion.

But Saddam's regime itself stemmed from illegal takeover of a previous 
regime -- doesn't that make all of his regime illegitimate and his 
authority void?

> Thus, Saddam has a plausible claim to authority, but the US
> does not.

The only reason Saddam has a plausible claim to authority is because he 
has taken gotten it by force. By the same reasoning, US or US-installed 
regime, which is being put into power by the use of force, has a 
plausible claim to authority as well.

> By extension, the US puppet government in Iraq also has no
> plausible claim to authority.

Why not?

-- 
avva




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sat Dec 20 09:32:43 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 09:32:43 -0800
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031219211922.05454480@mail.comcast.net>
References: <1d4.170b9b78.2d150fd4@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3FE4173B.18968.2FB7E36@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 21:21, Steve Schear wrote:
> "I have direct instructions from the President to seek better 
> relations with Iraq. [] Our opinion is that you should have
> the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no
> opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement
> with Kuwait." [7]

And then she proceeded to tell him that they did have an
opinion, an opinion so menacing that it could not be plainly
said.

Similarly, if you get an offer from a mafia boss, and you find
a horse's head in your bed, has he threatened you?

Diplomats, like mafia bosses, make their threats by
implication, not out loud.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     X+lkzU5AyyMRGqhdagmp2Shx9qHYuvKaYeWi1JiN
     4lf43mqw0rS9IzY4mvIWScRSGNQ6NzcX0Kx+ZzpT+




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sat Dec 20 09:40:26 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 09:40:26 -0800
Subject: "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America"
In-Reply-To: <cf538dac70910d2cfa8f40d63e9d483e@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <3FE4190A.26012.3028FBA@localhost>

On 20 Dec 2003 at 12:40, Nomen Nescio wrote:

> 
> Thanks Steve, I don't think I have heard this before. I googled on the
> text you quoted and found this url
> 
> http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_andambassaprilglaspie22303.html
> 
> and a few more
> 
> http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html
> http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html
> 
> I don't know what to say. This makes me sick to my stomach.
> 
> I guess one way of lookin at this is that U.S. played dirty and
> deceiving. U.S. is more or less the reason Iraq invaded Kuwait.
> 
> I guess this is not told on Fox news.
> 

I see you did not actually read 
"http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html"

There are two versions of Glaspie's conversation.  One believable, 
one unbelievable.  One of which tells Saddam that the US is deeply 
concerned about Saddam invading, implicitly threatening him while 
explicitly denying any threat, one of which gives the green light for 
invasion.

One definitely gives the green light.  The other can be read as 
giving the green light, but would not be so read by anyone who wanted 
to stay alive.

Needless to say, one version comes from more credible sources than 
the other.




From mv at cdc.gov  Sat Dec 20 11:01:02 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 11:01:02 -0800
Subject: The killer app for encryption
Message-ID: <3FE49C6E.5DB7722A@cdc.gov>

At 08:18 PM 12/19/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
[on onion routing POTS]

>"trace" that call, or payment for that matter. So if bin Laden were
feelin'
>lonely one day and signed onto the network, you could give him a call,
>without him worrying about the missles falling within a few minutes.
>
>-TD

If you ran voice analysis over every POTS call and then
directed your missile at the customer demarc you'd get
your man.  A good reason to decrypt to analog
the voice at the endpoint, eh?




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sat Dec 20 12:08:01 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 12:08:01 -0800
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
Message-ID: <3FE43BA1.7232.389AABA@localhost>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 21:37, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
> That's bullshit. Saddam was told by our Chick ambassador (I 
> can't remember her name) that the US had no interest in his 
> dispute with Kuwait, in effect giving Saddam a green light.

Commie lie

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html

What Glaspie said was:

: :	The instruction we had during this period was that 
: :	we should express no opinion on this issue and that 
: :	the issue is not associated with America. James 
: :	Baker has directed our official spokesmen to 
: :	emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve 
: :	this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or 
: :	via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that 
: :	these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all 
: :	of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears 
: :	to us?
: :
: :	My assessment after 25 years' service in this area 
: :	is that your objective must have strong backing from 
: :	your Arab brothers. I now speak of oil But you, Mr. 
: :	President, have fought through a horrific and 
: :	painful war. Frankly, we can see only that you have 
: :	deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that 
: :	would not be any of our business. But when this 
: :	happens in the context of what you said on your 
: :	national day, then when we read the details in the 
: :	two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we 
: :	see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken 
: :	by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, 
: :	parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then 
: :	it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And 
: :	for this reason, I received an instruction to ask 
: :	you, in the spirit of friendship -- not in the 
: :	spirit of confrontation -- regarding your 
: :	intentions.

Which is diplomat talk for threats and menaces, not a green
light.

When she asks him to see 'how the issue appears to us" this is
diplomat code for "I cannot state plainly how the issue appears
to us because that would constitute making threats."

And when she says "I ask not in the spirit of confrontation"
that means "If the answer is unacceptable, there may well be a
confrontation' 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     lzBXFdOUF+tOl6rQBvd0AC1waiR3dN1345QzG0hr
     4avCGxaFFDmv2sq/x5Ltz8sQgA0tgllba+DAdFQq7




From nobody at dizum.com  Sat Dec 20 03:40:04 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 12:40:04 +0100 (CET)
Subject: "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America"
Message-ID: <cf538dac70910d2cfa8f40d63e9d483e@dizum.com>

Thanks Steve, I don't think I have heard this before. I googled on the text you quoted and found this url

http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_andambassaprilglaspie22303.html

and a few more

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html

I don't know what to say. This makes me sick to my stomach.

I guess one way of lookin at this is that U.S. played dirty and deceiving.
U.S. is more or less the reason Iraq invaded Kuwait.

I guess this is not told on Fox news.




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Sat Dec 20 10:04:57 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 13:04:57 EST
Subject: "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America"
Message-ID: <3d.38d63a70.2d15e949@aol.com>

I'm not sure what your motivation is for wanting to rewrite history, but that 
isn't what Glaspie said.

There's a video interview I saw about all of this on 60 minutes (I think) 
where it was made clear that Glaspie did in fact say to Saddam that "We have no 
opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait."

Regards,  Matt-




From mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at  Sat Dec 20 04:26:37 2003
From: mixmaster at remailer.privacy.at (privacy.at Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 13:26:37 +0100 (CET)
Subject: fox news
Message-ID: <3c608dcbf5cefe486d252479b4edf702@remailer.privacy.at>

http://www.fauxnewschannel.com/




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sat Dec 20 13:51:24 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 13:51:24 -0800
Subject: Streisand loses to Adleman over California Coastline pics
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031220134607.028f8998@idiom.com>

http://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/pressrelease-decision.html

Ken Adleman and his wife photographed the entire California coastline
from their helicopter and put it on line free to the public.
Barbara Streisand, ostensible environmentalist, sued because it might let
gawking fans figure out how to get near her Malibu estate.
The suit was against Adleman and his ISPs.
The court agreed that free speech wins and that this was a SLAPP suit,
and dinged her for legal fees.




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sat Dec 20 11:19:47 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 14:19:47 -0500
Subject: "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America"
In-Reply-To: <3d.38d63a70.2d15e949@aol.com>
References: <3d.38d63a70.2d15e949@aol.com>
Message-ID: <79B1D016-3321-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


On 20-Dec-03, at 1:04 PM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> I'm not sure what your motivation is for wanting to rewrite history, 
> but that
> isn't what Glaspie said.
>

I am guessing here that he just wants to believe that the US is acting 
in their foreign policy for the greater good, not for some selfish 
reasons.

Nagging Conscience maybe?

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+Sg12lCnxcrW2uuEQIzawCgtpmGBBy4B3f+nrbVWXQ0eo6HlFIAoJ/6
L6YIZYQbQhuuv1kcM/WgomLX
=u4/h
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sat Dec 20 17:41:47 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 17:41:47 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
Message-ID: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>

    --
On 19 Dec 2003 at 22:23, Anonymous wrote:
> Re saddam et all... 
> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL19Ak01.html
>
> The war of words over Saddam & Bush is quite amusing. The
> blind faith in ones govt structure and the willingness to
> support force that is in such extreme measure overpowering
> and statist such as the dropping of tons of depleted uranium
> high explosives shows that some on this list have not
> broadened their news reading beyond fox news.

I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.

Back in the sixties, there were lots of good reasons to oppose
the Vietnam war, notably that it was fought by conscription,
and that McNamara's search for measures of war fighting
efficiency and to create incentives for efficient production of
war effort were demoralizing the troops, and instead of
creating incentives to fight effectively, created perverse
incentives to commit mass murder in place of killing the enemy.

But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi
Minh" Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after spending
ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the murder of
Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to rule what
became North Vietnam.  He purged 85% of the communist party,
murdering a large but unknown proportion of them, and conducted
a terror against the peasants of extraordinary savagery.

And now the guys on this list are weeping big salt tears about
poor victimized Saddam.

Anyone who opposed the war on Vietnam should have started off
by asking "How shall we contain the Soviet Union and eventually
defeat communism, and what is wrong with the way this
administration is doing it.

Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by
visualizing himself as the heir of  King John Sobieski, not the
heir of Saladin.  Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
lose, and their way of life perish.


Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two towers had
it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts himself in the
corner with the people who are stupid, evil, and losers. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     XwnNnDWaFm4T8flPHGpKzyaV4jg8/RzK3pUzhOzQ
     4+xdZmD79Z+1bt+2a7gG1vL9K6V53m4xxeoRxCt4p




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sat Dec 20 17:59:59 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 17:59:59 -0800
Subject: "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America"
In-Reply-To: <3d.38d63a70.2d15e949@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3FE48E1F.14986.4CBE971@localhost>

    --
On 20 Dec 2003 at 13:04, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
> There's a video interview I saw about all of this on 60
> minutes (I think) where it was made clear that Glaspie did in
> fact say to Saddam that "We have no opinion on your Arab -
> Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait."

And, as diplomats tend to do, she also proceeded to imply the
opposite.

In any case, you are making the "poor victimized Saddam
argument"  When one hears this argument in any particular case,
one does not need to check the facts of that particular case. 
That poor little Saddam was victimized is an obviously stupid
argument, and anyone making it an obviously evil person.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     6WGBV4YgV3ERm+ANnc1R5PyBtJd1N+U/T6s1mBLK
     4HFuMQjPp6w0HFllkQpbmhad5CnhaAWYf7P9QsMvn




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sat Dec 20 19:50:07 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 22:50:07 -0500 (EST)
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>

I don't know who you are referring too, but that comment is amusing,
because it is exactly the kind of lambaste broadside that one hears on
Faux news channel all the time.  Anyway, I say that Saddam has human
rights, just like everyone else, which includes due process, right to
counsel, and to face your accusers in an open court that has legitimate
authority to find you innocent or guilty.  The US is clearly and
wrongly doing the opposite of this, and if this makes me pro-Saddam,
then I will wear the label proudly.  

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From baudmax23 at earthlink.net  Sat Dec 20 20:30:45 2003
From: baudmax23 at earthlink.net (baudmax23 at earthlink.net)
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 23:30:45 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20031220224222.01cda850@pop.earthlink.net>

At 05:41 PM 12/20/2003 -0800, "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

>     --
>On 19 Dec 2003 at 22:23, Anonymous wrote:
> > Re saddam et all...
> > http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL19Ak01.html
> >
> > The war of words over Saddam & Bush is quite amusing. The
> > blind faith in ones govt structure and the willingness to
> > support force that is in such extreme measure overpowering
> > and statist such as the dropping of tons of depleted uranium
> > high explosives shows that some on this list have not
> > broadened their news reading beyond fox news.
>
>I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.


That is quite a presumption there.  "If you're not with US, you're with the 
terrorists", eh? Same old sorry ass script, dug up but unoriginal dullards 
as the boilerplate world domination scam.  You know, the Nazis were just 
make the world safe for freedom, fighting those pesky Commies, and oh yeah, 
those "terrorists" who burned down the Reichstag...

WTC-Reichstag 2.  Same old story.  Yep, just no decent boogymen, since the 
commies gave up the good fight.  They tried replacing them with "the drug 
menace", but that never quite took the same way.  People were yet too 
skeptical because too many people like gettin' high themselves.  Oh ok, 
here we go kiddies on our neverland joyride interminable "war on 
terror".  Oh yeah, that's a REAL good one, that'll keep the proles cowering 
for the protection of the feudal state's protection.  O. Protect Me, Thine 
Lord, and I shall prostrate my ass to your minions at the airports!  Pucker 
up to prove you don't a bomb hidden up yo ass, boy.

>Back in the sixties, there were lots of good reasons to oppose
>the Vietnam war, notably that it was fought by conscription,
>and that McNamara's search for measures of war fighting
>efficiency and to create incentives for efficient production of
>war effort were demoralizing the troops, and instead of
>creating incentives to fight effectively, created perverse
>incentives to commit mass murder in place of killing the enemy.
>
>But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi
>Minh" Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after spending
>ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the murder of
>Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to rule what
>became North Vietnam.  He purged 85% of the communist party,
>murdering a large but unknown proportion of them, and conducted
>a terror against the peasants of extraordinary savagery.

"Uncle Ho" was the leader of the Indochinese resistance, leader of a 
popular anti-colonial nationalist movement (remember, Indochina was a 
French colony, before the Japanese seized it from them).  The original viet 
cong tunnel complexes, dated back to the nationalist resistance movement 
which was fighting the Imperial Japanese occupation of 
Indochina.  Eisenhower actually considered Ho to be a great ally in the 
region at the time, for giving the Japs such hell.  After the War, however, 
the Frenchys wanted their old colony back so they could rape it some more 
of it's cheap natural resources, and well, Ho having fought the dickens out 
of the Japs, wasn't having any of it.  Eventually the French gave up (ever 
hear of dienbienphu?)  Then WE got involved in that mess (under the pretext 
of "anticommunism proxy warism"), and rather than just let them have their 
own country, killed a lot of peasants and made big defense contractors some 
mega money, before the Amerikan youth finally rebelled at being sent off to 
be slaughtered for defense contractor profiteering.  Ho had actually 
admitted to being an avid admirer of the founding fathers of the US, I seem 
to recall.


>And now the guys on this list are weeping big salt tears about
>poor victimized Saddam.

Saddam is irrelevant, and the real joke on US will be when we come to 
understand it.  OK, whoopy-dee-do, "We Got Him!"  (nevermind that WE MADE 
HIM, nevermind that we built up his bio-chem WMD proggies, to counter the 
reaction in Iran after our tyrant Shah THERE got his ass kicked out by the 
people).  A CIA puppet who got out of control.  Don't want to believe it, 
look for how he was part of a CIA team recruited to assassinate Kassem.  He 
was useful while he did US bidding.  Once he outlived his usefulness, we 
set him up ("the greenlighting of kuwait invasion, ala April Gillespie and 
Poppy Bush), so we had a great excuse to dump our obsolete inventories of 
older military hardware, as well as battle-test our latest weapons 
technologies at the same time.

Chickens always come home to roost.   This is the case with Saddam, same as 
it was for Bin Laden as well (another CIA Frankenstein, run amok on 
Master).  Do you not see a PATTERN here, of building up and tearing down, 
and making monster profits every step of the way, and the hell with those 
useless eater peasants by the millions?  Look at all the Panamanians we 
slaughtered, so Poppy Bush could "take out" a noncompliant Noriega, who was 
threatening to spill the sloppy details or Poppy's CIA cocaine 
trafficking.  Silenced him real good, didn't we.  Now he can talk to the 
wall in a Fed prison if he wants to talk...


>Anyone who opposed the war on Vietnam should have started off
>by asking "How shall we contain the Soviet Union and eventually
>defeat communism, and what is wrong with the way this
>administration is doing it.
>
>Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by
>visualizing himself as the heir of  King John Sobieski, not the
>heir of Saladin.  Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
>it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
>should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
>lose, and their way of life perish.
>

Why the insecure need to dominate others?  You think "American culture" has 
no flaws?  You think Islam has nothing of value?  Do you not see the logic 
of actions and reactions (and chain reactions ad infinitum)?  Why should 
one have to dominate/annihilate the other?  How about 
symbiosis?  Coexistence?  How about finding a balance where we become more 
self-sufficient, so that we do not need their oil, and therefore do not get 
"in their faces".  You know, picking sides, like the Israeli-Palestinian 
mess.  Oh yeah, I guess you just swallowed the Bush lie hook line and 
sinker about how they "did it because they hate our freedom".  Oh yeah, 
well, Bush and Nazi Asscroft have taken the most important freedoms, and 
undermine daily anything left, so they shouldn't have any reason to hate us 
anymore.  I'm surprised Bush didn't claim Osama got a bad burger once at 
the Riyadh McDonald's, and just then and there decided that we've just 
simply "got to be destroyed".

Gotta stop watching so much TV, it's rotting your brain.  You think the USA 
can do NO wrong, we ALWAYS have only the truly noblest intents, eh?  Look 
at history, look at how we have related and treated others.  Oh, sometimes 
we have done the right things, but at least as often if not more we have 
done the wrong things, to the tune of millions of dead foreign peasants 
usually.  Look at all the genocidal CIA installed dictators... Suharto in 
Indonesia, Saddam... etc etc etc

WHY THEY HATE US--DUH!
http://www.ddh.nl/pipermail/wereldcrisis/2002-October/003148.html

in particular: In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader 
who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, 
however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup 
in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such 
anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of 
nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the 
US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, 
US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist 
Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was 
Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go! In 1959, there was a failed 
assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a 
young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully 
assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first 
time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head 
of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi 
regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist 
activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his 
policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the 
CIA's close friends in Iraq.


>Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two towers had
>it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts himself in the
>corner with the people who are stupid, evil, and losers.


The people in the Towers were innocent victims, like most palestinians in 
the occupied territories, like oppressed peasants everywhere, and any and 
all "collateral casualties" to our militarist ventures and 
CIA-coup-installed-corporate friendly dictators.  And if the "people" in 
the US will not face the reality of what our "illustrious" leaders in 
Washington inflict upon others around the world, then we will unfortunately 
become "collateral casualties" ourselves in such reprisal attacks.  Is it 
right, is it good?  Of course not, but at the same time, will it stop if 
"we the people" can not learn our "lesson" and correct the inhuman policies 
our leaders pursue in our names?

You are not facing logical reality if you fail to account for these 
facts.  In fact, your position, as you state it, is vacuous, and devoid of 
logic.  The usual "treat the symptoms but never acknowledge or deal with 
the underlying cause" mentality, which is so prevalently marketed to the 
Amerikan consumer by the corporate "bread and circuses" media controllers 
who profit most from failed militaristic policies.

The only way to "win" will be in respect, in humility, in dignity.  That 
"all life has value, even the lives of non-Americans.  That all people want 
the same things, family, happiness, love.  And that an American life has no 
greater or lesser value than that of any other".  But instead, we spiral 
into accellerating degeneracy, destroying ourselves and taking the whole 
world along for the ride to the bottom.  Another historic failure of 
culture and civilization, a needless waste of physical resources and human 
life.  But how could it be otherwise, when most can not conceive it's true 
nature?

-Max



>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      XwnNnDWaFm4T8flPHGpKzyaV4jg8/RzK3pUzhOzQ
>      4+xdZmD79Z+1bt+2a7gG1vL9K6V53m4xxeoRxCt4p

------------------------------------------------
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should 
have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence 
from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own 
government.

--George Washington
-------------------------------------------------
Smash The State! mailing list home
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/smashthestate
---




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Sat Dec 20 22:36:57 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 06:36:57 +0000
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>

proclus at gnu-darwin.org (2003-12-21 03:50Z) wrote:

> I don't know who you are referring too, but that comment is amusing,
> because it is exactly the kind of lambaste broadside that one hears on
> Faux news channel all the time.  Anyway, I say that Saddam has human
> rights, just like everyone else, which includes due process, right to
> counsel, and to face your accusers in an open court that has legitimate
> authority to find you innocent or guilty.  The US is clearly and
> wrongly doing the opposite of this, and if this makes me pro-Saddam,
> then I will wear the label proudly.  

How can we offer him procedural guarantees enjoyed by U.S. residents
when we won't be the ones conducting procedure at his trial?  He's going
to be tried in the ICC or by Iraqis in Iraqi courts.  We have no good
evidence that he's committed crimes against Americans, and unless we
find some, I don't think that anyone would want him anywhere near a
Federal courtroom.

McRumsfeld and co. should be held accountable if they violate the Geneva
Convention with respect to Saddam or any other prisoner.  But the
procedural guarantees you talk about are attached to U.S. trials, which
Saddam will not enjoy (or dread, depending...).

-- 
I am a carnivorous fish swimming in    #+#  Banking establishments are
two waters, the cold water of art and  -*+  more dangerous than standing
the hot water of science.  - S. Dali   #-#  armies.  - Thomas Jefferson




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sun Dec 21 05:05:30 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 08:05:30 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <5AE11066-33B6-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 20-Dec-03, at 8:41 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

> I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.
>

Why. Because we OPPOSED the war on Saddam? That's an interresting logic 
you have here:

"I am against the war, unless of course, it is initiated by lies, 
deceit and the US of A. YOU are all of course for Torture, Murder and 
Saddam because he is the one the US of A is fighting the war against."

> Back in the sixties, there were lots of good reasons to oppose
> the Vietnam war, notably that it was fought by conscription,

Oh, so if it can hit your friend Buddy from down the road who just got 
drafted it is okay to be against it. But if a kid from the Bronx who 
has no other viable choice but join the military gets into the 
crossfire (and don't tell me he understands the reasons any better than 
your Buddy did back in Vietnam) it is okay?

> and that McNamara's search for measures of war fighting
> efficiency and to create incentives for efficient production of
> war effort were demoralizing the troops, and instead of
> creating incentives to fight effectively, created perverse
> incentives to commit mass murder in place of killing the enemy.
>

Ah, and this right now was / is a "clean" war? You now, good and 
honest? Two guys facing each other? One a couple of thousand feet up in 
the air dropping cluster bombs on cities while the other one hides in a 
hole, together with his family?


> But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi
> Minh" Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after spending
> ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the murder of
> Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to rule what
> became North Vietnam.  He purged 85% of the communist party,
> murdering a large but unknown proportion of them, and conducted
> a terror against the peasants of extraordinary savagery.

Yet you still think there was a good reason to Oppose the Vietnam war? 
Make up your mind man. Was it a "just" war like (in your opinion) Iraq 
right now or was it unjust?


>
> And now the guys on this list are weeping big salt tears about
> poor victimized Saddam.
>

Because, if we claim to be humane, do these wars for the greater good, 
we better act like it. (By it i mean the West in general). If we don't 
then we better shut the fuck up about our 'ideals" and how everybody 
should live by them. Why do you think we're such a target? Because the 
majority of the world population sees us for what we are: Opportunistic 
killers. Either we do it ourselves or we pay others to do our dirty 
work.


> Anyone who opposed the war on Vietnam should have started off
> by asking "How shall we contain the Soviet Union and eventually
> defeat communism, and what is wrong with the way this
> administration is doing it.

First of all the USSR was not Commust, it was a Stalnistic country. 
Second of all: Shouldn't people be free to choose under which political 
system they want to live? I grew up in Western Germany, I have been to 
what was then the GDR several times. I have still family in those 
areas. You know what? They said overall it was just as good if not 
better than it is today.

It is your kind of Arrogance that causes wars like one in Iraq right 
now. It is arrogance like yours that makes millions suffer without you 
even notice. There were a million more places where an intervention 
would have done any good. Yet in none of these places do we see anybody 
(Ivory Coast anyone?)


>
> Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by
> visualizing himself as the heir of  King John Sobieski, not the
> heir of Saladin.  Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
> it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
> should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
> lose, and their way of life perish.
>
Why does the "american way of life" have to win? What is it about the 
"american way" that has to win? The ability to dream of maybe becoming 
rich one day? The american dream and lifestyle has just as much right 
to "win" as any other. There is no "right" in any of these.



>
> Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two towers had
> it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts himself in the
> corner with the people who are stupid, evil, and losers.
>

Sammdam and the two towers had nothing to do with each other. That for 
one.

Second of all. Did they had it coming? Yes. It was only a question of 
time until something like this would have happened. The fact that the 
majority refused to see it has nothing to do with it.

Something will happen again, doesn't matter how many grannys you take 
away their needles, or how many people you put on a "no-fly" list 
because they are reading the wrong books. History is beginning to 
repeat itself. The Colonial Powers got kicked out of their colonies. As 
the world can hardly kick the US out of the Earth they will strike 
home.

If you really think that the US's behaviour (in regards to foreign 
policy) has nothing to do with 9/11 then you really are blind.

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+WanmlCnxcrW2uuEQIZCACfUXCYhDmjtcRs+A8I1rGFD74wjBYAnjfV
WYGzJZfm9VGYMyso2KNdOLt9
=8IrL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sun Dec 21 05:14:01 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 08:14:01 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>> I don't know who you are referring too, but that comment is amusing,
>> because it is exactly the kind of lambaste broadside that one hears on
>> Faux news channel all the time.  Anyway, I say that Saddam has human
>> rights, just like everyone else, which includes due process, right to
>> counsel, and to face your accusers in an open court that has 
>> legitimate
>> authority to find you innocent or guilty.  The US is clearly and
>> wrongly doing the opposite of this, and if this makes me pro-Saddam,
>> then I will wear the label proudly.
>
> How can we offer him procedural guarantees enjoyed by U.S. residents
> when we won't be the ones conducting procedure at his trial?  He's 
> going
> to be tried in the ICC or by Iraqis in Iraqi courts.  We have no good
> evidence that he's committed crimes against Americans, and unless we
> find some, I don't think that anyone would want him anywhere near a
> Federal courtroom.
>

He won't be put in front of the ICC as the US never signed on to it. So 
this one is out.

That leaves either an American Tribunal or an Iraqi one. In either case 
they should adhere to US procedures as they are based on them.


> McRumsfeld and co. should be held accountable if they violate the 
> Geneva
> Convention with respect to Saddam or any other prisoner.  But the
> procedural guarantees you talk about are attached to U.S. trials, which
> Saddam will not enjoy (or dread, depending...).
>

See above. Because of the possiblity that either Rumsfled & friends 
might end up in front of the ICC they never signed off on it.


Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+WcnGlCnxcrW2uuEQKsaACgiPD6Kbq/WN0qTL2eDyllk8QBC+0AoIxa
SboDJZtx5bUh6IrVFc9PShmh
=Hkgx
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com  Sun Dec 21 08:32:27 2003
From: cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com (Tim Meehan)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:32:27 -0500
Subject: Mitnick wants war stories
Message-ID: <0oibuvcupj1u5ilf2jn1ef73gnnqac21ns@4ax.com>

This sounds like a very interesting project!

-Tim


http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39118685,00.htm

Mitnick calls for hackers' war stories	

Patrick Gray
ZDNet Australia
December 19, 2003, 10:40 GMT
	
Notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick is collating tales of hackers' 'art' into a book	
 		
Famed hacker and master social engineer Kevin Mitnick has been commissioned to
write a new book following the success of his first text The Art of Deception.

The new book, tentatively titled The Art of Intrusion will tell the stories of
real hacks, with the names of attackers obscured to protect them from the
authorities and their victims. Mitnick has called on retired hackers to come
forward with their stories, offering a $500 (#283) prize for the best story that
makes it into the book, and a $200 payment for all stories that make the final
draft. 

"I'm going to tell the true stories of some of the untold most salacious hacks
in cyberspace. The sexy, the ingenious, the innovative and the clever," he told
ZDNet Australia by phone from the US "The stories are not going to be the same
attack vector or the same class of vulnerability. I'm looking for stories that
will include a variety of attack methods exploiting physical, operational,
network host, and personnel security vulnerabilities." 

Fame found Kevin Mitnick when the US government made an example of him,
incarcerating him for five years for computer based offences. Four of his years
inside were served before he was even tried, and he was forced to endure eight
months in solitary confinement because "the government said I could start a
nuclear war if I had access to a telephone," Mitnick says. 

In trouble with the law for technological mischief since 1982, Mitnick became a
fugitive in January 1993 when he skipped town after authorities sought to
question him about a possible parole violation. During that time he used various
aliases, including Eric Weiss -- Harry Houdini's real name -- and worked several
jobs, including a stint as a systems administrator at a law firm. He was
captured in 1995 by the FBI after two years on the run. The hunt for Mitnick and
his subsequent capture were dramatised in the novel Takedown, which was
subsequently turned into a movie of the same name. The book was written by
Mitnick's rival and security professional Tsutomu Shimomura, and co-authored by
New York Times journalist John Markoff. Shimomura assisted the FBI in tracking
Mitnick, who launched a scathing attack on the Takedown account of events in a
chapter of his last book that was never published. 

Mitnick was released from custody into supervised release in early 2000. The
conditions of his release meant he was not allowed to use a computer. When it
came time to write his book, however, the government was flexible. 

"The government had given me permission to obtain a computer prior to my
supervised release expiring. I wasn't permitted to use the Internet but I did
use a computer to do the last book. It was more difficult... I had to actually
send a floppy disk to my co-author, that's how we traded material -- by physical
postal mail," Mitnick explained. "But now these restrictions have been lifted I
think it's really going to increase our productivity now we can use this
marvellous thing called email." 

The terms of Mitnick's supervised release were lifted in January this year. As
well as being able to use the Internet again, Mitnick has been able to leave the
US -- a luxury not afforded to him while under the conditions of his release
agreement. "Lately I've been travelling all around the world, I've been to
Brazil -- I just got back from Portugal. I've been in the Czech Republic,
Poland, Spain, Helsinki [in] Finland -- which is kind of funny because Nokia
mobile phones, one of our prior victims, actually sponsored my talk which is
great. They've been forgiving," he said. 

Conceding his notoriety is at least in part responsible for his "reversal of
fortune" -- he claimed he was worried that the initial conditions of his release
would make it difficult for him to find a job -- Mitnick says his well-known
name is useful in getting his foot in the door. 

"My demand in the speaking arena -- my name value or my branding -- is really a
product of the sensationalism that was attached to the 'Kevin Mitnick' case...
if that never happened I might be a fantastic author, a fantastic consultant,
and a world renowned security professional, but by name I might not be known,"
Mitnick argued. "I do attribute the trials and tribulations that I experienced
in the past to why my name is so well known, and... this notoriety -- it does
drive some business." 

Mitnick plans to hand the finished manuscript to his publisher in September next
year. Have you got a story for Mitnick's new book? Email him at
hacks at defensivethinking.com.




From lists at crimbles.demon.co.uk  Sun Dec 21 04:12:40 2003
From: lists at crimbles.demon.co.uk (David Crookes)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 12:12:40 +0000
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <3FE2F097.19373.8E4F0D5@localhost>
References: <20031219144742.W11657-100000@localhost>
  <3FE2F097.19373.8E4F0D5@localhost>
Message-ID: <200312211212.41183.lists@crimbles.demon.co.uk>

On Friday 19 December 2003 20:35, James A. Donald wrote:

>
> In fact Glaspie told Saddam that if he invaded Kuwait, the shit
> would hit the fan.
>
> (That was not her words.  Her words were "subject of concern",
>

Cite? The google groups article you linked to has two links to possible 
transcripts. Neither back up your claim.




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sun Dec 21 10:09:13 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 13:09:13 -0500 (EST)
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <200312211821.hBLILdhQ033934@kepler2.gnu-darwin.org>

On 21 Dec, Michael Kalus wrote:
> >> I don't know who you are referring too, but that comment is amusing, 
> >> because it is exactly the kind of lambaste broadside that one hears on 
> >> Faux news channel all the time.  Anyway, I say that Saddam has human 
> >> rights, just like everyone else, which includes due process, right to 
> >> counsel, and to face your accusers in an open court that has  
> >> legitimate 
> >> authority to find you innocent or guilty.  The US is clearly and 
> >> wrongly doing the opposite of this, and if this makes me pro-Saddam, 
> >> then I will wear the label proudly. 
> > 
> > How can we offer him procedural guarantees enjoyed by U.S. residents 
> > when we won't be the ones conducting procedure at his trial?  He's  
> > going 
> > to be tried in the ICC or by Iraqis in Iraqi courts.  We have no good 
> > evidence that he's committed crimes against Americans, and unless we 
> > find some, I don't think that anyone would want him anywhere near a 
> > Federal courtroom. 
> > 
>  
> He won't be put in front of the ICC as the US never signed on to it. So  
> this one is out. 
>  
> That leaves either an American Tribunal or an Iraqi one. In either case  
> they should adhere to US procedures as they are based on them. 

Yes, but I think Justin is mistaking my meaning.  In order for the
trial to be fair and valid, it must adhere to certain standards, some
of which I enumerated.  They are not necessarily US procedures, per se.
Based on these discussions, I think it is clear that the war crimes
tribunal should be composed of elected Iraqi judges.   This would have
the advantage of adding democratic legitimacy to the process so that the
result would be widely accepted, something terribly lacking in any
proceeding under US auspices.  Moreover, this solution addresses US
exceptions to the international courts as well, since the case would be
heard in US-occupied Iraq.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sun Dec 21 13:13:47 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 13:13:47 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
  <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031221125906.02914c80@idiom.com>

At 08:14 AM 12/21/2003 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
>He won't be put in front of the ICC as the US never signed on to it.
>So this one is out.
>That leaves either an American Tribunal or an Iraqi one. In either case
>they should adhere to US procedures as they are based on them.

But this isn't an American war or occupation.  It's a war by the Allies,
including the US, Great Britain, and the Coalition Of the Willing,
and the UK and most of the COWs are responsible for bringing this to the ICC.
That means it's either the Iraqis that get to try Saddam and hang him,
or else the Americans have to pretend that they weren't pretending
that this was an international effort.

(Did Iraq join the ICC?)




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Dec 21 17:18:32 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 17:18:32 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  Yawn.
Message-ID: <3FE64668.BF0974E8@cdc.gov>

At 05:41 PM 12/20/03 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>
>Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two towers had
>it coming,

"Collateral damage".

The workers at say a WWII refinery did not directly
do evil to anyone.  Still, they were killed, because of where
they were.  Bummer, eh?  Sleep with dogs..

Better put some ice on that, bub.




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Dec 21 17:44:55 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 17:44:55 -0800
Subject: Give us at least 3 Nyms
Message-ID: <3FE64C97.5B278CFB@cdc.gov>

. We had to get very disciplined and accept nothing less than three
names."

A major obstacle was simply gathering the names correctly, considering
that many Arabs have four proper names, including family and tribal
surnames

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-tribalcode21dec21,1,4576311.story?coll=la-home-headlines




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sun Dec 21 16:28:32 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:28:32 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <20031221233733.GA18397@dreams.soze.net>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
  <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
  <20031221233733.GA18397@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <C5A8D22E-3415-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>
> As Bill Stuart pointed out, this is not an American war.  This is a war
> (or so the U.S. claims) based on alleged violation of an agreement
> between Iraq and the UN.  It seems to me that American Courts or
> American Tribunals have no authority to preside over Saddam's case in
> general.  I don't think anyone wants to try Saddam for crimes over 
> which
> the U.S. might have jurisdiction.  There's likely a much better case
> that he killed various subordinates, or that he gave orders to murder a
> bunch of Kurds, or that he murdered various people in his ascent into
> power, than there is that he offered material support to Al Qaeda or
> some other terrorist group.
>

I agree they should. But this war was not sanctioned by the UN, nor did 
the US ratify the ICC. Sure, the British and spanish and Italian where 
along for the ride, but the US Administration made it clear several 
times that THEY are going to call the shots on Iraq.


> Even if such a U.S. law-based prosecution were to be pursued, clearly
> there are serious international law issues.  Saddam was not some 
> rag-tag
> nation-less scoundrel.  Even if he was directly involved in terrorism, 
> I
> would think the only way to prosecute him for any such crimes would be
> in some international court, because he was essentially sovereign.
>

Agreed.

> Please explain why an Iraqi court must give Saddam U.S. style 
> procedural
> rights, because I don't understand.  I know you said "should", but what
> does that mean if not "must"?  The U.S. has no influence on Iraqi
> judicial proceedings, or at least it shouldn't.  Appeals to ethics 
> don't
> mean anything when one talks about a different culture.
>
If the US is serious to establish a democracy in Iraq than this would 
also mean a reform of the Criminal Justice system. Most likely built on 
the "best" system in the world and that would make it the US one, no?

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+Y6tWlCnxcrW2uuEQLOGACfeTsQ+8D5cD6Siz2km+1qp+K+57MAoN/f
DMN1fZOIoWhYhRlXXKvgrNTW
=zLGJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Dec 21 19:31:41 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:31:41 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20031220224222.01cda850@pop.earthlink.net>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald
> > I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.

baudmax23 at earthlink.net wrote:
> That is quite a presumption there.  "If you're not with US, 
> you're with the terrorists",

If you call for the release of Saddam, or you justify 9/11, as 
the "anti-war" posters in this thread have  been arguing, then 
indeed you are with the terrorists.

You are stupid evil, and a loser.

> Uncle Ho" was the leader of the Indochinese resistance, 
> leader of a popular anti-colonial nationalist movement

A popular anti-colonial nationalist movement which he led from 
Moscow?   Somehow I seriously doubt that Stalin's Moscow was 
the place to find nationalist movements, let alone popular 
ones.

When Ho came to power in North Vietnam, he treated the 
population as though they were the enemy, and himself the 
quisling leader of a hostile alien occupation force.  In his 
terror against the Vietnamese, he set execution quotas.  His 
servants had to kill such and such a number of "class enemies" 
in each village.

> Chickens always come home to roost.   This is the case with 
> Saddam, same as it was for Bin Laden as well (another CIA 
> Frankenstein, run amok on Master).

I deleted most of your lies without comment, as too obvious and 
stupid to merit rebuttal, but this lie, though equally obvious 
and equally stupid, is significant, as it links the fans of 
Saddam, with the fans of Stalin and Soviet expansionism.

You accuse the US of not merely being allied to bin Laden, but 
of "creating" him, which presupposes that the US created the 
Afghan resistance, and indeed every resistance to Soviet 
tyranny.

Hey, if it had not been for that nasty CIA the afghans would 
have been happy as pigs in mud enjoying the vast benefits of 
being uplifted by the Soviets to the superior level of 
civilization enjoyed by the beneficiaries of Soviet alliance
:-)

That is a lie we have heard over and over again, with thirty 
different wars of Soviet aggression, starting in the 1920s.  We 
heard it most infamously uttered against East German 
resistance, and every time we heard that tired old lie, those 
servants of tyranny uttering it were less believable, and less 
believed.

> in particular: In the quotations collected below, the name of 
> the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as 
> Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, 
> when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he 
> certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such 
> anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the 
> process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, 
> withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad 
> Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, 
> i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist 
> Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of 
> them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go! In 
> 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The 
> failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. 
> In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate 
> Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first 
> time.

oh come on.

The Baathist coup was part of a pan arab conspiracy for 
simultaneous coups in all major arab countries, to create a 
united pan arab socialist government modelled on Stalin's 
dictatorship, which would supposedly make the arabs strong in 
the way that Stalin had supposedly made the Soviet Union 
strong.

It is plausible that the CIA might support an ordinary military 
coup against a pro Soviet tyrant, but it is unbelievable that 
the CIA would support a pan arabist coup, intended to unite the 
arab world and subjugate the drunken fat princes of Kuwait, 
Saudi Arabia, etc.

Plus, if you really believed that Saddam was a CIA agent, how
come you are calling for him to be released, or turned over to
the questionable justice of his fellow tyrants and mass
murderers running the court in the Hague? 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     TvAY6+Fkueg9q0ZdMfMzOTt1CMEcIaszUot0IXzl
     4nh/RBzF7wz2eI/jN6gnWICUVvW8DNV8OwkTIisqt




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Dec 21 19:58:10 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:58:10 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <20031221161851.GE32589@clueinc.net>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > And now the guys on this list are weeping big salt tears 
> > about poor victimized Saddam.

Jamie Lawrence:
> I don't care if he got a shave. I do care that the US fails 
> to adhere to international law.

The US army would be wholly in compliance with international 
law even if it nailed Saddam's head to a post in central 
Baghdad with a nine inch nail.  Saddam is not entitled to POW 
protections.  He was running the war effort out of uniform and 
hidden amongst civilians, which has always been a 
shoot-on-the-spot violation of the rules of war, and his war 
effort consisted largely of terrorist attacks directed at 
civilians, which regrettably has not been a shoot-on-the-spot 
violation, but arguably should be.

> I fail to understand why our "war" on "terrorism", which is 
> apparently the mode that drives most of this sort of feeling, 
> suddenly required knocking over a crippled tyrant.

The title of this thread is 'I am anti war.  You lot support 
Saddam"  I don't defend the war on Iraq.  Why are you 
supporting Saddam?

James A. Donald
> > Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two towers 
> > had it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts himself in 
> > the corner with the people who are stupid, evil, and 
> > losers.

Jamie Lawrence:
> Anyone who babbles such inane false relations is a dope.

You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim. Care 
to give us your take on the two towers? 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     lSPP/JI5XquWeDE9Luo/hkP7TgMrx6R7x088utoG
     4elBeRSFzJwkpZXIuL3j9uEkywuFYbl8gvR7GYjfN




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Dec 21 19:58:10 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:58:10 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <5AE11066-33B6-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.

Michael Kalus
> Why. Because we OPPOSED the war on Saddam?

Because you have been justifying his actions, denying his 
crimes, and calling for his release.

James A.Donald:
> > But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi 
> > Minh" Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after 
> > spending ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the 
> > murder of Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to 
> > rule what became North Vietnam.  He purged 85% of the 
> > communist party, murdering a large but unknown proportion 
> > of them, and conducted a terror against the peasants of 
> > extraordinary savagery.

Michael Kalus
> Yet you still think there was a good reason to Oppose the 
> Vietnam war? Make up your mind man. Was it a "just" war like 
> (in your opinion) Iraq right now or was it unjust?

It was an unwise war fought by unjust means.  The cause of 
saving the Vietnamese from Soviet domination was a just cause, 
as the terror and the flood of refugees that followed the 
defeat of the west in Indochina proved.   However, "just cause" 
is only one of the several criteria needed for a just war.
(And the Iraqi war does not satisfy all the criteria of just
war either, though hanging Saddam is surely a just cause.)

> Why does the "american way of life" have to win?

The world cannot remain half slave and half free.  We must 
become slaves, or they must become free. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     jZXTBmVpML2nLd2bSKH/1gh9Qm3dDT6mYomGoIsl
     4wZklKuwlV/p34b+cMEJm5vQiUIkitUC0+bJTIw0v




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Dec 21 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 20:00:00 -0800
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200312220400.hBM400mV019095@slack.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Oct 13, 2003

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography
and its effect on society.  It is not a moderated list (but see exceptions
below) and the list operators are not responsible for the list content.

Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list.  A subscriber can subscribe to
one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list.  Each node
(called a "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer", although they are not
related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes
in addition to sending messages to its subscribers.  A message posted
to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes,
and vice-versa.

1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers.
Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of
spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to.

There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
messages to their subscribers. "cooked" CDRs try to eliminate the spam
on that's on the regular list by automatically sending only messages
that are from cypherpunks list subscribers (on any CDR) or people who
are replying to list messages.  Finally there are moderated lists, where
a human moderator decides which messages from the raw list to pass on
to subscribers.

2. Message Modification

Message modification policy indicates what modifications, if any, beyond
what is needed to operate the CDR are done (most CDRs add a tracking
X-loop header on mail posted to their subscribers to prevent mail loops).
Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
subscribers. CDRs should not modify mail that they pass from one CDR
to the next, but some of them do, and others undo those modifications.

3. Privacy

Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
list members, or no one ("private") , to retrieve the subscribers list.
Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
since your address is now out there.   It's really only useful for
keeping spammers from harvesting addresses from the list software.

Digest mode indicates that the CDR supports digest mode, which is where
the posts are batched up into a few large emails.  Nodes that support
only digest mode are noted.

4. Anonymous posting

Cypherpunks encourages anonymous posting.

You can use an anonymous remailer:
http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.html
http://anon.efga.org/Remailers
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html

5. Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
Since the list is run from a number of different CDRs, you have to
figure out which CDR you are subscribed to.  If you don't remember and
can't figure it out from the mail headers (hint: the top Received: line
should tell you), the easiest way to unsubscribe is to send unsubscribe
messages to all the CDRs listed below.

How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
"internet headers").  Look for the Sender or X-loop headers.  The Sender
will say something like "Sender: owner-cypherpunks at lne.com".  The X-loop
line will say something like "X-Loop: cypherpunks at lne.com".  Both of
these inticate that you are subscribed to the lne.com CDR.   If you were
subscribed to the algebra CDR, they would have algebra.com in them.
Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the
table below to find that CDRs unsubscribe instructions.

6. Lunatics, spammers and nut-cases

"I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings".
At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who
are abusing the lists openness by dumping reams of propaganda on the list.
The distinction between a spammer and a subscriber is nearly always very
clear, but the dictinction between a subscriber who is abusing the list
by posting reams of propaganda and a subscriber who is making lots of
controversial posts is not clear.  Therefore, we tolerate the crap.
Subscribers with a low crap tolerance should check out mail filters.
Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems
only.  Eudora also has a capacity for filtering mail, as do many other
mail readers.  An example procmail recipie is below, you will of
course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
    * (^From:.*ravage at ssz\.com.*|\
    ^From:.*jchoate at dev.tivoli.com.*|\
    ^From:.*mattd at useoz.com|\
    ^From:.*proffr11 at bigpond.com|\
    ^From:.*jei at cc.hut.fi)
	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

Operator:
Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at algebra.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???
Info:   ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

Operator:         drt at un.bewaff.net
Subscription:     "subscribe [password of your choice]" to 
				       cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe <password>" to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Help:             "help" to to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Web site:         http://koeln.ccc.de/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks
Posting address:  cypherpunks at koeln.ccc.de
Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and
                  every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line
                  containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. 
Digest mode:      this node is digest-only
NNTP:             news://koeln.ccc.de/cbone.ml.cypherpunks
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infonex:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at infonex.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lne:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at lne.com
Filtering policy: cooked 
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.
Message Modification policy:  
 1. messages are demimed (MIME attachments removed) when posted 
  through lne or received by lne CDR subscribers
 2. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 3. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html
(thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minder:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Help:             "help" to majordomo at minder.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at minder.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: private
Info:           send mail to cypherpunks-info at minder.net


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Help:             "help" to listproc at openpgp.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at openpgp.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder:

Subscription:     "subscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Help:             "help" to sunder at sunder.net
Posting address:  sunder at sunder.net
Filtering policy: moderated
Message Modification policy:  ???
Privacy policy:  ???
Info: ???


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pro-ns:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at pro-ns.net
Filtering policy: cooked
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.   
Message Modification policy:
 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 2. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sun Dec 21 17:27:47 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 20:27:47 -0500
Subject: Indications Saddam Was Not in Hiding But a Captive
Message-ID: <0C95D372-341E-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

http://www.debka.com/article_print.php?aid=743

Indications Saddam Was Not in Hiding But a Captive

DEBKAfile Special Report

December 14, 2003, 6:55 PM (GMT+02:00)

A number of questions are raised by the incredibly bedraggled, tired 
and crushed condition of this once savage, dapper and pampered ruler 
who was discovered in a hole in the ground on Saturday, December 13:

1. The length and state of his hair indicated he had not seen a barber 
or even had a shampoo for several weeks.

2. The wild state of his beard indicated he had not shaved for the same 
period

3. The hole dug in the floor of a cellar in a farm compound near Tikrit 
was primitive indeed b 6ft across and 8ft across with minimal sanitary 
arrangements - a far cry from his opulent palaces.

4. Saddam looked beaten and hungry.

5. Detained trying to escape were two unidentified men. Left with him 
were two AK-47 assault guns and a pistol, none of which were used.

6. The hole had only one opening. It was not only camouflaged with mud 
and bricks b it was blocked. He could not have climbed out without 
someone on the outside removing the covering.

7. And most important, $750,000 in 100-dollar notes were found with him 
(a pittance for his captors who expected a $25m reward)b but no 
communications equipment of any kind, whether cell phone or even a 
carrier pigeon for contacting the outside world.

According to DEBKAfile analysts, these seven anomalies point to one 
conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner.

After his last audiotaped message was delivered and aired over al 
Arabiya TV on Sunday November 16, on the occasion of Ramadan, Saddam 
was seized, possibly with the connivance of his own men, and held in 
that hole in Adwar for three weeks or more, which would have accounted 
for his appearance and condition. Meanwhile, his captors bargained for 
the $25 m prize the Americans promised for information leading to his 
capture alive or dead. The negotiations were mediated by Jalal 
Talabanibs Kurdish PUK militia.

These circumstances would explain the ex-rulerbs docility b described 
by Lt.Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as bresignationb b in the face of his 
capture by US forces. He must have regarded them as his rescuers and 
would have greeted them with relief.

 From Gen. Sanchezbs evasive answers to questions on the $25m bounty, it 
may be inferred that the Americans and Kurds took advantage of the 
negotiations with Saddambs abductors to move in close and capture him 
on their own account, for three reasons:

A. His capture had become a matter of national pride for the Americans. 
No kudos would have been attached to his handover by a local gang of 
bounty-seekers or criminals. The country would have been swept anew 
with rumors that the big hero Saddam was again betrayed by the people 
he trusted, just as in the war.

B. It was vital to catch his kidnappers unawares so as to make sure 
Saddam was taken alive. They might well have killed him and demanded 
the prize for his body. But they made sure he had no means of taking 
his own life and may have kept him sedated.

C. During the weeks he is presumed to have been in captivity, guerrilla 
activity declined markedly b especially in the Sunni Triangle towns of 
Falluja, Ramadi and Balad - while surging outside this flashpoint 
region b in Mosul in the north and Najef, Nasseriya and Hilla in the 
south. It was important for the coalition to lay hands on him before 
the epicenter of the violence turned back towards Baghdad and the 
center of the Sunni Triangle.

The next thing to watch now is not just where and when Saddam is 
brought to justice for countless crimes against his people and humanity 
- - Sanchez said his interrogation will take bas long as it takes b but 
what happens to the insurgency. Will it escalate or gradually die down?

An answer to this, according to DEBKAfilebs counter-terror sources, was 
received in Washington nine days before Saddam reached US custody.

It came in the form of a disturbing piece of intelligence that the 
notorious Lebanese terrorist and hostage-taker Imad Mughniyeh, who 
figures on the most wanted list of 22 men published by the FBI after 
9/11, had arrived in southern Iraq and was organizing a new anti-US 
terror campaign to be launched in March-April 2004, marking the first 
year of the American invasion.

For the past 21 years, Mughniyeh has waged a war of terror against 
Americans, whether on behalf of the Hizballah, the Iranian Shiite 
fundamentalists, al Qaeda or for himself. The Lebanese arch-terrorist 
represents for the anti-American forces in Iraq an ultimate weapon.

Saddambs capture will not turn this offensive aside; it may even bring 
it forward.

For Israel, there are three lessons to be drawn from the dramatic turn 
of events in Iraq:

First, An enemy must be pursued to the end and if necessary taken 
captive. The Sharon governmentbs conduct of an uncertain, wavering war 
against the Palestinian terror chief Yasser Arafat stands in stark 
contrast to the way the Americans have fought Saddam and his cohorts in 
Iraq and which has brought them impressive gains.

Second, Israel must join the US in bracing for the decisive round of 
violence under preparation by Mughniyeh, an old common enemy from the 
days of Beirut in the 1980s. Only three weeks ago, DEBKAfilebs military 
sources reveal, the terrorist mastermind himself was seen in south 
Lebanon in surveillance of northern Israel in the company of Iranian 
military officers. With this peril still to be fought, it is 
meaningless for Israelis to dicker over the Geneva Accord, unilateral 
steps around the Middle East road map, or even the defensive barrier.

Third, Certain Israeli pundits and even politicians, influenced by 
opinion in Europe, declared frequently in recent weeks that the 
Americans had no hope of capturing Saddam Hussein and were therefore 
bogged down irretrievably in Iraq. The inference was that the Americans 
erred in embarking on an unwinnable war in Iraq.

This was wide of the mark even before Saddam was brought in. The 
Americans are in firm control - even though they face a tough new 
adversary b and the whole purpose of the defeatist argument heard in 
Israel was to persuade the Sharon government that its position in 
relation to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat is as hopeless as that 
of the Americans in Iraq. Israelbs only choice, according to this 
argument, is to knuckle under to Palestinian demands and give them what 
they want. Now that the Iraqi ruler is in American custody, they will 
have to think again.

b14 December

Commander of US ground forces in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said at 
the dramatic news conference in Baghdad (Bremer: We Got him!), that 
Saddam Hussein was discovered in a bspider holeb 6-8ft deep behind a 
mud hut in a walled farm compound in Adwar, a town 15 km from Tikrit, 
eight months after his regime was toppled.

His capture was achieved without a shot fired and no injuries. He was 
emaciated, tired and unkempt and had grown a gray beard. The initial 
medical examination was videotaped and aired. He was then shaved for 
identification. Found with him were two AK-47 assault rifles and 
$750,000. Two associates were detained with him. A ventilator enabled 
them to stay underground. The hole in which Saddam was hiding was 
camouflaged with bricks and dirt.

Operation bRed Dawnb was carried by 4th Infantry Division and coalition 
special forces b 600 men. It was made possible by a great deal of human 
intelligence and the interrogation of captives.

Gen. Sanchez reported the deposed Iraqi ruler, discovered Saturday, 
December 13, at 8.30 pm local time, showed no resistance and appeared 
resigned to his fate. He was btalkative and cooperativeb while being 
taken to a secure place. The interrogation will btake as long as it 
takes.b

US administrator Paul Bremer called on the Iraqi people to turn to 
reconciliation and Saddambs followers to lay down their arms.

US troops poured into Baghdad and blocked the road-bridges into the 
capital as soon as word spread, in anticipation of violence from Saddam 
fedayeen or foreign terrorists fighting the US-led coalition presence. 
Baghdadis fired guns in the air to celebrate the capture of the man who 
ruled the country with an iron fist for 23 years. Kurdish and Shiite 
towns filled with dancing and jubilation. Iraq officials demand Saddam 
be handed over to the new Iraqi war crimes tribunal to be judged for 
the murder of 300,000 Iraqis.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+ZImGlCnxcrW2uuEQJeCQCfT2ADo3h8UQBJTwaP8F0OkX3OJ0YAnjHn
AaAM+czY70SpxOgvVfauZvuD
=SId2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sun Dec 21 22:59:54 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 22:59:54 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
References: <5.0.2.1.2.20031220224222.01cda850@pop.earthlink.net>
  <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031221221637.0298f928@idiom.com>

At 07:31 PM 12/21/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>baudmax23 at earthlink.net wrote:
> > That is quite a presumption there.  "If you're not with US,
> > you're with the terrorists",
>
>If you call for the release of Saddam, or you justify 9/11,
>as the "anti-war" posters in this thread have  been arguing,
>then indeed you are with the terrorists.

Saddam's not particularly related to the terrorists,
especially the 9/11 gang, other than having a common enemy.
He's apparently funded some terrorism in Israel,
but then the Israelis have funded lots of terrorism in Palestine.
He is related to the anti-invader resistance, but that's fair.

He may have been involved in a plot to kill George Bush the Elder,
but Bush had tried to kill him first, with decapitation bombings.
Either try both of them for that, or neither of them, or better,
let the two of them do pistols at dawn.  (Come to think of it,
give enough people that opportunity and the problem goes away.)
(Of *course* I meant give them that opportunity with Saddam, not Bush...)
But making up pretenses for invasion any time people question
your previous pretense is simply unprofessional.

If you want to have any pretense of caring about the Rule of Law,
you need to stick to it even after capturing your enemies,
otherwise you're just an illegitimate tyrant.
(Also, it's nice to pronounce "rule of law" the way Jefferson did,
rather than sounding like Bismarck's speech about "Blut und Eisen".)

That means either letting him go, or finding something to
try him for that you can not only prove, but that you have
your own standing to try him for, or else turn him over to
someone else who has a legitimate case.  Handing him to the ICC is fine,
if you don't think drowning people in red tape is cruel&unusual,
or hand him to the Kuwaitis, but not to the gang who were
lying about Iraqis ripping babies out of incubators.
Or to the Iraqis.

>Plus, if you really believed that Saddam was a CIA agent, how
>come you are calling for him to be released, or turned over to
>the questionable justice of his fellow tyrants and mass
>murderers running the court in the Hague?

The US did support Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, because he was
more in line with their interests than the Ayatollah's gang were.
However, unlike Noriega, I doubt he was a direct employee,
so if they wanted to attack him, the right channel was to declare war,
rather than to just call in CIA Internal Affairs....




From rah at shipwright.com  Sun Dec 21 20:07:09 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:07:09 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <20031218194035.GA10761@mail.dadadada.net>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost> 
  <20031218183508.F11657-100000@localhost>
  <20031218194035.GA10761@mail.dadadada.net>
Message-ID: <p0602040cbc0c1e5c17aa@[66.149.49.5]>

At 2:40 PM -0500 12/18/03, BillyGOTO wrote:
>Do we really measure weapons in pounds?

I suppose you do if you have to fly them?

;-)

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From rah at shipwright.com  Sun Dec 21 20:16:59 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:16:59 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost> 
  <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>
  <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <p06020410bc0c2070945e@[66.149.49.5]>

At 2:06 PM -0500 12/19/03, Michael Kalus wrote:
>I don't think Castro is a bad guy either.

Ah. I feel much better now. Thank you for sparing me the rest of your
drivel from now on...

Plonk!

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Sun Dec 21 15:37:33 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:37:33 +0000
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
  <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031221233733.GA18397@dreams.soze.net>

Michael Kalus (2003-12-21 13:14Z) wrote:

> > How can we offer him procedural guarantees enjoyed by U.S. residents
> > when we won't be the ones conducting procedure at his trial?  He's
> > going to be tried in the ICC or by Iraqis in Iraqi courts.  We have
> > no good evidence that he's committed crimes against Americans, and
> > unless we find some, I don't think that anyone would want him
> > anywhere near a Federal courtroom.
> 
> He won't be put in front of the ICC as the US never signed on to it.
> So this one is out.
> 
> That leaves either an American Tribunal or an Iraqi one. In either
> case they should adhere to US procedures as they are based on them.

As Bill Stuart pointed out, this is not an American war.  This is a war
(or so the U.S. claims) based on alleged violation of an agreement
between Iraq and the UN.  It seems to me that American Courts or
American Tribunals have no authority to preside over Saddam's case in
general.  I don't think anyone wants to try Saddam for crimes over which
the U.S. might have jurisdiction.  There's likely a much better case
that he killed various subordinates, or that he gave orders to murder a
bunch of Kurds, or that he murdered various people in his ascent into
power, than there is that he offered material support to Al Qaeda or
some other terrorist group.

Even if such a U.S. law-based prosecution were to be pursued, clearly
there are serious international law issues.  Saddam was not some rag-tag
nation-less scoundrel.  Even if he was directly involved in terrorism, I
would think the only way to prosecute him for any such crimes would be
in some international court, because he was essentially sovereign.

Please explain why an Iraqi court must give Saddam U.S. style procedural
rights, because I don't understand.  I know you said "should", but what
does that mean if not "must"?  The U.S. has no influence on Iraqi
judicial proceedings, or at least it shouldn't.  Appeals to ethics don't
mean anything when one talks about a different culture.

-- 
I am a carnivorous fish swimming in    #+#  Banking establishments are
two waters, the cold water of art and  -*+  more dangerous than standing
the hot water of science.  - S. Dali   #-#  armies.  - Thomas Jefferson




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec 22 00:23:04 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 00:23:04 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>
Message-ID: <102FCD2C-3458-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 21, 2003, at 7:58 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
>
> It was an unwise war fought by unjust means.  The cause of
> saving the Vietnamese from Soviet domination was a just cause,
> as the terror and the flood of refugees that followed the
> defeat of the west in Indochina proved.

Not my problem. If the Viet Cong wanted to free themselves from Ho or 
Thieu or Diem or Lyndon, not my problem.

And anyone using force to take my money to pay for such a war is 
aggressing against me.

Crapola about "just wars" is just statist nonsense.


>  However, "just cause"
> is only one of the several criteria needed for a just war.
> (And the Iraqi war does not satisfy all the criteria of just
> war either, though hanging Saddam is surely a just cause.)
>
>> Why does the "american way of life" have to win?
>
> The world cannot remain half slave and half free.  We must
> become slaves, or they must become free.
>

Not my problem. The Jews in Germany and Poland should have fought their 
oppressors instead of twirling their sidelocks and rocking and 
spinning...that they were slaughtered is, repeat after me, NOT MY 
PROBLEM.

Your proposal in this thread and others to fight "just wars" means you 
are still the socialist you said you were in your earlier years, albeit 
now worshipping Rand and Reagan instead of Ho and Che and Mao.

There has not been a "just war" involving America since 1776. And maybe 
1812, though that was really just a minor skirmish.

Stop yammering about using force to take my money and my time to 
support your "just causes" and "just wars."

Better yet, why don't you just _ENLIST_ in the U.S. Army and go to 
Baghdad to implement your principles?


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec 22 01:10:57 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 01:10:57 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <C0B77930-345E-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 20, 2003, at 5:41 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
>
> I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.
>
> Back in the sixties, there were lots of good reasons to oppose
> the Vietnam war, notably that it was fought by conscription,
> and that McNamara's search for measures of war fighting
> efficiency and to create incentives for efficient production of
> war effort were demoralizing the troops, and instead of
> creating incentives to fight effectively, created perverse
> incentives to commit mass murder in place of killing the enemy.
>
> But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi
> Minh"

As usual, you generalize to the point of venality.

I, and many others, were against the war in Vietnam without being 
supporters of Ho Chi Minh or the Soviets or anyone of that ilk. We were 
voters for John Hospers in 1972, who opposed the war in Vietnam without 
being a chanter of "Ho, Ho" or whatever it is your fantasies had us all 
chanting.

(And, yes, I was at the 1970 "Mobe March" in D.C., the one in May 1970, 
just after Kent State, where Nixon surrounded the White House with 
buses. I finagled my way into the inner ring, and saw the speakers from 
a few feet away. Essentially _none_ of them were supporters of the 
Soviets or the North Vietnamese qua North Vietnamese.)


> Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after spending
> ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the murder of
> Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to rule what
> became North Vietnam.  He purged 85% of the communist party,
> murdering a large but unknown proportion of them, and conducted
> a terror against the peasants of extraordinary savagery.

So? Not my problem. And rescuing others by using taxes stolen from 
Americans, or their bodies, is statist. Moreover, rescuing others is a 
moral hazard. Rescuing the Jews from their folly of spinning their 
dreidels and twirling their sidelocks was a particularly heinous moral 
hazard....they had been in favor of victim disarmament for centuries 
prior to the so-called Holocaust and their liquidation was predictable. 
For the American government to send boys to Europe to die to "liberate" 
Europe was one of the great crimes of the last century.

All of America's "alliances" have either been based on one-sided use of 
force (the USA always goes to fight in foreign lands, they never come 
here to help us fight our battles with the negroes and Mexicans) or 
have been based on corporate interests (oil companies, manufacturers 
wishing to expand into dangerous countries, etc.).

"Not my problem" is what the libertarian sentiment embodies. General 
Motors wants to set up a factory in Eritrea? Let them hire a private 
army, not use American cannon fodder. Squibb wants to sell baby formula 
in Paraguay? Intel wants to open a plant in mainland China? The answers 
are all the same: the U.S. armed forces are not "clearing operations" 
for corporations or do-gooders.

> Anyone who opposed the war on Vietnam should have started off
> by asking "How shall we contain the Soviet Union and eventually
> defeat communism, and what is wrong with the way this
> administration is doing it.

"Containing" some political system in some foreign land is NOT MY 
PROBLEM. Nor is it in the U.S. Constitution that foreign wars would be 
launched to save _other_ people from themselves and their foolish 
decisions.

>
> Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by
> visualizing himself as the heir of  King John Sobieski, not the
> heir of Saladin.  Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
> it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
> should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
> lose, and their way of life perish.

All of you, and I do mean _you_, who take my money to spend on these 
kinds of foreign adventures ought to be taken out and shot...for your 
aggressions, not for your sentiments.

Spend your own money. Become a mercenary. Fight Saddam and Muamar and 
Jacques all you want.

But don't steal my money, either directly or through corporate taxation 
to do it. Use your own money.

Got it?

--Tim May

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, 
and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for 
then it costs nothing to be a patriot." -- Mark Twain




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec 22 01:29:47 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 01:29:47 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost>
Message-ID: <6285D33A-3461-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 21, 2003, at 7:58 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
> James A. Donald
>>> Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two towers
>>> had it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts himself in
>>> the corner with the people who are stupid, evil, and
>>> losers.
>
> Jamie Lawrence:
>> Anyone who babbles such inane false relations is a dope.
>
> You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim. Care
> to give us your take on the two towers?
>

Straw man. You keep bringing up the World Trade Center attack as if 
Saddam ordered it, or was involved in some central way. No credible 
evidence has been presented...not even the usually-unreliable 
sources...that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. (Whether some Iraqis 
celebrated or not is beside the point...if that were the criterion for 
launching a war, we'd be at war with Syria, Egypt, France, China, and 
Malaysia, to name a few.)

Going after the actual planners, financiers, and attackers involved in 
the 9/11 attacks is of course justified.

"Liberating" Afghanistan and letting women in Kabul bare their legs and 
all was not justified (oh, and the women in Kabul are back to wearing 
scarves).

Inasmuch as Iraq and the Baath regime was never linked in any credible 
or substantive way, beyond the merest of "maybe they met with Bin 
Laden's guys" rumors, and inasmuch as a 9/11 link was never even 
alleged by warmongers like Cheney and Perle and Rumsfield, the claim 
that Iraq was attacked because of the World Trade Center attack is 
ludicrous.

You really are, down deep, a statist. You may have changed your stripes 
from supporting the Marxist variant of statism, but what you now 
support remains statism to the core.


--Tim May




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Sun Dec 21 17:47:05 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 01:47:05 +0000
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <C5A8D22E-3415-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <20031221035015.E0975247CD4@gnu-darwin.org>
  <20031221063657.GA15074@dreams.soze.net>
  <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
  <20031221233733.GA18397@dreams.soze.net>
  <C5A8D22E-3415-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031222014705.GD18397@dreams.soze.net>

Michael Kalus (2003-12-22 00:28Z) wrote:

> > As Bill Stuart pointed out, this is not an American war.  This is a
> > war (or so the U.S. claims) based on alleged violation of an
> > agreement between Iraq and the UN.  It seems to me that American
> > Courts or American Tribunals have no authority to preside over
> > Saddam's case in general.  I don't think anyone wants to try Saddam
> > for crimes over which the U.S. might have jurisdiction.  There's
> > likely a much better case that he killed various subordinates, or
> > that he gave orders to murder a bunch of Kurds, or that he murdered
> > various people in his ascent into power, than there is that he
> > offered material support to Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.
> 
> I agree they should. But this war was not sanctioned by the UN, nor
> did the US ratify the ICC. Sure, the British and spanish and Italian
> where along for the ride, but the US Administration made it clear
> several times that THEY are going to call the shots on Iraq.

But the U.S. position since way before the war has been that this is not
a bilateral conflict.  That alone seems to invalidate any notion that
the U.S. has sole jurisdiction over prosecutions stemming from the
"war".

Are you suggesting that we might try to get the ICC to handle Saddam's
trial and that they'd refuse on the grounds that it was a
Bush/Blair/Howard junta that went to war rather than an international
coalition?  It would be highly amusing if the ICC signatories were to
say that, but I don't see it happening.

> > Please explain why an Iraqi court must give Saddam U.S. style
> > procedural rights, because I don't understand.  I know you said
> > "should", but what does that mean if not "must"?  The U.S. has no
> > influence on Iraqi judicial proceedings, or at least it shouldn't.
> > Appeals to ethics don't mean anything when one talks about a
> > different culture.
>
> If the US is serious to establish a democracy in Iraq than this would
> also mean a reform of the Criminal Justice system. Most likely built
> on the "best" system in the world and that would make it the US one,
> no?

Even if the United States wants to reform the Iraqi judicial system to
incorporate most or all of U.S. rights (which really don't exist here
anymore thanks to decades of creative work by the Supremes), I think
that goal is orthogonal to the matter of how to treat Saddam.  The Iraqi
courts haven't been reformed yet.  There's no Iraqi constitution, and
the country isn't even sovereign, in the sense that there's no permanent
system of authority or law.  If Iraqi courts are to be used, do
prisoners just have to sit around for years until the process generates
a criminal justice system with adequate procedural guarantees?  I would
think that the current courts have to be used, regardless of what shape
they're in.

We really have no direct control over what goes on in Iraq.  We can use
diplomacy to try to influence what the governing council does, but it's
the governing council that's creating a constitution.  I'm really not
sure what we'd do if the governing council were to come up with a
constitution without the equivalent of our 4th-8th amendments.  Would we
march into the meeting chamber and kick everyone out, and seat military
commanders at the table instead?

Also, there's an existing (1968) constitution in Iraq, ignoring the
post-coup modifications, and Saddam ignoring it for a few decades
doesn't mean it's bad.  I haven't read it in translation and I don't
know Arabic, so I can't say what the old constitution guarantees in
terms of criminal procedure.  But allegedly it wasn't a terrible
constitution, and it probably guarantees something.

How much influence can we exert without turning Iraq into a U.S.
territory?  It's easy to argue that we've gone too far already by
screening Governing Council members.  Are you suggesting that Iraq
should be a U.S. territory?  If the Governing Council is a puppet, does
it matter whether they have fair trials?  I would think in that case
that any trials they conducted would be invalid, even if no other
countries were to object.

Just because we're there and we're trying to set up a democracy that has
some toleration for religious freedom and speech doesn't mean we have an
obligation to turn Iraq into a puppet state and run U.S. trials for
people who violated Iraqi law.

-- 
I am a carnivorous fish swimming in    #+#  Banking establishments are
two waters, the cold water of art and  -*+  more dangerous than standing
the hot water of science.  - S. Dali   #-#  armies.  - Thomas Jefferson




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Mon Dec 22 01:56:02 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 01:56:02 -0800
Subject: UN using Satellite Photos to track Israeli Apartheid Wall
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031222015343.02901030@idiom.com>

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3334235.stm

It's fun what you can do with satellite images.
The UN's using them to track the progress of the
apartheid wall that Israel's building to
"keep Palestinian suicide bombers out".
They haven't been all that careful about whose land
they're excluding.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 01:59:09 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 01:59:09 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
References: <5.0.2.1.2.20031220224222.01cda850@pop.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <3FE64FED.8831.9E3191@localhost>

    --
baudmax23 at earthlink.net wrote:
> Kassem [...] took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958,  
> [..] starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil 
> companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated 
> right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, 
> US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the 
> Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely 
> because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to 
> go! In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on 
> Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam 
> Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully 
> assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for 
> the first time.

So in your version of reality, the Iraqi people were happily 
enjoying socialism, loving the socialism this benevolent Kassem 
provided to them and then this evil capitalistic CIA agent, 
Saddam, took it all away from them.

If that is what happened, what is your objection then to him 
being given to Iraqi people for execution?  Why are you calling 
for him to be released, or to be given to his fellow tyrants
who run the Hague court, who certainly will not execute him,
probably will not imprison him for very long, and might well
exonerate him?  

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     PlYk3rEnQaDH/vg6bQg87i+LKYnWL9B1wqDEvWkg
     4OVFXm6Pp/pT/tn37qWgP4Q8Njgd7Uzm3LbUDEesM




From baudmax23 at earthlink.net  Mon Dec 22 05:27:57 2003
From: baudmax23 at earthlink.net (baudmax23 at earthlink.net)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:27:57 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE64FED.8831.9E3191@localhost>
References: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
  <5.0.2.1.2.20031220224222.01cda850@pop.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20031222074705.00b7f918@pop.earthlink.net>

At 01:59 AM 12/22/2003 -0800, "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

>     --
>baudmax23 at earthlink.net wrote:
> > Kassem [...] took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958,
> > [..] starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil
> > companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated
> > right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run,
> > US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the
> > Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely
> > because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to
> > go! In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on
> > Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam
> > Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully
> > assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for
> > the first time.
>
>So in your version of reality, the Iraqi people were happily
>enjoying socialism, loving the socialism this benevolent Kassem
>provided to them and then this evil capitalistic CIA agent,
>Saddam, took it all away from them.
>
>If that is what happened, what is your objection then to him
>being given to Iraqi people for execution?  Why are you calling
>for him to be released, or to be given to his fellow tyrants
>who run the Hague court, who certainly will not execute him,
>probably will not imprison him for very long, and might well
>exonerate him?

You are apparently so wrapped up in seeing this in some pre-conceived way, 
as to not grasp the obvious, literal meaning of what you read.  Kassem was 
a pro-arab nationalist, who nationalized (as in seized, without 
compensation) formerly foreign corporate oil interests.  Kassem was 
ANTI-western, anti-American, do you get it?  THAT is why Saddam had been 
recruited by CIA for the original (failed) assassination attempt.  After 
that, he fled Iraq, for Egypt.  Later, after the CIA successfully had 
Kassem assassinated, then Saddam returned to Iraq, and eventually installed 
himself (with US blessing) as Dictator/president.  Kassem was highly 
popular with the Iraqi public, who were we to say otherwise, and have him 
killed for power/profit considerations?  In doing so, for our interests, 
the Iraqi people suffered decades of tyranny under Saddam.  Do you 
understand our involvement in that?  More historical facts for the memory 
hole...

I don't much care to exonerate him, martyr him or anysuch 
nonsense.  However, if he is ALL THAT YOU RANT about, then he would 
obviously be convicted of his crimes in a fair and open court.  To reduce 
it to a kangeroo court and a lynching as you propose is to delegitamize 
such action.

As Tim May has already pointed out, what direct threat has Saddam posed to 
us suddenly that required us to attack him (as well as cause all the 
collateral casualties of innocents who didn't even support Saddam?).  To 
punish the Iraqi people for the actions of their leaders ( 2 wars and 12 
years of sanctions, no less) ... is just as much terrorism as Bin Laden 
punishing the US by attacking civilian Americans in the "homeland".

It was an excellent point Tim made though, that if you feel so strongly 
about intervening militarily in the affairs of others who have not directly 
come here and attacked you (like Saddam) then you ought to enlist and start 
fighting.  I still can't figure out your obsessive and false connexion 
between Saddam and the Sept.11 attacks (besides Bush's widely disseminated, 
baseless media propagated innuendo which misled ignorant US citizens to 
believe otherwise).  What ever did happen to Bin Laden?  Are we REALLY any 
safer today than before Sept.11th?  (Fade to Code Orange for Xmas/New 
Years) Is it possible to defend such a large empire, always, everywhere? 
(hint: Sun Tzu's "Art of War" provides the historical answer here) Or is 
the true path to security and peace (in the longer term) based on mutual 
respect of societies and cultures.  I posit the only true solution will be 
to remove the motivation for the attacks: a non-interventionist policy that 
trades with all, and wars with none, except any that directly ATTACKS the 
US.  When we threw the English out of the US in our revolution, WE THE 
PEOPLE did it, not some foreign "liberation force" coming to save us 
yocals.  Any people desiring freedom from intolerable restraint will take 
the same action, without requiring external nations to intervene and get 
the ball rolling.  Unfortunately, the US has an extensive and well 
documented history around the world of supporting/arming/protecting 
dictators, even from their own people who may be revolting against them in 
armed rebellion.

You can, in your ignorance, ignore the well established and documented 
history of covert CIA operations, leading to the installation of brutal 
dictators (like Saddam, like the return of the Shah in Iran, like most of 
the coups in S.America, like Pinochet in Chile, etc etc etc), but your 
belief does not make any of that history any less real.  Experiencing some 
severe cognitive dissonance between the media-reinforced "myths" and the 
"actual realities", are we?

I also don't understand your contempt of the ICC Hague.  The US has not 
signed the treaty, for fear of US personnel and officials being treated by 
the same standard as everyone else, in regards the commission of war 
crimes.  Why not pass the buck to them... do you REALLY think they'd just 
"let him go" (I doubt it).  And then this way America cannot be implicated 
in the injustice of a mock kangeroo trial and execution, which will only 
further motivate anti-US global resistance like al Qaeda.


-Max

>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      PlYk3rEnQaDH/vg6bQg87i+LKYnWL9B1wqDEvWkg
>      4OVFXm6Pp/pT/tn37qWgP4Q8Njgd7Uzm3LbUDEesM

---
Secrecy is the cornerstone of all tyranny.  Not force, but secrecy... 
censorship.  When any government, or any church, for that matter, 
undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must 
not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and 
oppression, no matter how holy the motives.  Mightily little force is 
needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked; Contrariwise, no amount of 
force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free.  No, not the rack, 
not fission bombs, not anything.  You cannot conquer a free man; The most 
you can do is kill him.

-Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100

---
Smash The State! mailing list home
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/smashthestate
---




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Mon Dec 22 05:44:37 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:44:37 -0500
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <p06020410bc0c2070945e@[66.149.49.5]>
References: <3FE17C45.9109.33692F7@localhost> 
  <3FE1F324.11964.506E7B4@localhost>
  <6ECBDB86-3256-11D8-935A-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
  <p06020410bc0c2070945e@[66.149.49.5]>
Message-ID: <FBCA4410-3484-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> Ah. I feel much better now. Thank you for sparing me the rest of your
> drivel from now on...
>

Enlighten me: Why is Castro a bad guy? Because he tries to hold onto 
power? Well, look around you have it everywhere.

Because he doesn't submit to the US? Boooh. How sad.

Amazing how short sighted some people can be (says me with -6 on both 
eyes).

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+b1RWlCnxcrW2uuEQJBpwCfXQ5m6v2YCfsv0/fV1BRO5TZB4wwAoIOg
/tNlUPDtcGHN/0aeuJh7gdpk
=SjH8
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Mon Dec 22 05:49:26 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:49:26 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>
Message-ID: <A80F1B0A-3485-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 21-Dec-03, at 10:58 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> James A. Donald:
>>> I am anti war.  You lot are pro Saddam.
>
> Michael Kalus
>> Why. Because we OPPOSED the war on Saddam?
>
> Because you have been justifying his actions, denying his
> crimes, and calling for his release.
>

I guess statements like these come about when there is a disconnect 
between the brain, the eyes and the fingers who type out these words. I 
suggest you go back and re-read the arguments.


> James A.Donald:
>>> But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi
>>> Minh" Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after
>>> spending ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the
>>> murder of Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to
>>> rule what became North Vietnam.  He purged 85% of the
>>> communist party, murdering a large but unknown proportion
>>> of them, and conducted a terror against the peasants of
>>> extraordinary savagery.
>
> Michael Kalus
>> Yet you still think there was a good reason to Oppose the
>> Vietnam war? Make up your mind man. Was it a "just" war like
>> (in your opinion) Iraq right now or was it unjust?
>
> It was an unwise war fought by unjust means.  The cause of
> saving the Vietnamese from Soviet domination was a just cause,
> as the terror and the flood of refugees that followed the
> defeat of the west in Indochina proved.   However, "just cause"
> is only one of the several criteria needed for a just war.
> (And the Iraqi war does not satisfy all the criteria of just
> war either, though hanging Saddam is surely a just cause.)
>

Ah, so now we agree that neither war was justified. So, there you go. 
The end not always justifies the means. As in the case of Iraq which is 
pretty much everybody saying here.



>> Why does the "american way of life" have to win?
>
> The world cannot remain half slave and half free.  We must
> become slaves, or they must become free.

Well, in america instead of being the slave to "the man" (just yet) 
you're the slave to your credit card bills, your employers and all the 
other robber barons you have in the industry, while under Castro you 
are.... Well what? You can't travel to the US? You are not necessarily 
always able to state your political opinions (which sound vaguely 
familiar in the US right now) etc.

Yeah, I see how much freer the US is.

Repeat after me: Freedom is something that is defined differently by 
every human being.

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA+AwUBP+b2bGlCnxcrW2uuEQLmgACeIVNDbG+Jk1QUmh2gdr/eH23NExcAlAtj
SgKdNNiF2T+zWByS27hyMIU=
=jU2o
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 09:20:35 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:20:35 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031221221637.0298f928@idiom.com>
References: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > If you call for the release of Saddam, or you justify 9/11, 
> > as the "anti-war" posters in this thread have  been 
> > arguing, then indeed you are with the terrorists.

Bill Stewart
> Saddam's not particularly related to the terrorists,

Those who want Saddam released, for the most part also 
rationalize 9/11

He may not be related to the terrorists, but his fans are 
related to the terrorists.

> But making up pretenses for invasion any time people question 
> your previous pretense is simply unprofessional.

The title of this thread is "I am anti war, you stupid evil 
scum are pro saddam."

I do not support the invasion.   I am not making up pretenses 
for the invasion.

> If you want to have any pretense of caring about the Rule of 
> Law, you need to stick to it even after capturing your 
> enemies

This is war.  Rule of law does not apply.  Rules of war do 
apply.  And rules of war say that the US army can not only give 
Saddam a dental examination, it can nail Saddam's head to a 
post in Baghdad with a nine inch nail, because he was captured 
out of uniform, administering the war effort while hiding 
amongst civilians.

> Handing him to the ICC is fine, if you don't think drowning 
> people in red tape is cruel&unusual

Handing him to the ICC is not fine, because the ICC is not 
going to execute him, and because the ICC is farcically 
incompetent, and because the ICC is dominated by the same 
tyrants who dominate the UN human rights commission, who might 
well choose to let him off.

When I see how many people want to get him off, I more and more 
think the the USG needs to kill him quickly.  The longer he 
lives, the greater the likelyhood that his international pals 
will pull him out of trouble, and eventually return him to 
power.

The Nuremberg trials were held in Germany by the victors.  Why 
this big desire to do something different this time around?   I 
don't hear anyone except the usual Nazis whining that Nuremberg 
was illegitimate or unfair. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     ffvNRYuGrbqZTNb8D6gHcU9pscBMBdTQYoiW5UTS
     4RbpAw5ZWrw71na8WBeLsb0wxGPk4N0JFG0QkwH12




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 10:14:20 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:14:20 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031221125906.02914c80@idiom.com>
References: <8B6D000B-33B7-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <3FE6C3FC.26152.2638B63@localhost>

    --
On 21 Dec 2003 at 13:13, Bill Stewart wrote:
> But this isn't an American war or occupation.  It's a war by
> the Allies, including the US, Great Britain, and the
> Coalition Of the Willing, and the UK and most of the COWs are
> responsible for bringing this to the ICC.

For this to be true, most of the coalition would be nations
that agreed to UN becoming a world government.   Somehow I
doubt it.

The ICC has no legitimacy. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     MVU3HFcf4zBO8SGAeAoleCnLt+ySdaD9K5ITh4lJ
     4HGnXPUOhSyzJ+wUkY0TdY99yKRck7IifD3Hly1iA




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 10:14:20 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:14:20 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <C0B77930-345E-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <3FE6C3FC.7490.2638978@localhost>

    --
On 22 Dec 2003 at 1:10, Tim May wrote:
> I, and many others, were against the war in Vietnam without  
> being supporters of Ho Chi Minh or the Soviets or anyone of  
> that ilk

True, but amongst the vast mass chanting Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,  
one could no more discern principled opponents of the Vietnam  
war, than one can today discern principled opponents of the  
Iraqi war among the Americans worrying about poor little  
victimized Saddam, and the mass of Europeans jumping for joy  
over the fall of the two towers.

Amidst the pro Saddam posters on this thread, many have come  
rather close to chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" -- for the  
example the argument that the evil CIA deprived the third world 
masses of their beloved socialism provided by benevolent  
dictators, and the argument that the US "created' the Afghan  
resistance -- and thus presumably every other resistance  
movement against the Soviets.

> Essentially _none_ of them were supporters of the Soviets or 
> the North Vietnamese qua North Vietnamese.)

Now I get to call you the pinko:

They were supposedly supporters of the NLF, which they well  
knew was a North Vietnamese sock puppet, and thus a KGB sock  
puppet.  And when that sock puppet was discarded to reveal the 
iron fist of the NVA that had been moving its lips, none of  
them were surprised or dismayed.   Similarly Jane Fonda was 
supposedly not a supporter of the North Vietnamese qua North 
Vietnamese, yet without hesitation she lied about the condition 
and treatment of the POWs she met, whom she depicted as 
leniently treated war criminals.  When some of those she lied 
about returned home to speak the truth, she stuck to her 
position, counter attacking them as hypocrites and liars, 
denying that they had shown signs of starvation and torture.

I find it strange that the speakers at your rally were so  
remarkably different from the speakers at my rally --  
particularly when so many of the pro Saddam posters in this  
thread sound like they are new nyms for the same people who  
spoke at my rally.

If any of your speakers really thought the NLF was something  
other than a KGB sock puppet, they would have had posters of  
the supposed NLF leader on their wall.  Instead, not one of  
these supposed supporters of the NLF blinked when the most of  
the NLF vanished in the 1975 purge.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     vgi7SNuqDzYgX5I5Cmd4QPW+QLDM2w78B+RO1o8f
     4oxwhPbCXdnYRp30H5XOTLwLfzQyCsQo15VgpDWYW




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 11:19:30 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 11:19:30 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <6285D33A-3461-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald
> > > > Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two 
> > > > towers had it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts 
> > > > himself in the corner with the people who are stupid, 
> > > > evil, and losers.

Jamie Lawrence:
> > >  Anyone who babbles such inane false relations is a dope.

James A. Donald;
> > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim. 
> > Care to give us your take on the two towers?

Tim May:
> Straw man. You keep bringing up the World Trade Center attack 
> as if Saddam ordered it

Not a straw man.  Those who think poor little Saddam was a 
victim, for the most part also think that the US 'created" the 
afghan resistance, and, particularly if they were European, 
think the that Americans had 9/11 coming to them.

Saddam was not behind the 9/11 attack, but he was and is allied 
with those that were, and, the point of my argument, western 
socialists allied with him and them.  Bin Laden, in obviously 
violation of the Koran which mandates capitalism, has taken 
socialism on board, Saddam, originally a secularist, has taken 
Sunni Islamicism on board, bridging what small ideological gap 
there was between him and Bin Laden, and western socialists are 
alarmingly willing to overlook the arabism and islamicism of 
the few remaining socialists in power.

During the invasion of Iraq, most of the arab news feeds, or at 
least their corresponding english language websites, were 
reasonably fair and balanced, while the BBC went over the top 
with Saddamite propaganda.  When I read the Al Jazeera web 
site, most of the entirely over the top propaganda came from 
western correspondents.  Al Jazeera's own correspondants were 
for the most part OK.

The western intellectuals are not reacting to this as a war of 
caucasians vs semites, but a war of ideologies -- German 
originated ideology vs English originated ideologies, with 
Saddam and Bin Laden incarnating Heidegger and Bush incarnating 
Locke.   Very likely Saddam had nothing to do with causing 
9/11, but Chomsky and the BBC did have something to do with 
causing 9/11.

When one sees someone arguing that Americans had 9/11 coming,
he frequently starts quoting improbable "facts" that originate 
from Chomsky, and backs them up with one of the nuttier BBC 
correspondents. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     G+7kcEq4buQwoHeoHjVTqtFSzhPgHya8+qSEMCmf
     4DCEXYnOji1pOndYuB0c/QAbhZbtw9okutswHAyjN




From s.schear at comcast.net  Mon Dec 22 11:43:49 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 11:43:49 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
References: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
  <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031222114038.05c89998@mail.comcast.net>

At 09:20 AM 12/22/2003, James A. Donald wrote:
>This is war.  Rule of law does not apply.  Rules of war do
>apply.  And rules of war say that the US army can not only give
>Saddam a dental examination, it can nail Saddam's head to a
>post in Baghdad with a nine inch nail, because he was captured
>out of uniform, administering the war effort while hiding
>amongst civilians.

Cite your sources.  The one's I find creditable indicate that at the time 
of his capture he appeared to have been held captive for at least 2-3 
weeks.  He may not have had an option about his uniform, or much else for 
that matter.

steve 




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 11:57:05 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 11:57:05 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20031222074705.00b7f918@pop.earthlink.net>
References: <3FE64FED.8831.9E3191@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE6DC11.9877.2C19CCF@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > So in your version of reality, the Iraqi people were
> > happily enjoying socialism, loving the socialism this
> > benevolent dictator Kassem provided to them and then this
> > evil capitalistic CIA agent, Saddam, took it all away from
> > them.
> >
> > If that is what happened, what is your objection then to
> > him being given to Iraqi people for execution?  Why are you
> > calling for him to be released, or to be given to his
> > fellow tyrants who run the Hague court, who certainly will
> > not execute him, probably will not imprison him for very
> > long, and might well exonerate him?

baudmax23 at earthlink.net
> You are apparently so wrapped up in seeing this in some
> pre-conceived way, as to not grasp the obvious, literal
> meaning of what you read. Kassem was a pro-arab nationalist,
> who nationalized (as in seized, without compensation)
> formerly foreign corporate oil interests. Kassem was
> ANTI-western, anti-American, do you get it?

Your story is inconsistent.  You tell us Saddam was a
capitalistic CIA agent -- so therefore we should not let the
Iraqis hang him. Huh?

Saddam also was and is socialist, anti western, anti american,
seized stuff without compensation etc, which is presumably why
you are backing him today -- and which makes the tale that he
was a CIA "creation" unbelievable.

> You can, in your ignorance, ignore the well established and
> documented history of covert CIA operations

Your "history" comes for the most part from notorious KGB
agents, for example John Pilger.

>From time to time old archives of the CIA are opened, and
usually conspicuously fail to confirm these tales -- these
tales all being variants of one single tale -- that wherever
Soviet aligned tyrants had trouble with each other or with
those they subjugated, it was all the CIA's doing.

> I also don't understand your contempt of the ICC Hague

Consider the trial of Milosevic.  Either the Hague is
deliberately trying to get him off, or they are idiots.  Most
likely idiots.

Plus if the Hague should ever get to exercise real power,
which its present performance makes unlikely, we would have a
world government, which would probably decide the entire
American population to be war criminals and send everyone to
the camps. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     KbRqE7c6EOpNAFJxD8n8roCUXV2WNJo4DkqL0p7h
     4zVatkiNc/ZPba7GUPRigeFpK5jmJrSkpQ/2Y7edR




From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Dec 22 12:25:13 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 12:25:13 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031222114038.05c89998@mail.comcast.net>
References: <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE6E2A9.28023.2DB6077@localhost>

    --
On 22 Dec 2003 at 11:43, Steve Schear wrote:
> Cite your sources.  The one's I find creditable indicate that 
> at the time of his capture he appeared to have been held 
> captive for at least 2-3 weeks.

Oh come on.

A whole platoon of random troops would have to be part of a big 
conspiracy. Plus quite a few Iraqis have interviewed him.  They 
in the vast right wing conspiracy also?

Or did the US perhaps rewrite Saddam's memory with the memory 
erasure thingy from 'men in black'

Shortly after busting Saddam, the US busted large numbers  of 
people in his apparatus, on the basis of records seized from 
his farmhouse.  Did Saddam's henchmen perhaps not notice Saddam 
was missing because the US replaced him with a double?

Real conspiracies exist, but when you start to see conspiracies 
so large, so well organized, so tightly disciplined, embracing 
so many quite ordinary seeming people, you are slipping into 
madness.   If a conspiracy is large, it is not going to be well 
organized and tightly disciplined.   The communists took the 
big conspiracy as far as it could go, and it did not go that 
far.  It is really hard to put on a big show unless you can 
carefully select your audience for willing suspension of 
disbelief.

If the US was faking the circumstances of Saddam's capture, 
this would be comparable to the bigger potemkin village 
operations that the communists put on, for example Mao's fake 
prison, where only the most privileged got to play prisoner, 
but the communists were utterly paranoid about exercising total 
control of any outsider's access to the set, the actors or 
anyone remotely connected to the actors, and only allowed the 
most carefully selected outsiders tightly controlled and highly
supervised access, whereas the US army has been completely
relaxed about letting anyone contact those involved in the
story. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     mnNGnEuQuzpGASrruKWsKhQzuCnYUai/jQiqorMy
     4qGaSHHsj4ncE7dJt0UcQcaG4v8WQFbg0mZElu6db




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Mon Dec 22 13:47:12 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 13:47:12 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Humiliating the Conquered, Part II
Message-ID: <200312222147.hBMLlCfM032270@artifact.psychedelic.net>

If you think it was embarrassing for the former regime in Iraq to see
their fearless leader getting a public louse inspection, just wait until
Christmas, when America again demonstrates it can walk the streets of
Baghdad with impunity.

Yesterday, the crew of WWE Smackdown arrived in Baghdad to set up for
their special Christmas broadcast of Smackdown! "Live from Baghdad."

  "The Smackdown crew with Steve Austin arrived yesterday in Baghdad at 
   the 28th U.S. Military Combat Support Hospital to hand out gift 
   packages to troops and give t-shirts to those injured."
 
  "World Wrestling Entertainment in proud to present a special edition of 
   SmackDown! from Baghdad on Christmas night. Join the Superstars of
   SmackDown! as they have the honor of competing in front of Americas 
   troops in what should be an evening filled with action, excitement and 
   emotion."

Goodness, where are the Donkey Carts of Mass Destruction when they are
really needed. :)

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From lists at crimbles.demon.co.uk  Mon Dec 22 07:05:05 2003
From: lists at crimbles.demon.co.uk (David Crookes)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:05:05 +0000
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <A80F1B0A-3485-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
  <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>
  <A80F1B0A-3485-11D8-967C-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <200312221505.06228.lists@crimbles.demon.co.uk>

On Monday 22 December 2003 13:49, Michael Kalus wrote:
>
> Well, in america instead of being the slave to "the man" (just yet)
> you're the slave to your credit card bills

By choice.

> your employers

By choice, through a range that is "barely enough to eat and drink" to 
unimaginable heights in historical terms.

 and all the
> other robber barons you have in the industry, while under Castro you
> are.... Well what? You can't travel to the US? You are not necessarily
> always able to state your political opinions (which sound vaguely
> familiar in the US right now) etc.

Not even close to the US situation. Get a clue.

A simple example, read Tim May's continued expressions on the state of the US.

Now read this about Cuba:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/05/67973.html

Now, tell me that you still think the US is less free.

> Repeat after me: Freedom is something that is defined differently by
> every human being.
>

So Cuban's choose oppression and no free speech, in exchange for freedom of 
slavery to credit-card spending on luxury items, employment and robber 
barons?

Have you been to Cuba?




From rah at shipwright.com  Mon Dec 22 12:43:33 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:43:33 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031222114038.05c89998@mail.comcast.net>
References: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost> 
  <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
  <6.0.1.1.0.20031222114038.05c89998@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <p06020477bc0d07e8d5ed@[66.149.49.5]>

At 11:43 AM -0800 12/22/03, Steve Schear wrote:
>Cite your sources.  The one's I find creditable

Debka? Really?

:-)

Cheers,
RAH
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Dec 22 20:06:27 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:06:27 -0800
Subject: Trusted Computing = Kevlar Doors
Message-ID: <3FE7BF43.788DBEAC@cdc.gov>

When the Trust Computing Worm (tm) comes out,
will anyone recognize it as a version of the jihadist
pilot who uses the impenetrable aircraft door?

Just wondering.  And doesn't Tom Ridge look great
in Orange?




From eugen at leitl.org  Mon Dec 22 11:28:56 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:28:56 +0100
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
References: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
  <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031222192855.GY32264@leitl.org>

Would you kindly STFU now. Talk about crypto, your politics is flat-EEG.

On Mon, Dec 22, 2003 at 09:20:35AM -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>     --
> James A. Donald:

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Dec 22 19:02:45 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 22:02:45 -0500
Subject: I am anti war. You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
Message-ID: <BAY7-F914omRXf2LTrp00051563@hotmail.com>

James Donald wrote...

"They were supposedly supporters of the NLF, which they well
knew was a North Vietnamese sock puppet, and thus a KGB sock
puppet. "

Uh...huh?

You really get a lot of things mixed up. If you think Ho Chi Minh was a KGB 
sockpuppet then you really don't know anything about Vietnam, China, or East 
Asian history. Think of Ho Chi Min as, utlimately, a violent pragmatist...he 
was going to get his guns from whoever he could, and that's what he did. He 
also had Chinese guns and, during WWII, American guns (yes: We were allied 
with Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese during WWII).

Likewise, you accused Saddam Hussein of being allied with bin Laden, which 
is also silly. In fact, bin Laden has regularly called for Saddam's death, 
and I see no reason to believe he wasn't serious.

Likewise, your lambasting of Chomsky on the "Chomsky Dis" website also 
indicates huge and suspicious gaps in knowledge. I'm starting to connect the 
dots here: I dare you to read the name that signs your paycheck.


-TD


>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
>Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:14:20 -0800
>
>     --
>On 22 Dec 2003 at 1:10, Tim May wrote:
> > I, and many others, were against the war in Vietnam without
> > being supporters of Ho Chi Minh or the Soviets or anyone of
> > that ilk
>
>True, but amongst the vast mass chanting Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,
>one could no more discern principled opponents of the Vietnam
>war, than one can today discern principled opponents of the
>Iraqi war among the Americans worrying about poor little
>victimized Saddam, and the mass of Europeans jumping for joy
>over the fall of the two towers.
>
>Amidst the pro Saddam posters on this thread, many have come
>rather close to chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" -- for the
>example the argument that the evil CIA deprived the third world
>masses of their beloved socialism provided by benevolent
>dictators, and the argument that the US "created' the Afghan
>resistance -- and thus presumably every other resistance
>movement against the Soviets.
>
> > Essentially _none_ of them were supporters of the Soviets or
> > the North Vietnamese qua North Vietnamese.)
>
>Now I get to call you the pinko:
>
>They were supposedly supporters of the NLF, which they well
>knew was a North Vietnamese sock puppet, and thus a KGB sock
>puppet.  And when that sock puppet was discarded to reveal the
>iron fist of the NVA that had been moving its lips, none of
>them were surprised or dismayed.   Similarly Jane Fonda was
>supposedly not a supporter of the North Vietnamese qua North
>Vietnamese, yet without hesitation she lied about the condition
>and treatment of the POWs she met, whom she depicted as
>leniently treated war criminals.  When some of those she lied
>about returned home to speak the truth, she stuck to her
>position, counter attacking them as hypocrites and liars,
>denying that they had shown signs of starvation and torture.
>
>I find it strange that the speakers at your rally were so
>remarkably different from the speakers at my rally --
>particularly when so many of the pro Saddam posters in this
>thread sound like they are new nyms for the same people who
>spoke at my rally.
>
>If any of your speakers really thought the NLF was something
>other than a KGB sock puppet, they would have had posters of
>the supposed NLF leader on their wall.  Instead, not one of
>these supposed supporters of the NLF blinked when the most of
>the NLF vanished in the 1975 purge.
>
>
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      vgi7SNuqDzYgX5I5Cmd4QPW+QLDM2w78B+RO1o8f
>      4oxwhPbCXdnYRp30H5XOTLwLfzQyCsQo15VgpDWYW

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of slow downloads? Compare online deals from your local high-speed 
providers now.  https://broadband.msn.com




From brett at lariat.org  Tue Dec 23 06:29:55 2003
From: brett at lariat.org (Brett Glass)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 07:29:55 -0700
Subject: For IP: Tracking devices required for hassle-free travel?
Message-ID: <mailman.825.1576007640.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

Dave:

I'm in Manhattan this morning, where -- due to the Federal government's
extremely vague claims of increased terrorist risk -- the police are out in
force during the morning commute. They're diverting traffic from some
normal commuter routes (such as the upper deck of the Queensboro Bridge)
and are requiring vehicles to slow down at checkpoints along others (such
as the approach to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel). We've seen such checkpoints
at Denver International Airport in the past, and have observed that they
appear to have little effect other than slowing traffic and inconveniencing
travelers. What they could possibly expect to be able to detect, during a
second's glance at a moving vehicle, is unclear.

What's particularly disturbing about the measures we saw today, however, is
that authorities appeared to be pulling over, and singling out for more
thorough inspection, vehicles which were not equipped with New York's
electronic "E-Z Pass" -- an electronic device which allows vehicle owners
to be charged automatically for tolls and parking.

Your Interesting People list has, in the past, featured articles describing
the increasingly widespread use of E-Z Pass records to track unfaithful
spouses, employees, etc. We've seen examples of this sort of invasive
"mission creep" before -- in particular, in the increasingly widespread use
of the Social Security number for identification purposes of all kinds. But
this is something new: It appears that now, when the Federal Government
declares an "orange" terror alert, an electronic tracking device has become
a requirement for hassle-free travel.

One can only wonder if this is the start of an era in which one is
detained, harassed, or otherwise branded as a suspected terrorist if at any
time one pays via anonymous cash or is unwilling to have his or her
movements continually traced and recorded.

--Brett Glass


[Just like the lack of a frequent flyer number will get you looked at hard
at airports djf]

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as eugen at leitl.org
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Dec 23 08:54:33 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 08:54:33 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <3FE87349.F71956C1@cdc.gov>

BERLIN  In the first case of its kind in Germany, a right-wing rock
band was deemed a criminal organization and its lead singer was
sentenced Monday to more than three years in prison for lyrics that
venerate Nazism and incite racial hatred.

A Berlin criminal court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Regener to 40
months in prison after a six-month trial that tested the boundaries of
free expression in a nation with strict laws against hate speech.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hate23dec23,0,7847339.story?coll=la-headlines-world




From dave at farber.net  Tue Dec 23 06:34:00 2003
From: dave at farber.net (Dave Farber)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 09:34:00 -0500
Subject: [IP] Tracking devices required for hassle-free
  travel?
Message-ID: <mailman.826.1576007640.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>



From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 23 09:35:39 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 09:35:39 -0800
Subject: I am anti war. You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F914omRXf2LTrp00051563@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <3FE80C6B.21534.7667B9C@localhost>

    --
On 22 Dec 2003 at 22:02, Tyler Durden wrote:
> If you think Ho Chi Minh was a KGB sockpuppet then you really
> don't know anything about Vietnam, China, or East Asian
> history.

He was not a KGB sock puppet.  He was KGB.

The indochinese communist party was run from a desk in Moscow,
and the guy behind that desk in Moscow was one Ho Chi Minh.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     tUqRWDkYAq3CLoQkZ14K0qF1d7QxbWlf6d2ZXjZs
     43Qc8nduD4tJh6uumE28HC7EsKfnNFvnGEYCCH0BO




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 23 12:22:01 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 12:22:01 -0800
Subject: [IP] Tracking devices required for hassle-free travel? (fwd
  from dave@farber.net)
In-Reply-To: <20031223143830.GK32264@leitl.org>
Message-ID: <3FE83369.27974.7FECC33@localhost>

    --
On 23 Dec 2003 at 15:38, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> It appears that now, when the Federal Government declares an
> "orange" terror alert, an electronic tracking device has
> become a requirement for hassle-free travel.
>
> One can only wonder if this is the start of an era in which
> one is detained, harassed, or otherwise branded as a
> suspected terrorist if at any time one pays via anonymous
> cash or is unwilling to have his or her movements continually
> traced and recorded.

During World War II, our newspapers would depict the
totalitarianism of the German regime by showing a German cop
asking someone to present his papers.

When I visited Cuba, Cubans would depict the totalitarianism of
the regime, by showing me their internal passports. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     uXT2oRtzzCpHIBBR5t7KejgeKkWf8KZZDS+tDjyy
     4ehzJxpZaSQPzKPv/y53lOmOIONB3AmRCm8N5oA7O




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 23 14:01:17 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 14:01:17 -0800
Subject: I am anti war. You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F119gJcjYxYCTx00053f2d@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <3FE84AAD.16743.859B01C@localhost>

   --
On 23 Dec 2003 at 15:07, Tyler Durden wrote:
> Ho Chi Min, like Mao, would take guns from anybody in order
> to get the job done

It is mighty hard to take guns from anybody but Stalin when you
are working in Moscow 9 to 5 for Stalin.

>. If that meant wearing a Soviet uniform for 15 minutes

He worked behind a desk in Moscow for over ten years in a very
senior position, which suggests he joined the KGB as a field
agent much earlier.

Kind of odd behavior for a nationalist.

If you are looking for a nationalist leadership, Stalin's
Moscow was not the place to find it.

> That US foreign policy in the far east in in Indo-China
> during most decades of the 20th century was a complete
> disaster was precisely due to the views you seem to hold.

Containment was a catastrophe from the beginning.  The US
government should have done what the communists accused us of
doing, and provided aid to the resistance in East Germany
shortly after Stalin launched the cold war, and aid for the
anti communist resistance in China when the true nature of
Chinese 'land reform" became apparent.

Containment is a strategy that requires one to win or draw
every time, at places and times of the enemies choosing.  The
US army did not win every time, and Vietnam was a bad place and
time.

With roll back, one could lose some, lose most, or even lose
all, and if one launched more wars than the Soviet Union could
afford, would still win the overall struggle.   Indeed,
arguably this was what happened during the second Reagan term.
The Soviets were not losing anywhere -- but could not afford
it. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     Jq9XxD3JlBT5EcJfysZ3Z9MLA4kbYVkDKjq3Wvrf
     4Opm3+oP1ir/TfOFhgXW8XuAzWps8FHp6AicowA0O




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Tue Dec 23 12:07:09 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 15:07:09 -0500
Subject: I am anti war. You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
Message-ID: <BAY7-F119gJcjYxYCTx00053f2d@hotmail.com>

Well, again you've WAY oversimplified things.
Indeed, this oversimplification is curiously identical to US foregin policy 
mistakes.

Ho Chi Min, like Mao, would take guns from anybody in order to get the job 
done. If that meant wearing a Soviet uniform for 15 minutes, then sobeit. 
Don't mistake that for Eastern-European-style Soviet block "governments".

Was Ho Chi Min ultimately a dictator? Sure. A Soviet-style dictator? Well, 
I'd argue only nominally. I'd also argue that our post World War II betrayal 
of Ho had a lot to do with shoving him into the arms of the Soviets, just 
like with Mao. (But in neither case did the association stick.) The 
important notion is that, unlike in Europe, China and Vietnam never had 
anything resembling a democracy or Parliament or anything like that. They 
were still largely fuedal, agrarian societies that weren't really in a 
position to critically evaluate the implications of Soviet-style rulership 
(and in fact they probably viewed it as being merely a non-Monarchic version 
of what they'd always done). BUT...the Soviets were providing guns and money 
and we weren't.

That both countries were really only externally Stalinst for a brief while 
(ie, a couple of decades) is evidenced by the fact that both economies are 
as about, in SOME ways, as free-wheeling and as capitalistic as exists these 
days. Of course, both are still certainly authoritarian and, depending on 
the subject, oppressive, but this has nothing to do with their 
politico-economic stance per se, as is now obvious.

In other words, the moral of this story is that you can't merely graft on a 
western political philosophy--in this case Marxism--to cultures that have 
unbroken traditions dating back to the stone age. It may look 'Marxist' on 
the outside, but internally that transplant ain't going to take root.

That US foreign policy in the far east in in Indo-China during most decades 
of the 20th century was a complete disaster was precisely due to the views 
you seem to hold. It's why we didn't back Mao when even though it was 
obvious BILLIONS of dollars were being siphoned away by Soong Tse-Vung and 
the Chiang regime...it's why we backed Lon Nol to overthrow Sihounouk 
(bringing in the Khmer rouge), and it's why we didn't back Ho even though he 
fought with us against the Japanese.

Had we stood back from our prejudices, respected the soverignity of those 
nations, engaged and offered some guns in order for them to choose their OWN 
government, I'd bet the era of Soviet-style government in both China and 
Vietnam would have been much shorter, and in Cambodia it would have 
CERTAINLY never existed.

In other words, YOU (and people with beliefs just like yours in the US 
government) are responsible for the spread of communism in the far east. Now 
you and your friends (including, I suspect, the guy who signs your paycheck) 
are going to do the same thing in the near east: you're going to force many 
ostensibly neutral nations into the Fundamentalist Islamic camp, because you 
just don't get it, and think we have the right to interfere.

"Well, the Soviets did it and the liberal left said it was great, so that 
makes it right." Forget it. Stop saying this crap and use that brain. 9/11 
sucked enough in this town...we don't need another.

-TD





>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: I am anti war. You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
>Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 09:35:39 -0800
>
>     --
>On 22 Dec 2003 at 22:02, Tyler Durden wrote:
> > If you think Ho Chi Minh was a KGB sockpuppet then you really
> > don't know anything about Vietnam, China, or East Asian
> > history.
>
>He was not a KGB sock puppet.  He was KGB.
>
>The indochinese communist party was run from a desk in Moscow,
>and the guy behind that desk in Moscow was one Ho Chi Minh.
>
>
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      tUqRWDkYAq3CLoQkZ14K0qF1d7QxbWlf6d2ZXjZs
>      43Qc8nduD4tJh6uumE28HC7EsKfnNFvnGEYCCH0BO

_________________________________________________________________
Have fun customizing MSN Messenger  learn how here!  
http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/reach_customize




From eugen at leitl.org  Tue Dec 23 06:38:30 2003
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 15:38:30 +0100
Subject: [IP] Tracking devices required for hassle-free travel? (fwd
  from dave@farber.net)
Message-ID: <20031223143830.GK32264@leitl.org>

----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <dave at farber.net> -----


From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 23 16:40:45 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 16:40:45 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <20031223230728.GL8119@clueinc.net>
References: <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost>
  <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost> <20031223230728.GL8119@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <CFC702F4-35A9-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 23, 2003, at 3:07 PM, Jamie Lawrence wrote:

> On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:
>>
>> James A. Donald;
>>>> You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim.
>
> Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit by attempting
> to credit me with such statements. Your repeated attempts to
> impute opinions to others that they don't actually hold, really, is
> pathetic and boring.

Chomsky lies. You repeat the sentiments of Chomsky and thus you are 
support Chomsky and are thus a liar and a supporter of the KGB High 
Command and a lap dog of the running dogs of the Kremlin.

>
> As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to
> impute motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on
> wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical arguments
> and obscure cause and effect based on international relations in the
> '60s, bundled together with some sort of New American Century twine
> about how if we don't kill all the "ragheads" (your words, not mine),
> we'll be enslaved or worse.

You obviously endorse the views of George McGovern and other pinko(e)s 
who wish to pervert our precious bodily fluids.

>
> As far as your babbling and frothing about how I and many others must 
> be
> Saddam supporters, you're just not making any sense, intentionally
> ignoring what people say, and just generally acting like a fool. If you
> want to do something other than bat at strawmen and denounce the 
> commies
> you keep seeing in your bedsheets, then please, begin to do so. 
> Otherwise...
> Tim nailed it: you're just a statist who found a new god.

Chomsky lies. and you are obviously a sock puppet for the Trilateralist 
Bilderbergers.


--Tim May, who has noticed for a long time that the cadence and even 
the phrasing that James Donald uses is remarkably like the cadence of 
those who used to talk about "the running dogs of capitalism." But he 
uses replacement phrases like "sock puppets of the KGB" instead. Which 
I guess shows that his indoctrination ran deep, though he is now 
ostensibly infiltrating the libertarian fringe.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 23 17:14:22 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 17:14:22 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <20031223230728.GL8119@clueinc.net>
References: <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE877EE.4614.90A74AE@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald
> > > > Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two 
> > > > towers had it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts 
> > > > himself in the corner with the people who are stupid, 
> > > > evil, and losers.

Jamie Lawrence:
> > >  Anyone who babbles such inane false relations is a dope.

James A. Donald;
> > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim.

Jamie Lawrence wrote:
> Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit by 
> attempting to credit me with such statements.

You were telling us that the USG's terrible mistreatment of 
Saddam is a great shame on the US, which whatever it sounds 
like to you, sounds to me very like "poor little victimized 
Saddam"

And you still have not told us your take on the fall of the two 
towers --perhaps like Chomsky you are going to tell us that it 
was a great crime -- which Americans should be terribly ashamed
for forcing Bin Laden to commit? 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     lQDrOCwfKGWJIHLGNcUoPPdowUAnjCfOC3NLJQyO
     4kh4ZBgRszPBjikt7Hmhjyzo4flxrIcSKRcm10cux




From ericm at lne.com  Tue Dec 23 17:42:26 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 17:42:26 -0800
Subject: lne.com CDR to close
Message-ID: <20031223174226.A23853@slack.lne.com>

The lne.com CDR node will stop accepting new
subscriptions on Jan 1 2004, and will stop forwarding
cypherpunks mail on Jan 15.  There are other nodes
currently and hopefully more will announce themselves.

I've learned a lot on the cpunks list over the last
10 years and I'd like to thank some of the people whose
writing I've enjoyed:  Lucky Green, Black Unicorn, 
Declan McCullagh, Tim May, John Gilmore.


Eric




From jal at jal.org  Tue Dec 23 15:07:28 2003
From: jal at jal.org (Jamie Lawrence)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 18:07:28 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
References: <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost>
  <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031223230728.GL8119@clueinc.net>

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> James A. Donald
> > > > > Anyone who wants to argue that the guys in the two 
> > > > > towers had it coming, and poor Saddam is a victim, puts 
> > > > > himself in the corner with the people who are stupid, 
> > > > > evil, and losers.
> 
> Jamie Lawrence:
> > > >  Anyone who babbles such inane false relations is a dope.
> 
> James A. Donald;
> > > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim. 

Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit by attempting
to credit me with such statements. Your repeated attempts to
impute opinions to others that they don't actually hold, really, is
pathetic and boring.

As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to
impute motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on
wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical arguments
and obscure cause and effect based on international relations in the
'60s, bundled together with some sort of New American Century twine
about how if we don't kill all the "ragheads" (your words, not mine),
we'll be enslaved or worse.

As far as your babbling and frothing about how I and many others must be
Saddam supporters, you're just not making any sense, intentionally
ignoring what people say, and just generally acting like a fool. If you 
want to do something other than bat at strawmen and denounce the commies 
you keep seeing in your bedsheets, then please, begin to do so. Otherwise...
Tim nailed it: you're just a statist who found a new god.

-j
 

-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org
"If it was so, it might be; and it were so, it would be; but as it isn't,
it ain't. That's logic."
   - Lewis Carrol




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 23 20:14:34 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 20:14:34 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <20031224024006.GN8119@clueinc.net>
References: <3FE877EE.4614.90A74AE@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald
> > > > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a
> > > > victim.

Jamie Lawrence:
> > > Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit
> > > by attempting to credit me with such statements.

James A. Donald
> > You were telling us that the USG's terrible mistreatment of 
> > Saddam is a great shame on the US, which whatever it sounds 
> > like to you, sounds to me very like "poor little victimized 
> > Saddam"

Jamie Lawrence
> I absolutely said no such thing. You are a liar.

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:18:51 -0500, message ID
20031221161851.GE32589 at clueinc.net You said:
: :	"I do care that the US fails to adhere to
: :	international law."
 implying that US treatment of Saddam violated international
 law.

You also said;
: :	"knocking over a crippled tyrant."
implying oh dear, that terrible big bully USA is kicking a poor
little cripple in his poor little wheelchair, think of the poor
little Saddam falling out of his wheelchair.

These images are not appropriate to someone who claims to
believe what you just claimed to believe, and you were not
saying what you claimed you were saying.

As the thread title says, I am anti war, you support Saddam.

> Getting back to what we were talking about, here's a bit that
> you didn't want to respond to:
>
> As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to impute
> motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on 
> wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical 
> arguments and obscure cause and effect based on international 
> relations in the '60s, bundled together with some sort of New 
> American Century twine about how if we don't kill all the
> "ragheads" (your words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or
> worse.

Liar:

I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other forums
I have regularly argued against claims about Islam or arabs
that would rationalize and justify such an action.

There is ample evidence that the 'anti war' crowd is largely
pro Saddam, evidence in this mailing list, considerably
stronger evidence in the newsgroups, evidence in the streets,
and in the editorials of the BBC and the telegraph, and
evidence in your own utterances.  Let us discuss that.

Dean at least has a legitimate excuse to be unhappy about the
capture of Saddam, since it queers his chances in the election,
but there are an awful lot of other people distressed about the
capture and coming execution of Saddam.  What is your excuse? 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     mOt6pyE37ffUkwFENPIfhLpsNbx8+c/AFA3bkXDp
     471tnWs02/4wMvR80m7OjAktOd7+2SdPyl966jWqZ




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Tue Dec 23 21:10:57 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 21:10:57 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <CFC702F4-35A9-11D8-8D2D-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031223230728.GL8119@clueinc.net>
  <3FE5FB52.28409.A5E7653@localhost> <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
  <20031223230728.GL8119@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031223210819.02987b40@idiom.com>

At 04:40 PM 12/23/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>Chomsky lies. and you are obviously a sock puppet for the Trilateralist 
>Bilderbergers.

It's amazing how many people are building burgers these days
instead of doing technical work, now that sockpuppets.com crashed.
Usually they're round, and Wendy's makes square ones,
but I haven't seen the trilateralist flavor before...




From s.schear at comcast.net  Tue Dec 23 21:16:43 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 21:16:43 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
References: <3FE5F51D.17925.A4639DB@localhost>
  <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031223211455.059f9510@mail.comcast.net>

At 09:20 AM 12/22/2003, James A. Donald wrote:

>The Nuremberg trials were held in Germany by the victors.  Why
>this big desire to do something different this time around?   I
>don't hear anyone except the usual Nazis whining that Nuremberg
>was illegitimate or unfair.

 From a 2001 cypherpunks post to cypherpunks


Basis
Fundamental questions have been raised regarding the legal and moral 
foundation of ad hoc judicial forums, such the War Crimes Tribunal in the 
Hague and Rwandan tribunals.  Both were created by the U.N. Security 
Council though its charter mentions no such authority.  Isn't this little 
more than mob justice carried out by nation states?  Come to think of it 
isn't the purpose of all murder trials "civilized Vengeance" (small c, big V)?

The espoused purpose of these courts is to enforce "norms of justice in the 
international community."  But who constitutes that community and what are 
those norms?  The truth is justice like beauty is in the eye of the 
beholder.  Historically, the notion of what is just has varied considerably 
and often based on economics and religion.  Modern western justice tends to 
ignore these factors and so sets the stage, indirectly, for a trial of 
cultures.  Even within the west these norms seem to be rapidly 
changing.  Can or should such norms be used a basis for international law?

Uniform Application
Like the Nuremberg trials before them, these tribunals appear ripe with 
application of ex post facto "laws" and inattention to 
technicalities.  They often bear little resemblance to the laws and their 
application within the major U.N. member states.  The states have no great 
interest in either bringing a consistent moral basis to their foreign and 
domestic policies or establishing strong extra-national courts which could 
conceivably bring national leaders to account their actions.

All potential violators must be investigated with equal vigilance and 
judged according to a uniform standard or none should be.  Serious charges 
have been leveled against Henry Kissenger yet no criminal indictments have 
been brought or even discussed by the tribunals.  Unless these courts are 
held by world citizens to the motto "Equal Justice Under Law" carved on our 
Supreme Court building then no courts should be convened.  Current 
procedures brand the courts as a propaganda puppet show merely using forms 
of justice to carry out a predetermined policy.

Competition
Despite frequent evidence that economics trump justice, national 
governments continue the charade of representing all the interests of their 
citizens.  Mohammed Douri, Iraq's U.N. ambassador's quote in the article 
put it cynically and succinctly, "Politics is about interests. Politics is 
not about morals."  I believe Mohammed is right.  That these courts aren't 
better is because, like most governmental services, they have no need: 
there is no viable alternative.

If one accepts the American Constitutional notion that all rights are 
originally vested in the sovereign individual and that competition is 
usually the best path to maximizing quality of a service, then a clear path 
extends to a market based solution.  Effective private justice may not 
provide a fairer outcome but it will offer an alternative which will 
challenge the current tribunals and their masters to either abandon 
pretexts that they are impartial, abandon the tribunals altogether or 
improve them.

Any attempt to establish a private global (as opposed to international, as 
in between nations) justice system are likely to be met with harsh 
responses by the major nation states.  They don't want the competition and 
some of their current or former leaders and their lieutenants could be the 
first facing indictments.  So, anonymity of supporters is a prerequisite.

The Internet has shown us that it can be an effective medium for annealing 
those with out of the mainstream political views into formidable groups 
whilst offering effective privacy. Money often buys justice.  So, a means 
for moralists to anonymously fund their interests is needed.  Fortunately, 
a number of effective and popular electronic currencies (e.g., e-gold) with 
adequate privacy features exist.

Every successful social movement requires leadership.  Hopefully someone of 
great character and stature will step forward or emerge and take the reins 
to either bring all to account for their war crime actions (by whatever 
means necessary) or thwart (by whatever means necessary) the ability of the 
U.N. tribunals to operate from their baseless pedestal.

steve


"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout 
society those irresistible forces of uniformity, for passionate cooperation 
with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and 
individuals which lack the larger herd sense ... the nation in wartime 
attains a uniformity of feeling, hierarchy of values culminating at the 
undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced 
through any other agency than war ...."
--- from the first part of an essay titled "The State," left unfinished at 
Randolph Bourne's untimely death in 1918. 




From jal at jal.org  Tue Dec 23 18:40:06 2003
From: jal at jal.org (Jamie Lawrence)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 21:40:06 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE877EE.4614.90A74AE@localhost>
References: <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
  <3FE877EE.4614.90A74AE@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031224024006.GN8119@clueinc.net>

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> James A. Donald;
> > > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a victim.
> 
> Jamie Lawrence wrote:
> > Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit by 
> > attempting to credit me with such statements.
> 
> You were telling us that the USG's terrible mistreatment of 
> Saddam is a great shame on the US, which whatever it sounds 
> like to you, sounds to me very like "poor little victimized 
> Saddam"

I absolutely said no such thing. You are a liar.

Please reference when I said anything about a "poor little vicimized
Saddam", "Terrible mistreatment", or anything even similar. Fact is, you
are full of shit. You are not only full of shit, but you are also
attempting to further your statist goals by attacking people who might
say that you are full of shit.

No matter what I say, you will hear what you will hear. Which reaffirms my 
general conclusion, which is you're not interesting.

> And you still have not told us your take on the fall of the two 
> towers -perhaps like Chomsky you are going to tell us that it 
> was a great crime -- which Americans should be terribly ashamed
> for forcing Bin Laden to commit? 

Simple: the people who want to do things like knock over buildings,
should die. That taxpayer funded operations should kill them is silly,
for both the base reason and the effect.


Getting back to what we were talking about, here's a bit that you didn't
want to respond to:

>As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to
>impute motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on
>wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical arguments
>and obscure cause and effect based on international relations in the
>'60s, bundled together with some sort of New American Century twine
>about how if we don't kill all the "ragheads" (your words, not mine),
>we'll be enslaved or worse.
>
>As far as your babbling and frothing about how I and many others must be
>Saddam supporters, you're just not making any sense, intentionally
>ignoring what people say, and just generally acting like a fool. If you
>want to do something other than bat at strawmen and denounce the commies
>you keep seeing in your bedsheets, then please, begin to do so. Otherwise...
>Tim nailed it: you're just a statist who found a new god.


Are you going to babble, or respond? Read out loud as: "James Donald has
failed to respond". Or perhaps, "James Donald only reponds when he can
score a point."

Really, if you want to talk, then talk.

Terrorism is stopped at home. (Synonyms abound. Freedom fighters have
killed lots of counter-ensurgents.) If you would like to do anything
more than promote war profits, then at least be a patriot. At least
patriots were statists that were interesting.

James: Give up before you really squander your goodwill.

-j




-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 23 21:52:05 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 23:52:05 -0600 (CST)
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312232349470.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> When one sees someone arguing that Americans had 9/11 coming,
> he frequently starts quoting improbable "facts" that originate 
> from Chomsky, and backs them up with one of the nuttier BBC 
> correspondents. 

Fuck Chomsky.  We had it coming.  Years ago.  One cause above *all* others
(although there are dozens):

		Israel.

We have, through our total support of the israeli mass murder state, earned
the retribution of civilized peoples. 

We lost 3k on 9/11.  So what.  How many have we killed through the goddamned
israelis?

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 23 22:04:20 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:04:20 -0600 (CST)
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE5FB52.1981.A5E76B7@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312240003220.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> The world cannot remain half slave and half free.  We must 
> become slaves, or they must become free. 

Since "we" are not "free", you can shove this entire line of 100% bullshit up
your white racist asshole.

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 23 22:12:10 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:12:10 -0600 (CST)
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <kgu9uvkq5qhlgidnl70k1h54qkum06l5di@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312240011400.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
> it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
> should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
> lose, and their way of life perish.

*plonk*

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 24 00:13:13 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:13:13 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312232349470.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <3FE6D342.14305.29F333B@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE8DA19.4396.A89ED43@localhost>

    --
J.A. Terranson
> We had [9/11] coming.  Years ago.  One cause above *all* 
> others (although there are dozens):
>
>   Israel.
>
> We have, through our total support of the israeli mass murder 
> state, earned the retribution of civilized peoples.
>
> We lost 3k on 9/11.  So what.  How many have we killed 
> through the goddamned israelis?

Considerably less than three thousand.  And "we" did not kill 
them.  The Israelis did.  There are lots of states worse than 
Israel -- Iraq for one.

In particular, the people in the two towers did not kill them.

If Palestinians had bombed the white house or congress, that 
might well have been just.  But Bin Laden's boys were children
of wealth, power, and privilege.  Even if they had been bombing 
Washington, they did not have just cause.  And they were not 
bombing Washington, they were bombing the two towers.

The 9/11 terrrorists were not Palestinians.  They were not 
avenging Israeli dispossession of Palestinians, and had they 
been, they would have been hitting the wrong target. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     IiyqcQhV2KJ4R1K+kGbr2aCFhK9VbUPrMe2F3cLJ
     4d1RfbOAFufdjBnTDpLRiSNeujK8Q9celdJUVt1HA




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 23 22:17:11 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:17:11 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031219151216.GA9255@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312240015530.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Justin wrote:

> Jim Dixon (2003-12-19 13:30Z) wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > 
> > > In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.
> > > It does not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be
> > > faithful to this premise, physical location is a non-sequitor.
> > 
> > This is a valid and probably commendable political position.  I do not
> > believe, however, that it reflects current practice in the USA or
> > elsewhere.
> 
> If these rights apply to everyone at all times, how does war work?  War
> is clearly a deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due
> process.  Which of those three are suffering deprivation depends on the
> type of war and particular battle plans.

Precisely.  Under this viewpoint, [initiation of] war does *not* work.  We
have zero moral authority to wage war under the system we pretend to operate
under.

 -- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 23 22:20:16 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:20:16 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Sunny Guantanamo (Re: Speaking of the Geneva convention)
In-Reply-To: <20031219132036.Y11657-100000@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312240017340.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> 
> > > Why does the US military have
> > > to treat them as though they had US constitutional rights?  They are not
> > > citizens or physically present in the United States.
> >
> > In a nutshell, our Constitution *recognizes* universal human rights.  It does
> > not *establish* these rights.  If we are going to be faithful to this
> > premise, physical location is a non-sequitor.
> 
> This is a valid and probably commendable political position.  I do not
> believe, however, that it reflects current practice in the USA or
> elsewhere.
> 
> I say "probably" because it seems likely that adopting this as a practice
> would have very high costs.  How far would you have this go?  Is the US
> government to be obligated to ensure these rights to everyone everywhere?
> Does this mean liberating slaves in China and Saudi Arabia, for example?
> Opening up Russian jails?  Forcing countries everywhere to grant the vote
> to women, to educate children?
> 
> Hmmm.  Does the application of this principle mean that the US government
> is going to require the British government to recognize the right to keep
> and bear arms?  ;-)

The application of the principal domestically does not inherently oblige us
to force the acceptance of our views on others.  Rather, it provides a
framework where others who share this view can come here.  If we are
"correct" in our worldview, we will pick up allies.  If we are not, we will
die.  

Unfortunately, the US does not even *pretend* to follow it's own ethics, so
the whole subject is pure theory on a national level :-(


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 24 00:20:37 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:20:37 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20031224010154.00b80388@pop.earthlink.net>
References: <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE8DBD5.8103.A90B40F@localhost>

    --
Jamie Lawrence
> > > As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to
> > > impute motives to others that you imagine they might
> > > hold, based on wildy improbable chains of cause and
> > > effect in philosophical arguments and obscure cause and
> > > effect based on international relations in the '60s,
> > > bundled together with some sort of New American Century
> > > twine about how if we don't kill all the "ragheads" (your
> > > words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or worse.

James A. Donald
> > Liar:
> >
> > I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other
> > forums I have regularly argued against claims about Islam
> > or arabs that would rationalize and justify such an action.

baudmax23 at earthlink.net Quoting me:
> "...raghead fanatics should lose, and their way of life
> perish."

That was the "raghead fanatic way of life should perish."  Not
"raghead fanatics should perish"

baudmax23 at earthlink.net
> Funny, then, and quite logically inconsistent, that this
> thread is titled "I am antiwar...".  I have not seen anything
> evidencing "antiwar: mentality from you,

I am anti war:  You are pro war.  Just that you are backing the
side in the war that wants to kill me.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     T2Kb+BTaFEQldqTXeeVzZG8CQ4FuhYyYO8eAUhpP
     4BrvcpxPzarsaCgfIQX7MXC8F/2QBKqKTjpJuL5Ia




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Dec 23 22:27:24 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:27:24 -0600 (CST)
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312190957580.11603-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0312240023460.9960-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Sunder wrote:

> That all depends on your definition of sovereign.  After all, "we" put, or
> at least helped, that monster into power.  No different an action than we
> the many times before putting tyrants into control of small, but important
> nations under the guise of "protecting democracy."  

<huge snip>

Whether we put the mofo into power or not is not relevent: the "nation" is a
sovereign, regardless of the current figurehead who purports to represent it.

Note:
I don't *think* that anyone here is arging that Saddam was a nice guy - we're
all just arguing at cross purposes.  Camp A (me) seems to be arguing from a
meta [societal] position, while Camp J is arguing from a personal-dislike
position.  Neither camp is likely to deter the other, since our frames of
reference can never intersect :-(

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens." 

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From baudmax23 at earthlink.net  Tue Dec 23 22:40:51 2003
From: baudmax23 at earthlink.net (baudmax23 at earthlink.net)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 01:40:51 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>
References: <20031224024006.GN8119@clueinc.net>
  <3FE877EE.4614.90A74AE@localhost>
Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20031224010154.00b80388@pop.earthlink.net>

At 08:14 PM 12/23/2003 -0800, CIA-apologist "James A. Donald" 
<jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

>     --
>James A. Donald
> > > > > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a
> > > > > victim.
>
>Jamie Lawrence:
> > > > Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit
> > > > by attempting to credit me with such statements.
>
>James A. Donald
> > > You were telling us that the USG's terrible mistreatment of
> > > Saddam is a great shame on the US, which whatever it sounds
> > > like to you, sounds to me very like "poor little victimized
> > > Saddam"
>
>Jamie Lawrence
> > I absolutely said no such thing. You are a liar.
>
>On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:18:51 -0500, message ID
>20031221161851.GE32589 at clueinc.net You said:
>: :     "I do care that the US fails to adhere to
>: :     international law."
>  implying that US treatment of Saddam violated international
>  law.
>
>You also said;
>: :     "knocking over a crippled tyrant."
>implying oh dear, that terrible big bully USA is kicking a poor
>little cripple in his poor little wheelchair, think of the poor
>little Saddam falling out of his wheelchair.
>
>These images are not appropriate to someone who claims to
>believe what you just claimed to believe, and you were not
>saying what you claimed you were saying.
>
>As the thread title says, I am anti war, you support Saddam.
>
> > Getting back to what we were talking about, here's a bit that
> > you didn't want to respond to:
> >
> > As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to impute
> > motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on
> > wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical
> > arguments and obscure cause and effect based on international
> > relations in the '60s, bundled together with some sort of New
> > American Century twine about how if we don't kill all the
> > "ragheads" (your words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or
> > worse.
>
>Liar:
>
>I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other forums
>I have regularly argued against claims about Islam or arabs
>that would rationalize and justify such an action.

"Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by
visualizing himself as the heir of  King John Sobieski, not the
heir of Saladin.  Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
lose, and their way of life perish."
-James A. Donald, post on this thread, 12/20/2003

"...raghead fanatics should lose, and their way of life perish."

Down the memory hole we go folks.  James is almost as much in denial about 
his lying as GWB.  Confront him as you will, let the  facts not be 
obstacles.  Genocidal monsters unleashed, with the blessing of James, as we 
will not consider the consequences, because "we can do no wrong".  Oh yeah.

>There is ample evidence that the 'anti war' crowd is largely
>pro Saddam, evidence in this mailing list, considerably
>stronger evidence in the newsgroups, evidence in the streets,
>and in the editorials of the BBC and the telegraph, and
>evidence in your own utterances.  Let us discuss that.

Funny, then, and quite logically inconsistent, that this thread is titled 
"I am antiwar...".  I have not seen anything evidencing "antiwar: mentality 
from you, as you just justify it as all well, fine and dandy.  Oh yeah, if 
WE kill 10,00o Iraqis, that's worth just 1 measly disheveled 
Saddam.  You've got some funny math goin', boy.  That's not even counting 
the Billions$$ of US $DEBT we cannot afford now.

>Dean at least has a legitimate excuse to be unhappy about the
>capture of Saddam, since it queers his chances in the election,
>but there are an awful lot of other people distressed about the
>capture and coming execution of Saddam.  What is your excuse?

Who gives a flying F*CK about Dean, about Commies, about Capitalists, et 
al.  Despite repeated and voluminous, historically verifiable and 
irrefutable evidence to the contrary, you refuse to even acknowledge there 
is ANY base grievance against US foreign policy, which has led to the 
current state of affairs (so-called "war on terror", blah blah blah).  In 
your rather logically and cerebrally challenged world view, everything else 
is nothing but a "sock-puppet KGB conspiracy" against the US/CIA (which is 
giving the KGB considerably more credit I'm sure, then they deserve, if 
they were half as inept and incompetent as the CIA during the so-called 
"cold war period construct").

You see, all I care about is:  I am not going to pay the bill for this 
inane shit (insane policy), and I would not give my life for it.  I would 
not ALLOW any youth under my discretion to be seduced by these lies to lay 
down their life for this SHIT.  This is not freedom ,or liberty, or 
liberation.  You, James A Donald, are an armchair pussy Neo-con, who 
advocates others putting their lives and resources on the line for this 
utter CRAP and HYPOCRISY, and yet would not do so yourself (you are 
probably physically UNFIT for such military duty yourself).  Intellectual, 
moral, and physical WIMPS as yourself are unfit to ask, much less demand 
others suffer the sacrifice to satisfy your self delusions and 
self-aggrandizement.  People just like YOU DESERVE to die in RETALIATORY 
strikes to such MAD foreign policy.  My only regret is that such attacks 
will not specifically target hard headed morons like you.

And I for sure, would not weap a tear, because scum like you DESERVE such 
an end, in fact, DEMAND it it.  That's not just an ad hominem, mind 
you.  You don't respond to reason, you LIE and OBFUSCATE.  You deserve your 
just fruits.  Unfortunately, the actions and policies you advocate will 
inevitably and inexorably lead to the deaths of many innocents who do not 
share your limited views.  But it will also end the tyranny of the 
ignorant, and the point is, if that is the case, then so be it.  Systems 
seek equilibrium.

Justice will be served, wisdom will prevail.  That "it all" will have a 
higher cost than need be, is due to the ignorant likes of you.  And don't 
think anyone will cry when the likes of you are gone, any more than Saddam, 
any more than the scum who hung at Nuremburg.  Because you are really no 
different, exercising your tyranny behind the masses, than anything he ever 
did.  What you advocate, is murder, coercion, torture (in the name of the 
almighty state).  And people like you, deserve just the same as Saddam, 
because, at /ROOT, YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT.  Screaming for "cruise missile 
strikes" from a 1,000 miles away, even whilst other unfortunate suckers are 
designated to push buttons you wouldn't even have the balls to push 
yourself.  What a man!  Oh yeah!  What a MAN!

-Max

And I don't usually get quite this MAD, but such ignorance, such blindness, 
is the reason we are in this mess.  I'd hang you myself, if but given the 
rope and the chance.  If it could save ANOTHER 3,000 innocent lives, it'd 
be well worth it!

>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      mOt6pyE37ffUkwFENPIfhLpsNbx8+c/AFA3bkXDp
>      471tnWs02/4wMvR80m7OjAktOd7+2SdPyl966jWqZ

------------------------------------------------
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should 
have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence 
from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own 
government.

--George Washington
-------------------------------------------------
Smash The State! mailing list home
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/smashthestate

Extropian Principles... the Future, Now
http://www.extropy.org/principles.htm
---




From hdiwan at mac.com  Wed Dec 24 03:32:07 2003
From: hdiwan at mac.com (Hasan Diwan)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 03:32:07 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
Message-ID: <5115042.1072265527508.JavaMail.hdiwan@mac.com>

On Wednesday, December 24, 2003, at 00:20AM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

>
>    --
>Jamie Lawrence
>> > > As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to
>> > > impute motives to others that you imagine they might
>> > > hold, based on wildy improbable chains of cause and
>> > > effect in philosophical arguments and obscure cause and
>> > > effect based on international relations in the '60s,
>> > > bundled together with some sort of New American Century
>> > > twine about how if we don't kill all the "ragheads" (your
>> > > words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or worse.
>
>James A. Donald
>> > Liar:
>> >
>> > I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other
>> > forums I have regularly argued against claims about Islam
>> > or arabs that would rationalize and justify such an action.
Gentlemen:
     Fanatics of any persuasion attack not our people, but the very freedoms and tolerance we value. This sort of line of rhetoric illustrates to me that they have won. Let us agree to disagree, but disagree in a civil manner. Thank you very much.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 24 05:47:18 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 05:47:18 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20031224072723.00bdd200@pop.earthlink.net>
References: <3FE8DBD5.8103.A90B40F@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE92866.26539.BBBC78D@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald
> > That was the "raghead fanatic way of life should perish." 
> > Not "raghead fanatics should perish"

baudmax23 at earthlink.net
> Oh some distinction...

The difference between killing people and setting them free 
doubtless seems trivial to the fans of slavery and terror.

>. and what if they do not lay down in the dust?

More likely they will dance in the streets.  Observe what 
happened in Afghanistan.

James A. Donald
> > I am anti war:  You are pro war.  Just that you are backing 
> > the side in the war that wants to kill me.

baudmax23 at earthlink.net
> If it was up to me, we wouldn't be in this war,

Probably we would not be in the Iraq war, but the fans of 
tyranny, yourself among them, would still be seeking to enslave 
us, which leads to events such as 9/11

It really is that they hate us for our (relative) freedom.   I 
can see that on this list with all the big salt tears wept for 
poor little victimized Saddam, and the outraged indignation 
that various third worlders have been cruelly deprived of the 
wonderful socialism so generously bestowed upon them by various 
bloodstained, but nonetheless benevolent and popular,
dictators. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     GE4Hj5Erjex0vf6z5ksoK284TV55SBe4e0zBbBpC
     4yDNRBFArA+1mx7N/jkII87cHZCBxECiA6ZqOeec/




From baudmax23 at earthlink.net  Wed Dec 24 04:39:31 2003
From: baudmax23 at earthlink.net (baudmax23 at earthlink.net)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 07:39:31 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE8DBD5.8103.A90B40F@localhost>
References: <5.0.2.1.2.20031224010154.00b80388@pop.earthlink.net>
  <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>
Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20031224072723.00bdd200@pop.earthlink.net>

At 12:20 AM 12/24/2003 -0800, "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

>     --
>Jamie Lawrence
> > > > As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to
> > > > impute motives to others that you imagine they might
> > > > hold, based on wildy improbable chains of cause and
> > > > effect in philosophical arguments and obscure cause and
> > > > effect based on international relations in the '60s,
> > > > bundled together with some sort of New American Century
> > > > twine about how if we don't kill all the "ragheads" (your
> > > > words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or worse.
>
>James A. Donald
> > > Liar:
> > >
> > > I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other
> > > forums I have regularly argued against claims about Islam
> > > or arabs that would rationalize and justify such an action.
>
>baudmax23 at earthlink.net Quoting me:
> > "...raghead fanatics should lose, and their way of life
> > perish."
>
>That was the "raghead fanatic way of life should perish."  Not
>"raghead fanatics should perish"

Oh some distinction.... and what if they do not lay down in the dust and 
relinquish their "way of life" as you demand, then you will have no choice 
but to make them perish?  The James A. Donald definition of 
"freedom":  relinquish your way of life, or else....?


>baudmax23 at earthlink.net
> > Funny, then, and quite logically inconsistent, that this
> > thread is titled "I am antiwar...".  I have not seen anything
> > evidencing "antiwar: mentality from you,
>
>I am anti war:  You are pro war.  Just that you are backing the
>side in the war that wants to kill me.

If it was up to me, we wouldn't be in this war, we'd have spent it on 
alternative energy instead.  I think with $150+ Billion we'd have made 
progress on that front, thereby negating any "need" we have for Mideast oil.

The mentality of people like you endangers us ALL, both here in "the 
homeland" as well as innocents abroad.  That is the real message here which 
you have refused to hear, instead advocating continuation of the policies 
which have led us here.  Policies based on well established and documented 
history of which you are both ignorant and in denial of.

I hope you feel safer this Christmas, with your Code Orange.  Oh yeah, but 
how can that be, I mean, aren't we safer now that that evil dictator Saddam 
has been captured?!  hah hah hah sure we are.  And all along we should have 
been focusing on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who are the real threats.  Oh well, 
what's $150B worth of military and intelligence resources...

-Max


>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      T2Kb+BTaFEQldqTXeeVzZG8CQ4FuhYyYO8eAUhpP
>      4BrvcpxPzarsaCgfIQX7MXC8F/2QBKqKTjpJuL5Ia

------------------------------------------------
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should 
have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence 
from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own 
government.

--George Washington
-------------------------------------------------
Smash The State! mailing list home
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/smashthestate

Extropian Principles... the Future, Now
http://www.extropy.org/principles.htm
---




From jal at jal.org  Wed Dec 24 09:11:08 2003
From: jal at jal.org (Jamie Lawrence)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 12:11:08 -0500
Subject: Merry Nondenominational Cooking Event.
In-Reply-To: <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>
References: <3FE877EE.4614.90A74AE@localhost>
  <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>
Message-ID: <20031224171108.GS8119@clueinc.net>

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:18:51 -0500, message ID
> 20031221161851.GE32589 at clueinc.net You said:
> : :	"I do care that the US fails to adhere to
> : :	international law."
>  implying that US treatment of Saddam violated international
>  law.
> 
> You also said;
> : :	"knocking over a crippled tyrant."
> implying oh dear, that terrible big bully USA is kicking a poor
> little cripple in his poor little wheelchair, think of the poor
> little Saddam falling out of his wheelchair.
> 
> These images are not appropriate to someone who claims to
> believe what you just claimed to believe, and you were not
> saying what you claimed you were saying.
> 
> As the thread title says, I am anti war, you support Saddam.

James, you are simply full of shit. I don't believe you're incapable of
seeing the difference between calling Saddam a crippled tyrant and
"support[ing] Saddam". I do believe you're willfully attempting to twist
other people's words, and not even doing a good job of it. "A equals A" 
reasoning is for high school. If you look at the words I typed, instead
of your fantasy-land model of reality, you might notice that you're
making a fool of yourself.
 
> I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other forums
> I have regularly argued against claims about Islam or arabs
> that would rationalize and justify such an action.

I have no idea what you've said in other forums. I merely pointed
out what you have said here.

> There is ample evidence that the 'anti war' crowd is largely
> pro Saddam, evidence in this mailing list, considerably
> stronger evidence in the newsgroups, evidence in the streets,
> and in the editorials of the BBC and the telegraph, and
> evidence in your own utterances.  Let us discuss that.

There is ample evidence that you fail to argue about what people have 
_actually said_, impute motive and behaviour where there is none, 
and point to a grand Ellsworth Toohey-ish conspiracy that needs to be 
fought, improbably enough, by a nation-state. 

> Dean at least has a legitimate excuse to be unhappy about the
> capture of Saddam, since it queers his chances in the election,
> but there are an awful lot of other people distressed about the
> capture and coming execution of Saddam.  What is your excuse? 

As I said, you're being boring. I suppose someone had to step up to the
task of being the resident Choate.

I have some cooking to do. Happy holidays, all!

-j


-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org
A priest, a bear, and a programmer walked into a bar. And the 
bartender said, "What is this, a joke?"




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 24 09:19:51 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 12:19:51 -0500
Subject: Saddam is evil, therefore we have the right to feed him to our
  pigs
Message-ID: <BAY7-F716rpwngptFRH00037c0b@hotmail.com>

James Donald wrote...

"There is ample evidence that the 'anti war' crowd is largely
pro Saddam"

This is a critical point, and it's one you fail to recognize over and over 
again.

Let me tell you a little story. There's this guy that lives down the 
block...I think he may be a Satanist or something, but I'm not quite sure. I 
know he's into some wierd stuff...I saw his wife with a black eye once, and 
his kids don't look so happy or healthy.

One day at the supermarket his cart crashed into mine. It may have been an 
accident, but I'm not quite sure. But the guy gave me an eye, so he's 
clearer a threat to me.

So what I did the other day was I broke into the guy's house...it was late 
and I took him by surpise so when he was coming down the stairs I shot him. 
His older son came at me with a baseball bat, so I had to shoot him too. 
When I finally got to the wife the ungrateful bitch started crying and 
begged me not to kill her..."DAMMIT, I'M HERE TO SAVE YOU YOU STUPID BITCH" 
I said to her, but she didn't seem to feel any better.

Actually, I'm typing this message from her house, because if I leave the 
cops'll get me and maybe some more of the guy's relatives will come, and 
then we'll be right back where we started. I've got no plans to leave here 
for at least 2 to 3 years. Funny thing is, though, every now and then when 
I'm coming down the stairs there will be tacks or nails or something at the 
bottom. I'm starting to get the idea they don't want me here!

Sometimes I wonder if I should have done this, but now that I look around 
this guy's house I can see all sorts of whips and books on Satanism. So it 
turns out I was right! I guess that means I did the right thing.

-TD


>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>To: cypherpunks at algebra.com
>Subject: Re: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
>Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 20:14:34 -0800
>
>     --
>James A. Donald
> > > > > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a
> > > > > victim.
>
>Jamie Lawrence:
> > > > Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit
> > > > by attempting to credit me with such statements.
>
>James A. Donald
> > > You were telling us that the USG's terrible mistreatment of
> > > Saddam is a great shame on the US, which whatever it sounds
> > > like to you, sounds to me very like "poor little victimized
> > > Saddam"
>
>Jamie Lawrence
> > I absolutely said no such thing. You are a liar.
>
>On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:18:51 -0500, message ID
>20031221161851.GE32589 at clueinc.net You said:
>: :	"I do care that the US fails to adhere to
>: :	international law."
>  implying that US treatment of Saddam violated international
>  law.
>
>You also said;
>: :	"knocking over a crippled tyrant."
>implying oh dear, that terrible big bully USA is kicking a poor
>little cripple in his poor little wheelchair, think of the poor
>little Saddam falling out of his wheelchair.
>
>These images are not appropriate to someone who claims to
>believe what you just claimed to believe, and you were not
>saying what you claimed you were saying.
>
>As the thread title says, I am anti war, you support Saddam.
>
> > Getting back to what we were talking about, here's a bit that
> > you didn't want to respond to:
> >
> > As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to impute
> > motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on
> > wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical
> > arguments and obscure cause and effect based on international
> > relations in the '60s, bundled together with some sort of New
> > American Century twine about how if we don't kill all the
> > "ragheads" (your words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or
> > worse.
>
>Liar:
>
>I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other forums
>I have regularly argued against claims about Islam or arabs
>that would rationalize and justify such an action.
>
>There is ample evidence that the 'anti war' crowd is largely
>pro Saddam, evidence in this mailing list, considerably
>stronger evidence in the newsgroups, evidence in the streets,
>and in the editorials of the BBC and the telegraph, and
>evidence in your own utterances.  Let us discuss that.
>
>Dean at least has a legitimate excuse to be unhappy about the
>capture of Saddam, since it queers his chances in the election,
>but there are an awful lot of other people distressed about the
>capture and coming execution of Saddam.  What is your excuse?
>
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      mOt6pyE37ffUkwFENPIfhLpsNbx8+c/AFA3bkXDp
>      471tnWs02/4wMvR80m7OjAktOd7+2SdPyl966jWqZ

_________________________________________________________________
Enjoy a special introductory offer for dial-up Internet access  limited 
time only! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 24 09:25:34 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 12:25:34 -0500
Subject: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
In-Reply-To: <3FE92866.26539.BBBC78D@localhost>
References: <3FE8DBD5.8103.A90B40F@localhost>
  <3FE92866.26539.BBBC78D@localhost>
Message-ID: <2E841DC8-3636-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> It really is that they hate us for our (relative) freedom.

Believe it or not, but most people do not care about what way you live. 
The only way they know about your "freedom" by watching american TV. So 
blame it on yourself.


>  I
> can see that on this list with all the big salt tears wept for
> poor little victimized Saddam, and the outraged indignation
> that various third worlders have been cruelly deprived of the
> wonderful socialism so generously bestowed upon them by various
> bloodstained, but nonetheless benevolent and popular,
> dictators.
>

Sponsored either by the US or the ones you love to hate: USSR (who has 
perished over 10 years ago).

M.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+nMHGlCnxcrW2uuEQLpdgCgmrPkAHDpDioke2TetvDQ2o1HNVQAnRWQ
AKAreSANbksHclFiPIGDk0mF
=k07r
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 24 13:08:47 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 13:08:47 -0800
Subject: Merry Nondenominational Cooking Event.
In-Reply-To: <20031224171108.GS8119@clueinc.net>
References: <3FE8A22A.7166.9AF6D66@localhost>
Message-ID: <3FE98FDF.26546.D4FFA5B@localhost>

    --
James A. Donald:
> > You said:
> > : :	"I do care that the US fails to adhere to 
> > : :	international law."
> >  implying that US treatment of Saddam violated 
> >  international law.
> >
> > You also said;
> > : :	"knocking over a crippled tyrant."
> > implying oh dear, that terrible big bully USA is kicking a 
> > poor little cripple in his poor little wheelchair, think of 
> > the poor little Saddam falling out of his wheelchair.
> >
> > These images are not appropriate to someone who claims to 
> > believe what you just claimed to believe, and you were not 
> > saying what you claimed you were saying.

Jamie Lawrence
> James, you are simply full of shit. I don't believe you're 
> incapable of seeing the difference between calling Saddam a 
> crippled tyrant and "support[ing] Saddam". I do believe 
> you're willfully attempting to twist other people's words

You were already in a frenzy of rage before I accused you of 
weeping big salt tears for poor little victimized Saddam.

My position on the Vietnam and Iraq wars is the same as that as 
the mainstream left of the Democratic party (or at least the 
same as the position they will be holding once the primaries 
are over), yet you reacted as if I had called for everyone like 
you to be gassed.

The position you purport to hold is almost indistinguishable 
from my own and that of the Democrat party mainstream -- but 
that is not the position implied by your arguments, nor does it 
correspond to the emotions you express.   Sometimes the 
position nominally taken by leading Democrats fail to 
correspond to the arguments and emotions they express also -- 
Dean has caught some flack for that -- but the discrepancy in 
your case has is far more visible than that of Dean,    You 
will not catch Dean weeping big salt tears for Saddam, nor see 
him deeply shocked by the prospect that Saddam will be tried by 
his victims. and Dean has a legitimate excuse for his
comparativelyt mild hypocrisy -- he is upset about the the
impact of the coming execution of Saddam on his election
campaign, not about the impact on the prospects for a world of
slavery and fear. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     kTerUTT9UTTp482foMMnkDUC/YqrMZtRcywtamEc
     45Wu1KrbIBAMYIiC58VZi7gmTa4oJ9gneUTWvxK5e




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 24 10:13:38 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 13:13:38 -0500
Subject: I am anti war. You lot support Saddam
Message-ID: <BAY7-F35AwxXSXI3acH00004c48@hotmail.com>

"And I don't usually get quite this MAD, but such ignorance, such blindness, 
is the reason we are in this mess. "

I'm not so sure Mr Donald is ignorant OR blind. He seems to be something 
I've never seen in real life before: Completely aligned with US foreign 
policy, past/present/future.

I'm starting to think that Mr Donald's contributions to Cypherpunks may be 
part of his job description.

-TD


>From: baudmax23 at earthlink.net
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: I am anti war.  You lot support Saddam
>Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 01:40:51 -0500
>
>At 08:14 PM 12/23/2003 -0800, CIA-apologist "James A. Donald" 
><jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
>
>>     --
>>James A. Donald
>> > > > > You have just told us that poor little Saddam is a
>> > > > > victim.
>>
>>Jamie Lawrence:
>> > > > Incorrect. I said no such thing, and you're being a twit
>> > > > by attempting to credit me with such statements.
>>
>>James A. Donald
>> > > You were telling us that the USG's terrible mistreatment of
>> > > Saddam is a great shame on the US, which whatever it sounds
>> > > like to you, sounds to me very like "poor little victimized
>> > > Saddam"
>>
>>Jamie Lawrence
>> > I absolutely said no such thing. You are a liar.
>>
>>On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:18:51 -0500, message ID
>>20031221161851.GE32589 at clueinc.net You said:
>>: :     "I do care that the US fails to adhere to
>>: :     international law."
>>  implying that US treatment of Saddam violated international
>>  law.
>>
>>You also said;
>>: :     "knocking over a crippled tyrant."
>>implying oh dear, that terrible big bully USA is kicking a poor
>>little cripple in his poor little wheelchair, think of the poor
>>little Saddam falling out of his wheelchair.
>>
>>These images are not appropriate to someone who claims to
>>believe what you just claimed to believe, and you were not
>>saying what you claimed you were saying.
>>
>>As the thread title says, I am anti war, you support Saddam.
>>
>> > Getting back to what we were talking about, here's a bit that
>> > you didn't want to respond to:
>> >
>> > As it stands, you seem only capable of attempting to impute
>> > motives to others that you imagine they might hold, based on
>> > wildy improbable chains of cause and effect in philosophical
>> > arguments and obscure cause and effect based on international
>> > relations in the '60s, bundled together with some sort of New
>> > American Century twine about how if we don't kill all the
>> > "ragheads" (your words, not mine), we'll be enslaved or
>> > worse.
>>
>>Liar:
>>
>>I did not suggest killing all the ragheads, and in other forums
>>I have regularly argued against claims about Islam or arabs
>>that would rationalize and justify such an action.
>
>"Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by
>visualizing himself as the heir of  King John Sobieski, not the
>heir of Saladin.  Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose
>it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life
>should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should
>lose, and their way of life perish."
>-James A. Donald, post on this thread, 12/20/2003
>
>"...raghead fanatics should lose, and their way of life perish."
>
>Down the memory hole we go folks.  James is almost as much in denial about 
>his lying as GWB.  Confront him as you will, let the  facts not be 
>obstacles.  Genocidal monsters unleashed, with the blessing of James, as we 
>will not consider the consequences, because "we can do no wrong".  Oh yeah.
>
>>There is ample evidence that the 'anti war' crowd is largely
>>pro Saddam, evidence in this mailing list, considerably
>>stronger evidence in the newsgroups, evidence in the streets,
>>and in the editorials of the BBC and the telegraph, and
>>evidence in your own utterances.  Let us discuss that.
>
>Funny, then, and quite logically inconsistent, that this thread is titled 
>"I am antiwar...".  I have not seen anything evidencing "antiwar: mentality 
>from you, as you just justify it as all well, fine and dandy.  Oh yeah, if 
>WE kill 10,00o Iraqis, that's worth just 1 measly disheveled Saddam.  
>You've got some funny math goin', boy.  That's not even counting the 
>Billions$$ of US $DEBT we cannot afford now.
>
>>Dean at least has a legitimate excuse to be unhappy about the
>>capture of Saddam, since it queers his chances in the election,
>>but there are an awful lot of other people distressed about the
>>capture and coming execution of Saddam.  What is your excuse?
>
>Who gives a flying F*CK about Dean, about Commies, about Capitalists, et 
>al.  Despite repeated and voluminous, historically verifiable and 
>irrefutable evidence to the contrary, you refuse to even acknowledge there 
>is ANY base grievance against US foreign policy, which has led to the 
>current state of affairs (so-called "war on terror", blah blah blah).  In 
>your rather logically and cerebrally challenged world view, everything else 
>is nothing but a "sock-puppet KGB conspiracy" against the US/CIA (which is 
>giving the KGB considerably more credit I'm sure, then they deserve, if 
>they were half as inept and incompetent as the CIA during the so-called 
>"cold war period construct").
>
>You see, all I care about is:  I am not going to pay the bill for this 
>inane shit (insane policy), and I would not give my life for it.  I would 
>not ALLOW any youth under my discretion to be seduced by these lies to lay 
>down their life for this SHIT.  This is not freedom ,or liberty, or 
>liberation.  You, James A Donald, are an armchair pussy Neo-con, who 
>advocates others putting their lives and resources on the line for this 
>utter CRAP and HYPOCRISY, and yet would not do so yourself (you are 
>probably physically UNFIT for such military duty yourself).  Intellectual, 
>moral, and physical WIMPS as yourself are unfit to ask, much less demand 
>others suffer the sacrifice to satisfy your self delusions and 
>self-aggrandizement.  People just like YOU DESERVE to die in RETALIATORY 
>strikes to such MAD foreign policy.  My only regret is that such attacks 
>will not specifically target hard headed morons like you.
>
>And I for sure, would not weap a tear, because scum like you DESERVE such 
>an end, in fact, DEMAND it it.  That's not just an ad hominem, mind you.  
>You don't respond to reason, you LIE and OBFUSCATE.  You deserve your just 
>fruits.  Unfortunately, the actions and policies you advocate will 
>inevitably and inexorably lead to the deaths of many innocents who do not 
>share your limited views.  But it will also end the tyranny of the 
>ignorant, and the point is, if that is the case, then so be it.  Systems 
>seek equilibrium.
>
>Justice will be served, wisdom will prevail.  That "it all" will have a 
>higher cost than need be, is due to the ignorant likes of you.  And don't 
>think anyone will cry when the likes of you are gone, any more than Saddam, 
>any more than the scum who hung at Nuremburg.  Because you are really no 
>different, exercising your tyranny behind the masses, than anything he ever 
>did.  What you advocate, is murder, coercion, torture (in the name of the 
>almighty state).  And people like you, deserve just the same as Saddam, 
>because, at /ROOT, YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT.  Screaming for "cruise missile 
>strikes" from a 1,000 miles away, even whilst other unfortunate suckers are 
>designated to push buttons you wouldn't even have the balls to push 
>yourself.  What a man!  Oh yeah!  What a MAN!
>
>-Max
>
>And I don't usually get quite this MAD, but such ignorance, such blindness, 
>is the reason we are in this mess.  I'd hang you myself, if but given the 
>rope and the chance.  If it could save ANOTHER 3,000 innocent lives, it'd 
>be well worth it!
>
>>     --digsig
>>          James A. Donald
>>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>>      mOt6pyE37ffUkwFENPIfhLpsNbx8+c/AFA3bkXDp
>>      471tnWs02/4wMvR80m7OjAktOd7+2SdPyl966jWqZ
>
>------------------------------------------------
>A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should 
>have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence 
>from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own 
>government.
>
>--George Washington
>-------------------------------------------------
>Smash The State! mailing list home
>http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/smashthestate
>
>Extropian Principles... the Future, Now
>http://www.extropy.org/principles.htm
>---

_________________________________________________________________
Have fun customizing MSN Messenger  learn how here!  
http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/reach_customize




From cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com  Wed Dec 24 19:52:56 2003
From: cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com (cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com)
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 22:52:56 -0500
Subject: MAOLD terrorist group strikes Toronto
Message-ID: <fnnkuvof0v3vrqtg3vjofop9ovj3v1r16t@4ax.com>

(Oh wait, terrorist by USA PATRIOT Act Standards.)



SUSPECTS RESPONSIBLE FOR TORCHING CHRISTMAS DECORATONS ARRESTED

http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/newsreleases/release.php?id=4869

32 Division
416-808-3236

Toronto Police have been investigating 12 reported cases of arson, which
occurred in the Willowdale area between November 10 and December 13, 2003. 

In each occurrence, suspects deliberately set afire numerous front yard holiday
displays containing scarecrows, reindeer, wreaths or bales of straw. 

In one instance the suspects left a note warning the homeowner to stop using
flammable outdoor displays and stick to indoor decorations. 

The note was signed "M.A.O.L.D. The movement against outdoor lawn decorations,
and Bite the Curb".

On Sunday December 21st, 2003 officers on patrol in the Willowdale neighbourhood
investigated a number of youths walking along the street. 

At that time, one of the youths was found to be in possession of a can of fuel,
a hose, gloves and a mask. 

On Tuesday December 23rd, 2003 as a result of further investigation, officersf
rom No. 32 Division arrested and charged three 15-year-old boys in relation to
the arsons. 

In total, the youths face a total of eight counts of arson causing damage to
property. They are scheduled to appear in court in January of 2004. 

Anyone having information regarding this investigation is asked to contact
police at 416-808-3200 or Crime Stoppers at 416-222-TIPS(8477).




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Wed Dec 24 17:15:12 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Thu, 25 Dec 2003 14:15:12 +1300
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
Message-ID: <200312250115.hBP1FCc21309@cs.auckland.ac.nz>

Nomen Nescio <nobody at dizum.com> writes:

>After WWI the "winners" humiliated the loosers badly. This is one of the main
>reasons Hitler came to power and got support from the Germans for the
>aggressions that started the war. He managed to use these feelings of being
>treated as dogs and paying to heavy for the first war. Also they were very
>humiliated by the fact that France then occupied part of western Germany.
>
>After WWII the "winners" had learned their lesson from WWI pretty well. Now
>they did not humilate the people of Germany like after the first war. We got
>the Mar shal plan and so on.

Unfortunately after GulfWarII the "winners" hadn't learned their lessons from
WWII very well.  At the end of the war, despite the bombing campaigns, Germany
had a vaguely functional administration and (heavily rationed) food, coal,
electricity, etc were available.  The Allies systematically dismantled all of
that, both through apathy (no real planning beyond "Move in and occupy the
place") and their zeal to rebuild the country in their own image.  For
example, they prevented anyone who'd ever been a Nazi party member from doing
their job.  Well the problem was that to do almost anything, you had to be a
party member, so they instantly stopped all civil administration,
engineering/maintenance work, teachers, the judicial system, the police, you
couldn't even deliver the mail without being a party member (since they were
government employees).

Virtually every male over the age of about 16 had been in the military and had
experience with weapons.  So you now had a mass of unemployed ex-military who
desperately wanted food and clothing, and had access to an almost infinite
supply of weaponry.  In addition Germany after the war attracted what one of
the allied leaders (Eisenhower?) described as "the scum of Europe", eager to
make a quick buck (in Iraq it's folks eager to beat up the infidels).  This
lead to sizeable pitched battles between the armed gangs and the occupying
military, with the military frequently being outgunned by the gangs.

Substitute Germany -> Iraq and profit / food -> religion /nationalism and the
same situation exists today.

Peter.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Dec 26 09:13:23 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 09:13:23 -0800
Subject: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3324883.stm

Adam Back is part of this team, I think.

Similar approach to Camram/hahscash.  Memory-based approaches have been 
discussed.  Why hasn't Camram explored them?

steve

BTW, Penny Black stamp was only used briefly.  It was the Penny Red which 
was used for decades. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Fri Dec 26 09:37:22 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 09:37:22 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3FE87349.F71956C1@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <200312261737.hBQHbMo0001521@artifact.psychedelic.net>

> A Berlin criminal court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Regener to 40
> months in prison after a six-month trial that tested the boundaries of
> free expression in a nation with strict laws against hate speech.

Of course, that should be "a nation with strict laws against free speech."

Crying "Hate Speech" is the last resort of people who cannot debate what 
is being said and convince anyone.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 26 11:52:14 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 14:52:14 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <200312261737.hBQHbMo0001521@artifact.psychedelic.net>
References: <200312261737.hBQHbMo0001521@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <006EC3F6-37DD-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 26-Dec-03, at 12:37 PM, Eric Cordian wrote:

>> A Berlin criminal court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Regener to 40
>> months in prison after a six-month trial that tested the boundaries of
>> free expression in a nation with strict laws against hate speech.
>
> Of course, that should be "a nation with strict laws against free 
> speech."
>
> Crying "Hate Speech" is the last resort of people who cannot debate 
> what
> is being said and convince anyone.
>
Being from Germany I would like to detest that statement.

The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy 
task as you can see in a six month trial.

Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well. And I would like 
to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and 
Britain).

There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises, but let's be 
serious here for a moment: The US is not as free as people like to 
think.

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+yRcmlCnxcrW2uuEQKDZACfc63XujDFQOJ+bcyGq1xtQc8l1yYAoNd1
vcmRWdOkxly/219fuaNHB/kL
=lA06
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From mv at cdc.gov  Fri Dec 26 15:16:37 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 15:16:37 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>

At 02:52 PM 12/26/03 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
>On 26-Dec-03, at 12:37 PM, Eric Cordian wrote:
>
>>> A Berlin criminal court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Regener to 40
>>> months in prison after a six-month trial that tested the boundaries
of
>>> free expression in a nation with strict laws against hate speech.
>>
>> Of course, that should be "a nation with strict laws against free
>> speech."
>>
>> Crying "Hate Speech" is the last resort of people who cannot debate
>> what
>> is being said and convince anyone.
>>

>The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy
>task as you can see in a six month trial.

Germany, or any State that  restricts words or thought, needs a regime
change
with extreme prejudice.

>Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.

Are there exceptions for Buddhists and Amerinds?  Moron.

And I would like
>to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and
>Britain).

If so, then Germany should have the balls to discover freedom --adopt
the US Constitution for instance.  The US can't counter such a move.

>There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises,

Not in Germany, obviously.  In the US, yes.  Our founders trusted
the Volk; your conquerors (eg the US) let your shepards (eg your govt)
neuter the sheep (ie you).

Fuck censors dead.

Freedom is only tested when its unconfortable, baby.

Maybe you will find this list too uncomfortable, Kalus.




From dahonig at cox.net  Fri Dec 26 15:20:20 2003
From: dahonig at cox.net (David Honig)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 15:20:20 -0800
Subject: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage
  project
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.20031226152020.01fa0100@pop.west.cox.net>

At 09:13 AM 12/26/03 -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3324883.stm
>

>>Mr Wobber and his group calculated that if there are 80,000
seconds in a day, a computational "price" of a 10-second levy
would mean spammers would only be able to send about 8,000
messages a day, at most. 

"Spammers are sending tens of millions of e-mails, so if they had
to do that with all the messages, they would have to invest
heavily in machines." <<


Replace "invest" with "trojan" and remind Mr. W. that he
works for the major facilitator of trojaned machines.







---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From measl at mfn.org  Fri Dec 26 16:09:48 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 18:09:48 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>
References: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20031226180552.U694@mx1.mfn.org>

On Fri, 26 Dec 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> If so, then Germany should have the balls to discover freedom --adopt
> the US Constitution for instance.  The US can't counter such a move.

I'm sure it would at least as ineffective as the same Constitution is right
here in the good ole USA... :-(


> >There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises,
>
> Not in Germany, obviously.  In the US, yes.

We are obviously living in separate (although close to parallel) universes.
The USA does NOT practice "free speech" - "ultimate" or otherwise.


> Our founders trusted
> the Volk;

Yes.  But the Volken have clearly abdicated this trust, and now the entire
mechanism is lost to the sands of history.


--
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Dec 26 18:55:14 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 18:55:14 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <5A2B5247-3806-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>
  <5A2B5247-3806-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <181F95BA-3818-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 26, 2003, at 4:48 PM, Michael Kalus wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
>>
>>> The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy
>>> task as you can see in a six month trial.
>>
>> Germany, or any State that  restricts words or thought, needs a regime
>> change
>> with extreme prejudice.
>>
>
> Then I guess you better start liberating the world. Pretty much any
> country in the world has a law against hate speech.

Some do, some don't. The U.S., for all its oft-cited faults, doesn't. 
It's not a violation of any national or state (California) law to argue 
that negroes are monkeys, that Germany's main failure was to miss 
getting the last 100K Jews (the main cause of their problems today, as 
the dreidl-spinners yammer about Nazism while arguing for socialism), 
and so on.

One or two states in the U.S. tried to implement "hate speech" laws, 
but the Supremes, in a rare moment when the negroes and Jews were 
outnumbered, said "Go back and read the First Amendment, you fucking 
dweebs and Hebes."

>
>>> Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.
>>
>> Are there exceptions for Buddhists and Amerinds?  Moron.
>
> All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not the
> reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D".

You've been brainwashed by your Yid masters. The swastika goes back to 
very, very old Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist symbology. Hitler read about 
it in some magazine and adopted it as his own.

You make me sick. I hope the ovens are fired up again and you are sent 
to one for a nice, long, _very_ hot shower.

--Tim May




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Fri Dec 26 16:48:14 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 19:48:14 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>
References: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5A2B5247-3806-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>
>> The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy
>> task as you can see in a six month trial.
>
> Germany, or any State that  restricts words or thought, needs a regime
> change
> with extreme prejudice.
>

Then I guess you better start liberating the world. Pretty much any 
country in the world has a law against hate speech.



>> Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.
>
> Are there exceptions for Buddhists and Amerinds?  Moron.

All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not the 
reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D".


>
> And I would like
>> to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and
>> Britain).
>
> If so, then Germany should have the balls to discover freedom --adopt
> the US Constitution for instance.  The US can't counter such a move.

They could actually until ~ 10 years ago. Germany (even though 
considered independend) wasn't. By international law a piece was never 
brokered, it was just a cease fire.

Of course now they could, but Germany still is a bit jumpy about it's 
past.


>
>> There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises,
>
> Not in Germany, obviously.  In the US, yes.  Our founders trusted
> the Volk; your conquerors (eg the US) let your shepards (eg your govt)
> neuter the sheep (ie you).
>

Nice... So in the US you have :

- - Walmart which censors music to make it "clean".
- - Blockbuster who edits movies (or has in the past, not sure if they 
still do)
- - TV Stations who edit movies
- - Censors at TV stations who "watch" over the programming.
- - What about the FCC who restricts what can be aired?


> Fuck censors dead.
>

I agree.

> Freedom is only tested when its unconfortable, baby.
>

I agree again, but the problem is that even in the good ol'e US of A it 
is not tested.


> Maybe you will find this list too uncomfortable, Kalus.
>
Doubtful. I don't have an issue with discussion if both sides can get 
their say. I do not agree that driving people like Nazis into the 
underground accomplishes anything. Their ideas have to be looked at in 
the light and then society can answer.

Problem with that is: 99% of people give a fuck about discussion or 
ideas. they want to be told what to do.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+zW1WlCnxcrW2uuEQIfqgCcDMvh3WH9dspQ/Tf43a9nT8z521AAnjuO
0aujI5ksmZhQ23+cJNPEzVCZ
=K0rP
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From adam at cypherspace.org  Fri Dec 26 18:37:18 2003
From: adam at cypherspace.org (Adam Back)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 21:37:18 -0500
Subject: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>; from s.schear@comcast.net on Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 09:13:23AM -0800
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20031226213718.A32627@bitchcake.off.net>

I did work at Microsoft for about a year after leaving ZKS, but I quit
a month or so ago (working for another startup again).

But for accuracy while I was at Microsoft I was not part of the
microsoft research/academic team that worked on penny black, though I
did exchange a few emails related to that project and hashcash etc
with the researchers.

I thought the memory-bound approaches discussed on CAMRAM before were
along the lines of hash functions which chewed off artificially large
code foot-print as a way to impose the need for memory.  

Arnold Reinhold's HEKS [1] (Hash Extended Key Stretcher) key stretching
algorithm is related also.  HEKS aims to make hardware attacks on key
stretching more costly: both by increasing the memory footprint
required to efficiently compute it, and by requiring operations that
are more expensive in silicon (32 bit multiplies, floating point is
another suggestion he makes).

The relationship to hashcash is you could simply use HEKS in place of
SHA1 to get the desired complexity and hence silicon cost increase.

"The main design goal of this algorithm is to make massively parallel
key search machines it as expensive as possible by requiring many
32-bit multiplies and large amounts of memory."

I think I also recall discussing with Peter Gutmann the idea of using
more complex hash functions (composed of existing hash functions for
security) to increase the cost of hardware attacks.


The innovation in the papers referred to by the Penny Black project
was the notion of building a cost function that was limited by memory
bandwidth rather CPU speed.  In otherwords unlike hashcash (which is
CPU bound and has minimal working memory or code footprint) or a
notional hashcash built on HEKS or other similar system (which is
supposed to take memory and generaly expensive operations to build in
silicon), the two candidate memory-bound functions are designed to be
computationally cheap but require a lot of random access memroy
utilization in a way which frustrates time-space trade-offs (to reduce
space consumption by using a faster CPU).  They then argue that this
is desirable because there is less discrepency in memory latency
between high end systems and low end systems than there is discrepency
in CPU power.

The 2nd memory [3] bound paper (by Dwork, Goldber and Naor) finds a
flaw in in the first memory-bound function paper (by Adabi, Burrows,
Manasse, and Wobber) which admits a time-space trade-off, proposes an
improved memory-bound function and also in the conclusion suggests
that memory bound functions may be more vulnerable to hardware attack
than computationally bound functions.  Their argument on that latter
point is that the hardware attack is an economic attack and it may be
that memory-bound functions are more vulnerable to hardware attack
because you could in their view build cheaper hardware more
effectively as the most basic 8-bit CPU with slow clock rate could
marshall enough fast memory to under-cut the cost of general purpose
CPUs by a larger margin than a custom hardware optimized
hashcash/computationally bound function.

I'm not sure if their conclusion is right, but I'm not really
qualified -- it's a complex silicon optimization / hardware
acceleration type question.

Adam

[1] http://world.std.com/~reinhold/HEKSproposal.html

[2] Abadi, Burrows, Manasse and Wobber "Moderately Hard, Memory-bound
Functions", Proceedings of the 10th Annual Network and Distributed
System Security Symposium, February 2003

http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/memory-final-ndss.pdf

[3] Dwork, Goldberg, and Naor, "On Memory-Bound Functions for Fighting
Spam", Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Cryptology
Conference (CRYPTO 2003), August 2003.

http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/lbdgn.pdf


On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 09:13:23AM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3324883.stm
> 
> Adam Back is part of this team, I think.
> 
> Similar approach to Camram/hahscash.  Memory-based approaches have been 
> discussed.  Why hasn't Camram explored them?
> 
> steve

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Fri Dec 26 23:38:07 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 23:38:07 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <5A2B5247-3806-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov> <3FECC155.154A32BC@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031226232452.0292d4d0@idiom.com>

At 07:48 PM 12/26/2003 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
> >> Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.
> > Are there exceptions for Buddhists and Amerinds?  Moron.
>All symbols that are related to Nazism.  One of the reasons
>(if not the reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D".

As Tim pointed out, the Swastika symbol had long use before the
Nazis picked it up.  I remember going into a temple in Guangzhou China
which had three large Buddha statues with it on their chests,
and some of the Native American cultures prominently weave it
into baskets.  In Asia it tends to be a sun symbol,
or sometimes a moon symbol depending on which way it's pointing;
in the Americas it tends to be a whirlwind symbol.

If you can drag somebody into court for six months because
you don't like their speech, that's a problem too.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen here in the US too,
though more often for speech involving sex than violence,
and certainly our new Attorney General John Ashcroft
has no particular love for free speech.
But you can only throw someone in jail by threatening violence,
so it's hypocritical to say you're doing so to eliminate violent speech.

A friend of mine was on the city council in a Southern California town
where some Ku Klux Klan racist wanted to hold a march.
He wasn't from around there, and didn't really have any local support -
what he really wanted was for the town to ban his group from marching,
so he could sue the town for violating his right to free speech.
The town let him march, and had to bring out the police to make sure
that nobody attacked him or his five or ten friends while they marched.
It was the right thing to do, though she found it very frustrating.
Sometimes you just have to let people be [pick an insult here...]




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sat Dec 27 01:27:57 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 01:27:57 -0800
Subject: I am anti war.  You stupid evil scum are pro Saddam.
In-Reply-To: <3FE6E2A9.28023.2DB6077@localhost>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031222114038.05c89998@mail.comcast.net>
  <3FE6B763.18755.232547D@localhost>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031227011709.029b9508@idiom.com>

At 12:25 PM 12/22/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>     --
>On 22 Dec 2003 at 11:43, Steve Schear wrote:
> > Cite your sources.  The one's I find creditable indicate that
> > at the time of his capture he appeared to have been held
> > captive for at least 2-3 weeks.
>
>Oh come on.
>
>A whole platoon of random troops would have to be part of a big
>conspiracy. Plus quite a few Iraqis have interviewed him.  They
>in the vast right wing conspiracy also?

This isn't suggesting that the US kept Saddam on hold for
political expediency, the way they're planning to "suddenly" "find"
Osama _and_ the Missing Weapons of Mass Destruction next October
just in time for the election.

This is just saying that it appears that some well-armed independents
(or traitorous ex-henchpersons, or whoever) caught Saddam a
couple of weeks ago and have been trying to negotiate a good price,
but the US found them and avoided paying them off.
That's believable (though of course it could be staged,
either to deceive the American public about whether we really paid them
or to make it easier for the initial captors to get away with it afterwards.)

It's therefore being suggested that while they've let Saddam
hang onto enough clean underwear for a few weeks of spider-hole time,
that they either haven't been ironing his uniforms adequately,
or else they ditched them because that someone else might catch on
and sell _them_ out for a reward.  I find this less credible.
Maybe the captors have been using his Generalissimo uniforms as evidence
to get the Americans to negotiate with them or something,
but again it's dubious.




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Dec 27 09:47:56 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 09:47:56 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BD5A576A-3884-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
  <BD5A576A-3884-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <CDC4B928-3894-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 27, 2003, at 7:52 AM, Michael Kalus wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 27-Dec-03, at 9:53 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
>> "All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not 
>> the
>> reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D"."
>>
>> Interesting. So even if the swatsika is protrayed as a bad thing (to
>> the point of practically being a bullseye) it's banned.
>>
>> So...can you have swastikas in Textbooks? Perhaps 100 years from now
>> the Holocaust will be forgotten. Of course, that'll make Tim May happy
>> because then it could happen all over again.
>>
>> So a question for you: If I want to write a book on the history of the
>> swastika, or teach about the holocuast in Germany, do I need a license
>> or something? (And let's just assume I have a "politically correct"
>> view.)
>>
>>
> To my understanding Historical documents are exempt from this.

Jew groups have "demanded" that Microsoft modify its symbol font sets 
to remove swastikas.

Part of a CNN report on this flap:

"The swastika, which was made infamous by Nazi Germany, was included in 
Microsoft's "Bookshelf Symbol 7" font. That font was derived from a 
Japanese font set, said Microsoft Office product manager Simon Marks.

"Microsoft said it will release other tools at a later date to remove 
only the offending characters.

"A form of the swastika has been used in the Buddhist religion to 
symbolize the feet or footprints of the Buddha. The symbol, which was 
also used widely in the ancient world including Mesopotamia, 
Scandinavia, India and the Americas, became common in China and Japan 
with the spread of Buddhism."


So, the racialist demands of a sect of dreidl-spinning weirdos is now 
being used to affect even academic scholarship: the day will soon be 
upon where swastikas are removed even from Buddhist, Scandinavian, 
Indian, etc. texts, and where scholars who wish to write about them 
must blank out they symbol and refer to it as the "s symbol," analogous 
to the way negroes freely call other negroes "niggers" and "niggaz" and 
"nigga hoes," but "demand" that whites refer to the words as "the n 
word."

Now that the Jews dominate Germany once again, time for book burning of 
any book which offends the Jews?


--Tim May




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sat Dec 27 06:53:30 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 09:53:30 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>

"All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not the
reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D"."

Interesting. So even if the swatsika is protrayed as a bad thing (to the 
point of practically being a bullseye) it's banned.

So...can you have swastikas in Textbooks? Perhaps 100 years from now the 
Holocaust will be forgotten. Of course, that'll make Tim May happy because 
then it could happen all over again.

So a question for you: If I want to write a book on the history of the 
swastika, or teach about the holocuast in Germany, do I need a license or 
something? (And let's just assume I have a "politically correct" view.)

-TD



>From: Michael Kalus <mkalus at thedarkerside.to>
>To: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at cdc.gov>
>CC: "cypherpunks at lne.com" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Re: Singers jailed for lyrics
>Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 19:48:14 -0500
>
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
> >
> >> The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy
> >> task as you can see in a six month trial.
> >
> > Germany, or any State that  restricts words or thought, needs a regime
> > change
> > with extreme prejudice.
> >
>
>Then I guess you better start liberating the world. Pretty much any
>country in the world has a law against hate speech.
>
>
>
> >> Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.
> >
> > Are there exceptions for Buddhists and Amerinds?  Moron.
>
>All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not the
>reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D".
>
>
> >
> > And I would like
> >> to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and
> >> Britain).
> >
> > If so, then Germany should have the balls to discover freedom --adopt
> > the US Constitution for instance.  The US can't counter such a move.
>
>They could actually until ~ 10 years ago. Germany (even though
>considered independend) wasn't. By international law a piece was never
>brokered, it was just a cease fire.
>
>Of course now they could, but Germany still is a bit jumpy about it's
>past.
>
>
> >
> >> There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises,
> >
> > Not in Germany, obviously.  In the US, yes.  Our founders trusted
> > the Volk; your conquerors (eg the US) let your shepards (eg your govt)
> > neuter the sheep (ie you).
> >
>
>Nice... So in the US you have :
>
>- - Walmart which censors music to make it "clean".
>- - Blockbuster who edits movies (or has in the past, not sure if they
>still do)
>- - TV Stations who edit movies
>- - Censors at TV stations who "watch" over the programming.
>- - What about the FCC who restricts what can be aired?
>
>
> > Fuck censors dead.
> >
>
>I agree.
>
> > Freedom is only tested when its unconfortable, baby.
> >
>
>I agree again, but the problem is that even in the good ol'e US of A it
>is not tested.
>
>
> > Maybe you will find this list too uncomfortable, Kalus.
> >
>Doubtful. I don't have an issue with discussion if both sides can get
>their say. I do not agree that driving people like Nazis into the
>underground accomplishes anything. Their ideas have to be looked at in
>the light and then society can answer.
>
>Problem with that is: 99% of people give a fuck about discussion or
>ideas. they want to be told what to do.
>
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: PGP 8.0.3
>
>iQA/AwUBP+zW1WlCnxcrW2uuEQIfqgCcDMvh3WH9dspQ/Tf43a9nT8z521AAnjuO
>0aujI5ksmZhQ23+cJNPEzVCZ
>=K0rP
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

_________________________________________________________________
Get reliable dial-up Internet access now with our limited-time introductory 
offer.  http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sat Dec 27 06:54:19 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 09:54:19 -0500
Subject: James Donald Skeetshoot...
Message-ID: <BAY7-F17r3Di32AvJ1J00001eb2@hotmail.com>

Variola: PULL!

_________________________________________________________________
Get reliable dial-up Internet access now with our limited-time introductory 
offer.  http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Dec 27 10:01:04 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 10:01:04 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <A39120C4-3896-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 27, 2003, at 6:53 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not the
> reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D"."
>
> Interesting. So even if the swatsika is protrayed as a bad thing (to 
> the point of practically being a bullseye) it's banned.
>
> So...can you have swastikas in Textbooks? Perhaps 100 years from now 
> the Holocaust will be forgotten. Of course, that'll make Tim May happy 
> because then it could happen all over again.

Nonsense. The problem with the Holocaust was not because people were 
expressing their opinions about Jews, their habits, etc., or having 
"un-PC" thoughts about their neighbors. In fact, the so-called 
anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1920s and 30s was less pronounced than 
in other European countries, notably France.

The issue with the Holocaust, as with the suppression of the Kulaks in 
Soviet Russia, as with the forced starvation of entire provinces of 
tens of millions of people by Mao, was directly attributable to STATE 
POWER. In other words, the problem was that Hitler, Eichmann, Goebbels, 
etc. could have their bureaucrats meet at Wansee to implement the Final 
Solution.

In a decentralized political system, one with constitutional 
protections for speech, movement, association, gun ownership, property 
accumulation, etc., such "purges" and "pogroms" and "final solutions" 
are much more difficult to carry out. And had the Jews spent more time 
on self-defense, on matters martial instead of matters Talmudic, they 
might not have been such easy pickings and gone so readily into the 
cattle cars headed east.

By the way, practically speaking, banning the swastika and outlawing 
any expression of admiration for Hitler just makes these things more 
attractive to young kids. Duh.

--Tim May, who counts more on the Constitution to limit the power of 
government (though these limits are falling, year by year) than he does 
in some ban on putting swastikas in books or on armbands
>
>
#1. Sanhedrin 59a: "Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild 
animal."
#2. Aboda Sarah 37a: "A Gentile girl who is three years old can be 
violated."
#3. Yebamoth 11b: "Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted 
if she is three years of age."
#4. Abodah Zara 26b: "Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed."
#5. Yebamoth 98a: "All gentile children are animals."
#6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122: "A Jew is forbidden to drink from 
a glass of wine which a Gentile has touched, because the touch has made 
the wine unclean."
#7. Baba Necia 114, 6: "The Jews are human beings, but the nations of 
the world are not human beings but beasts."




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sat Dec 27 07:52:57 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 10:52:57 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <BD5A576A-3884-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 27-Dec-03, at 9:53 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "All symbols that are related to Nazism. One of the reasons (if not the
> reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D"."
>
> Interesting. So even if the swatsika is protrayed as a bad thing (to 
> the point of practically being a bullseye) it's banned.
>
> So...can you have swastikas in Textbooks? Perhaps 100 years from now 
> the Holocaust will be forgotten. Of course, that'll make Tim May happy 
> because then it could happen all over again.
>
> So a question for you: If I want to write a book on the history of the 
> swastika, or teach about the holocuast in Germany, do I need a license 
> or something? (And let's just assume I have a "politically correct" 
> view.)
>
>
To my understanding Historical documents are exempt from this.

Wolfenstein was banned in the end because the symbols where used in 
"Entertainment".

If it is a historical drama in which the Symbols appear this seems to 
be permissible as well. If you put one on your jacket though and walk 
around with it in the streets they can get you.

Michael

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+2q3mlCnxcrW2uuEQLSggCfYUtI+BIz6KVZzpWHUyq28DpGEm8AoME9
3OJy6lG0zwAsFacIwujAZswI
=/pq7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Dec 27 12:39:29 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 12:39:29 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3346C907-389C-11D8-8133-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
  <BD5A576A-3884-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
  <CDC4B928-3894-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <3346C907-389C-11D8-8133-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <C4BD17BD-38AC-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 27, 2003, at 10:40 AM, Michael Kalus wrote:
>
> That you have extremists who will use the past as the main argument for
> their reasoning can be clearly seen by your own views.
>
> There is no difference between people like you and jews (or any other
> extreme zealot) who tries to push his or her own agenda.
>


There is in fact a _very_ important difference, one you should think 
carefully about: the issue of force.

In Germany, men with guns arrest those who sing songs which are not PC. 
I have no such power to use force to arrest those who use words I don't 
like.

This is the essence of liberty. It's all about the initiation of force, 
versus free choice.

In a free system, those who don't want to see swastikas or here 
"prejudiced" speech will take steps to avoid concerts where such 
symbols or words are used, will use the "OFF" switch on their radios 
and televisions when such symbols or speech appears, and will avoid 
visiting Web sites which offend them. Choice. And responsibility.

They may even hire others to act as watchdogs or censors to screen 
material which may offend them. This is what ratings systems are all 
about. And closed communities. And voluntary associations.

However, in a free society they may not use guns or force to stop what 
other people are reading or viewing or singing.

Think about it. Carefully. Read up on some of the basics.

You are on the wrong mailing list if you are as statist as you appear 
to be.

--Tim May




From billy at dadadada.net  Sat Dec 27 09:48:04 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (BillyGOTO)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 12:48:04 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BD5A576A-3884-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
References: <BAY7-F12FKkvhZOObrn0005beb2@hotmail.com>
  <BD5A576A-3884-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <20031227174803.GA11865@mail.dadadada.net>

On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 10:52:57AM -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:

> If it is a historical drama in which the Symbols appear this seems to 
> be permissible as well. If you put one on your jacket though and walk 
> around with it in the streets they can get you.

I guess "The Producers" will never make it to Berlin.
It's really funny.  Your loss.




From ben at algroup.co.uk  Sat Dec 27 05:22:15 2003
From: ben at algroup.co.uk (Ben Laurie)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 13:22:15 +0000
Subject: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
In-Reply-To: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <3FED8787.6010105@algroup.co.uk>

Steve Schear wrote:

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3324883.stm
> 
> Adam Back is part of this team, I think.
> 
> Similar approach to Camram/hahscash.  Memory-based approaches have been 
> discussed.  Why hasn't Camram explored them?

They were only invented recently, and indeed, I've been planning to 
introduce them to the camram arena. I wonder if they're being discussed 
as a result of the pub conversation I had recently with a Microsoft 
person on this very subject?

One major advantage of memory-based proof-of-work over hashcash is that 
the variation between machines is much smaller (estimated to be a factor 
of 4 from slowest to fastest PCs, for example).

BTW, for those who don't know, SpamAssassin now supports hashcash.

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Sat Dec 27 16:51:38 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 16:51:38 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <006EC3F6-37DD-11D8-866B-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>
Message-ID: <200312280051.hBS0pc6N003614@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Michael writes:

> Being from Germany I would like to detest that statement.

> The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy 
> task as you can see in a six month trial.

It is the outcome of the trial which condemns Germany.  THe length of the
trial is an unimportant data point.

THe law clearly defines "hate speech" as the communication of any information which might 
tend to cause people to be displeased with a particular religious or ethnic group, whether 
or not the information is true.

People in Germany have been jailed under the "hate speech" laws for simply suggesting in
written editorials that the Jewish people might act collectively in their own enlightened
self-interest.

As long as truth is no defense against "hate speech," and "hate speech" includes things
which clearly don't involve anyone hating anyone else, "hnate speech" is simply a code
phrase for suppressing free expression.

> Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well. And I would like 
> to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and 
> Britain).

Yes, the Allies have done an excellent job of redirecting German jackbooted obnoxiousness
back at the German people.  Do you have a point here?

> There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises, but let's be 
> serious here for a moment: The US is not as free as people like to 
> think.

The US isn't free at all.  However, most US citizens support freedom to have opinions and 
to express them.  Germans have to ask their government for permission to think.  Most 
Germans think this is a good thing, by the way.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sat Dec 27 19:31:45 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 22:31:45 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <BAY7-F112Ky8VBDUfdf000016b7@hotmail.com>

"As long as truth is no defense against "hate speech," and "hate speech" 
includes
things which clearly don't involve anyone hating anyone else, "hate speech" 
is simply
a code phrase for suppressing free expression."

At worst. At best it's going to boil down to some local enforcement shitheel 
taking it upon himself to be the arbiter of issues he'll have no ability to 
comprehend.

-TD





>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Singers jailed for lyrics
>Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 16:51:38 -0800 (PST)
>
>Michael writes:
>
> > Being from Germany I would like to detest that statement.
>
> > The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy
> > task as you can see in a six month trial.
>
>It is the outcome of the trial which condemns Germany.  THe length of the
>trial is an unimportant data point.
>
>THe law clearly defines "hate speech" as the communication of any 
>information which might
>tend to cause people to be displeased with a particular religious or ethnic 
>group, whether
>or not the information is true.
>
>People in Germany have been jailed under the "hate speech" laws for simply 
>suggesting in
>written editorials that the Jewish people might act collectively in their 
>own enlightened
>self-interest.
>
>As long as truth is no defense against "hate speech," and "hate speech" 
>includes things
>which clearly don't involve anyone hating anyone else, "hnate speech" is 
>simply a code
>phrase for suppressing free expression.
>
> > Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well. And I would like
> > to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and
> > Britain).
>
>Yes, the Allies have done an excellent job of redirecting German jackbooted 
>obnoxiousness
>back at the German people.  Do you have a point here?
>
> > There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises, but let's be
> > serious here for a moment: The US is not as free as people like to
> > think.
>
>The US isn't free at all.  However, most US citizens support freedom to 
>have opinions and
>to express them.  Germans have to ask their government for permission to 
>think.  Most
>Germans think this is a good thing, by the way.
>
>--
>Eric Michael Cordian 0+
>O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
>"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

_________________________________________________________________
Check your PC for viruses with the FREE McAfee online computer scan.  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963




From s.schear at comcast.net  Sat Dec 27 23:04:01 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 23:04:01 -0800
Subject: Fwd: Smuggling in Bolivia 
Message-ID: <6.0.1.1.0.20031227230352.05b0e7c0@mail.comcast.net>

[From another list.  I don't often fwd, but I thought these comments would 
be appreciated by those on the list who see only an ever expanding 
government worldwide.]

>Peruvians are a lot like Bolivians but Bolivia is not Peru.
>
>This is an interview with Antonio Estrado, President of the
>association of "porters" (aka smugglers) of Yacuiba who has, "for
>42 years, devoted himself to carrying contraband from Argentina
>to Bolivia".
>
>Antonio Estrado / Presidente de la asociacisn de bagalleros
>de Yacuiba
>
>Desde hace 42 aqos se dedica a cargar productos de contrabando desde 
>Argentina hacia
>Bolivia
>
>http://www.el-deber.net/20031221/economia_10.html
>
>It ends with the following.
>
>-?Ustedes permitirman que vuelva la Aduana y el COA a Pocito Boliviano?
>Will you allow the customs and the police to return?
>
>- Tendrma que consultar con mi gente.
>I will have to ask my people.
>
>- ?Pero, ahora quiin manda en la frontera boliviana?
>But who now controls the Bolivian border?
>
>- Aqum, nosotros los bagalleros. Los militares, policmas y la Aduana no 
>son nada. Mientras el
>gobierno siga con abusos contra nosotros y no quiera dialogar no dejaremos 
>que entre,
>aunque tengamos que morir todos. El bagallero esta caracterizado, por 
>todas las
>autoridades, como lo peor que existe en el Chaco, pero no es asm, es una 
>persona humilde
>que el znico medio que tiene para subsistir es su cuerpo.
>Here, we the porters.  The military, police and customs are nothing. While 
>the government
>continues to abuse us and won't talk we will not let them in, otherwise we 
>will all die.  The
>porter is denigrated by all the authorities but that is not right, he is a 
>decent person whose
>only means of survival is his labor.
>
>One interesting thing about Bolivia is that there is a long
>tradition of "syndicalism".  Thus there are organized coca
>growers unions, smugglers unions etc.  All these organized
>groups are conceived by Bolivians as part of society and the
>government is considered just another such more of less coequal
>group.  Thus you often have, say the coca growers or the
>smugglers negotiating with or going on strike against the
>government on a more or less equal basis and sometimes getting
>their way.  There is not the expectation of dominance and Lese
>Majeste by the government which would lead to Waco like
>confrontations in such situations in the US.




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Sun Dec 28 05:46:39 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 08:46:39 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F112Ky8VBDUfdf000016b7@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F112Ky8VBDUfdf000016b7@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <42EF876D-393C-11D8-A2AF-000A95B18462@thedarkerside.to>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 27-Dec-03, at 10:31 PM, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "As long as truth is no defense against "hate speech," and "hate 
> speech" includes
> things which clearly don't involve anyone hating anyone else, "hate 
> speech" is simply
> a code phrase for suppressing free expression."
>
> At worst. At best it's going to boil down to some local enforcement 
> shitheel taking it upon himself to be the arbiter of issues he'll have 
> no ability to comprehend.
>
> -TD
>
>

It isn't quite that easy.

It is not like any cop can just arrest you, drag you away and lock you 
up because he thinks you did something wrong.

The way this would work out is that someone would have to report you 
(as the offender) to the cops, they in turn would contact the 
"Verfassungschutz" which then would investigate and if they consider 
that something is up they can ask a judge for a warrant.

In reality though is there was a huge outcry last year in Germany. A 
rather right wing party called "NDP" as well as several 
"Wehrsportgruppen" which (according to the Verfassungschutz) were 
extremely right and attacking the German consitution, were in effect 
actually LED by informants of the Verfassungschutz. What this means is: 
They build the monster they were supposed to "protect" us from.

The whole thing still isn't over, Politicians from all colours ask 
loudly if Germany actually still needs the Verfassungsschutz. That the 
singer got jailed has happened independently from each other, but to 
think that the majority of people in Germany are just sheep is as wrong 
as the idea that all of Germans are Nazis.

I find it always interesting how people (especially from the US) seem 
to have prefabricated ideas about how other countries are, but are at 
the same time so much in denial about their own society that it is just 
frightening.

One huge difference I have noticed between the US and Germany in 
particular is that discussions LIKE these are still happening in the 
mainstream press, not only in the "left" or "right" wing propaganda 
papers.

It might be interresting to note BTW, that the german mainstream right 
is that mainly likes to use the Verfassungschutz, not so much the left 
who accepts it but is a lot more critical of it than for example the 
Bavarian Government. That might have to do with the little fact that in 
the mid 70s and 80s the left was the main target of them (think Rote 
Armee Fraktion).


Michael


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3

iQA/AwUBP+7e02lCnxcrW2uuEQLQCwCfd+72zy7tRdeg0TVJ9rr4tCW40XUAoMnV
GbwK/9fd8UKh55pl/op7SWWF
=y2uv
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sun Dec 28 09:49:31 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 12:49:31 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <BAY7-F35Tziwi7Qf4vK0000b82d@hotmail.com>

MK wrote...

>I find it always interesting how people (especially from the US) seem
>to have prefabricated ideas about how other countries are, but are at
>the same time so much in denial about their own society that it is just
>frightening.

Well, that's true. It's a point I've made on Cypherpunks many times, that 
many economic, political, or legal analeses of other countries (particularly 
non-Indo-European) only hold up at the surface...
My comment was more general, and not necessarily aimed at Germany per se. 
For instance, there theoretically seems to be laws about everything in 
Italy, but nobody seems to obey them and they are only enforced 
half-heartedly, and for as long as it's in vogue to give a crap.

Likewise, Communist "Land Reform" in mainland China isn't communist so much 
as it's Chinese: land reform and nationalisation of salt production and 
other industries have regularly occurred throughout Chinese history. 
"Communism" in mainland China was a mask that seemed to last about as long 
as Mao was alive. (Of course, the hardheads on this list will reply by 
saying that Chinese culture has always been more "communistic" than other 
countries, but then this statement ignores just how truly capitalist China 
has become since 1984 or so. It remains oppressive, of course, if you're 
discussing the wrong subjects....)

>
>One huge difference I have noticed between the US and Germany in
>particular is that discussions LIKE these are still happening in the
>mainstream press, not only in the "left" or "right" wing propaganda
>papers.

Yes...because we Americans have only had one government, we tend to equate 
"legality" with morality, and then assume the discussion is over. No doubt 
that causes us to look at laws "over there" as being far more important than 
they really are...at least some times.

-TD

_________________________________________________________________
Make your home warm and cozy this winter with tips from MSN House & Home.  
http://special.msn.com/home/warmhome.armx




From measl at mfn.org  Sun Dec 28 11:05:45 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 13:05:45 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Interesting Freudian Slip...
Message-ID: <20031228130154.D7613@mx1.mfn.org>

...by Congresscritter Cox:

	http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,106809,00.html

	The terrorists are playing a losing game. But if by making idle
	threats that are always taken seriously by people who are just
	scared, we can impose enormous costs on the country and the
	terrorists can impose enormous costs on the country. Then that
	turns their losing game into a winning game.

_WE_ can impose enormous costs indeed!  An Fox printed it without sterilizing
it?  They better be careful, or someone might accuse them of "aiding the
terrorists"!


-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate
patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a
whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind
its citizens."

The Promise of World Peace
http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm




From adam at cypherspace.org  Sun Dec 28 10:29:27 2003
From: adam at cypherspace.org (Adam Back)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 13:29:27 -0500
Subject: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project
In-Reply-To: <20031226213718.A32627@bitchcake.off.net>; from adam@cypherspace.org on Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 09:37:18PM -0500
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net> <20031226213718.A32627@bitchcake.off.net>
Message-ID: <20031228132927.B15484@bitchcake.off.net>

Oh yes forgot one comment:

One down-side of memory bound is that it is memory bound.  That is to
say it will be allocated some amount of memory, and this would be
chosen to be enough memory to that a high end machine should not have
that much cache so think multiple MB, maybe 8MB, 16MB or whatever.
(Not sure what is the max L2 cache on high end servers).

And what the algorithm will do is make random accesses to that memory
as fast as it can.

So effectively it will play badly with other applications -- tend to
increase likelihood of swapping, decrease memory available for other
applications etc.  You could think of the performance implications as
a bit like pulling 8MB of ram or whatever the chosen value is.

hashcash / computationally bound functions on the other hand have a
tiny footprint and CPU consumption by hashcash can be throttled to
avoid noticeable impact on other applications.

Adam

On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 09:37:18PM -0500, Adam Back wrote:
> I did work at Microsoft for about a year after leaving ZKS, but I quit
> a month or so ago (working for another startup again).
> 
> But for accuracy while I was at Microsoft I was not part of the
> microsoft research/academic team that worked on penny black, though I
> did exchange a few emails related to that project and hashcash etc
> with the researchers.
> 
> I thought the memory-bound approaches discussed on CAMRAM before were
> along the lines of hash functions which chewed off artificially large
> code foot-print as a way to impose the need for memory.  
> 
> Arnold Reinhold's HEKS [1] (Hash Extended Key Stretcher) key stretching
> algorithm is related also.  HEKS aims to make hardware attacks on key
> stretching more costly: both by increasing the memory footprint
> required to efficiently compute it, and by requiring operations that
> are more expensive in silicon (32 bit multiplies, floating point is
> another suggestion he makes).
> 
> The relationship to hashcash is you could simply use HEKS in place of
> SHA1 to get the desired complexity and hence silicon cost increase.
> 
> "The main design goal of this algorithm is to make massively parallel
> key search machines it as expensive as possible by requiring many
> 32-bit multiplies and large amounts of memory."
> 
> I think I also recall discussing with Peter Gutmann the idea of using
> more complex hash functions (composed of existing hash functions for
> security) to increase the cost of hardware attacks.
> 
> 
> The innovation in the papers referred to by the Penny Black project
> was the notion of building a cost function that was limited by memory
> bandwidth rather CPU speed.  In otherwords unlike hashcash (which is
> CPU bound and has minimal working memory or code footprint) or a
> notional hashcash built on HEKS or other similar system (which is
> supposed to take memory and generaly expensive operations to build in
> silicon), the two candidate memory-bound functions are designed to be
> computationally cheap but require a lot of random access memroy
> utilization in a way which frustrates time-space trade-offs (to reduce
> space consumption by using a faster CPU).  They then argue that this
> is desirable because there is less discrepency in memory latency
> between high end systems and low end systems than there is discrepency
> in CPU power.
> 
> The 2nd memory [3] bound paper (by Dwork, Goldber and Naor) finds a
> flaw in in the first memory-bound function paper (by Adabi, Burrows,
> Manasse, and Wobber) which admits a time-space trade-off, proposes an
> improved memory-bound function and also in the conclusion suggests
> that memory bound functions may be more vulnerable to hardware attack
> than computationally bound functions.  Their argument on that latter
> point is that the hardware attack is an economic attack and it may be
> that memory-bound functions are more vulnerable to hardware attack
> because you could in their view build cheaper hardware more
> effectively as the most basic 8-bit CPU with slow clock rate could
> marshall enough fast memory to under-cut the cost of general purpose
> CPUs by a larger margin than a custom hardware optimized
> hashcash/computationally bound function.
> 
> I'm not sure if their conclusion is right, but I'm not really
> qualified -- it's a complex silicon optimization / hardware
> acceleration type question.
> 
> Adam
> 
> [1] http://world.std.com/~reinhold/HEKSproposal.html
> 
> [2] Abadi, Burrows, Manasse and Wobber "Moderately Hard, Memory-bound
> Functions", Proceedings of the 10th Annual Network and Distributed
> System Security Symposium, February 2003
> 
> http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/memory-final-ndss.pdf
> 
> [3] Dwork, Goldberg, and Naor, "On Memory-Bound Functions for Fighting
> Spam", Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Cryptology
> Conference (CRYPTO 2003), August 2003.
> 
> http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/lbdgn.pdf
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 09:13:23AM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3324883.stm
> > 
> > Adam Back is part of this team, I think.
> > 
> > Similar approach to Camram/hahscash.  Memory-based approaches have been 
> > discussed.  Why hasn't Camram explored them?
> > 
> > steve
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> The Cryptography Mailing List
> Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Sun Dec 28 14:19:27 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 14:19:27 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F35Tziwi7Qf4vK0000b82d@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <200312282219.hBSMJS9N002848@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Tyler Durden wrote:

> Yes...because we Americans have only had one government, we tend to equate 
> "legality" with morality, and then assume the discussion is over. No doubt 
> that causes us to look at laws "over there" as being far more important than 
> they really are...at least some times.

The laws "over there" would only lack importance if they were universally ignored.

But they aren't ignored, and they ruin peoples lives, and deprive them of freedom
and property everytime someone in some protected class claims to have been offended.

When a Jew in Germany gives material support to Israel's reign of terror against the
Palestinian people, and someone criticizes it, German law puts the person criticizing 
it in jail because he made the Jew feel bad.

A civilized country would put the Beanie-Headed Land Grabber in jail, and give the 
critic a medal.  

Germany is not a civilized country.

Neither is the United States, of course, where US citizens are free to join the
Israeli army, and commit atrocities in the illegally occupied territories, but 
face prison for "terrorism" if they support the oppressed Palestinians and play 
paintball with their friends on weekends.

Naziism is National Socialism.  Neoconservatism is National Capitalism.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From k-elliott at wiu.edu  Sun Dec 28 16:07:31 2003
From: k-elliott at wiu.edu (Kevin Elliott)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 16:07:31 -0800
Subject: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
In-Reply-To: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
References: <b4b50837fa8d771d4ee03c2a3a868576@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <p06002002bc1520bb3cbc@[192.168.1.100]>

At 11:00 +0100  on  12/19/03, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>After WWI the "winners" humiliated the loosers badly. This is one of 
>the main reasons Hitler came to power and got support from the 
>Germans for the aggressions that started the war. He managed to use 
>these feelings of being treated as dogs and paying to heavy for the 
>first war. Also they were very humiliated by the fact that France 
>then occupied part of western Germany.
>
>After WWII the "winners" had learned their lesson from WWI pretty 
>well. Now they did not humilate the people of Germany like after the 
>first war. We got the Marshal plan and so on.
>
>Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated in the 
>way Saddam has been treated.
>
>Is this something U.S. should feel comfortable with then? Some 
>people on this list seem to have these disturbing thoughts.
>
>It will backfire sooner or later I'm afraid. And then it may be our 
>kids who pay the price.

-- 
__________________________________________
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud.
After a while, you realize the pig is enjoying it.
__________________________________________
Kevin Elliott   <mailto:kelliott at mac.com>
ICQ#23758827               AIM ID: teargo
iChatAV: kelliott at mac.com  (video chat available)
__________________________________________




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sun Dec 28 16:16:47 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 19:16:47 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <BAY7-F119qnqEBQdWfF000011bc@hotmail.com>

"Neither is the United States, of course, where US citizens are free to join 
the
Israeli army, and commit atrocities in the illegally occupied territories, 
but
face prison for "terrorism" if they support the oppressed Palestinians and 
play
paintball with their friends on weekends."

No real argument here.

Moreover, if I "support" (even if only verbally) Palestinian control over 
Israel, I'm "Anti Semitic" even though the Palestinians are semites, and the 
Ashkenazi only marginally semitic (they LOOK awfully European to me).*

However, I doubt I'll go to jail...now. If Bush gets re-elected, then who 
knows.

As for Germany, for me at least the same government that's forbidding 
swastikas today in an effort to eliminate "hate" may one day utilize that 
same power to warp & weave official history (like in Japan and their antics 
in China from 37 to 45), and all of a sudden everyone is seeing terrorists 
everywhere who are trying to "steal our freedoms", rather than understanding 
that if 10 men with families gave their lives to kill 3000 of us, it's at 
least fair to say that they're rather upset about SOMETHING...

At the same time, remember that the Holocaust happened in Germany. And if 
you were German and realized that your own father was at least partially 
responsible for baking hundreds of Jews, well...let's just say that would 
probably weird you out a bit.

-TD

* I'd note that some of the most outspoken "Anti semites" in this category 
happen to be Jewish: Bobby Fisher, Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert and others.




>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Singers jailed for lyrics
>Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 14:19:27 -0800 (PST)
>
>Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > Yes...because we Americans have only had one government, we tend to 
>equate
> > "legality" with morality, and then assume the discussion is over. No 
>doubt
> > that causes us to look at laws "over there" as being far more important 
>than
> > they really are...at least some times.
>
>The laws "over there" would only lack importance if they were universally 
>ignored.
>
>But they aren't ignored, and they ruin peoples lives, and deprive them of 
>freedom
>and property everytime someone in some protected class claims to have been 
>offended.
>
>When a Jew in Germany gives material support to Israel's reign of terror 
>against the
>Palestinian people, and someone criticizes it, German law puts the person 
>criticizing
>it in jail because he made the Jew feel bad.
>
>A civilized country would put the Beanie-Headed Land Grabber in jail, and 
>give the
>critic a medal.
>
>Germany is not a civilized country.
>
>Neither is the United States, of course, where US citizens are free to join 
>the
>Israeli army, and commit atrocities in the illegally occupied territories, 
>but
>face prison for "terrorism" if they support the oppressed Palestinians and 
>play
>paintball with their friends on weekends.
>
>Naziism is National Socialism.  Neoconservatism is National Capitalism.
>
>--
>Eric Michael Cordian 0+
>O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
>"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

_________________________________________________________________
Enjoy a special introductory offer for dial-up Internet access  limited 
time only! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Dec 28 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 20:00:00 -0800
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200312290400.hBT4000V028112@slack.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Oct 13, 2003

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography
and its effect on society.  It is not a moderated list (but see exceptions
below) and the list operators are not responsible for the list content.

Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list.  A subscriber can subscribe to
one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list.  Each node
(called a "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer", although they are not
related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes
in addition to sending messages to its subscribers.  A message posted
to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes,
and vice-versa.

1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers.
Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of
spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to.

There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
messages to their subscribers. "cooked" CDRs try to eliminate the spam
on that's on the regular list by automatically sending only messages
that are from cypherpunks list subscribers (on any CDR) or people who
are replying to list messages.  Finally there are moderated lists, where
a human moderator decides which messages from the raw list to pass on
to subscribers.

2. Message Modification

Message modification policy indicates what modifications, if any, beyond
what is needed to operate the CDR are done (most CDRs add a tracking
X-loop header on mail posted to their subscribers to prevent mail loops).
Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
subscribers. CDRs should not modify mail that they pass from one CDR
to the next, but some of them do, and others undo those modifications.

3. Privacy

Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
list members, or no one ("private") , to retrieve the subscribers list.
Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
since your address is now out there.   It's really only useful for
keeping spammers from harvesting addresses from the list software.

Digest mode indicates that the CDR supports digest mode, which is where
the posts are batched up into a few large emails.  Nodes that support
only digest mode are noted.

4. Anonymous posting

Cypherpunks encourages anonymous posting.

You can use an anonymous remailer:
http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.html
http://anon.efga.org/Remailers
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html

5. Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
Since the list is run from a number of different CDRs, you have to
figure out which CDR you are subscribed to.  If you don't remember and
can't figure it out from the mail headers (hint: the top Received: line
should tell you), the easiest way to unsubscribe is to send unsubscribe
messages to all the CDRs listed below.

How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
"internet headers").  Look for the Sender or X-loop headers.  The Sender
will say something like "Sender: owner-cypherpunks at lne.com".  The X-loop
line will say something like "X-Loop: cypherpunks at lne.com".  Both of
these inticate that you are subscribed to the lne.com CDR.   If you were
subscribed to the algebra CDR, they would have algebra.com in them.
Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the
table below to find that CDRs unsubscribe instructions.

6. Lunatics, spammers and nut-cases

"I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings".
At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who
are abusing the lists openness by dumping reams of propaganda on the list.
The distinction between a spammer and a subscriber is nearly always very
clear, but the dictinction between a subscriber who is abusing the list
by posting reams of propaganda and a subscriber who is making lots of
controversial posts is not clear.  Therefore, we tolerate the crap.
Subscribers with a low crap tolerance should check out mail filters.
Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems
only.  Eudora also has a capacity for filtering mail, as do many other
mail readers.  An example procmail recipie is below, you will of
course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
    * (^From:.*ravage at ssz\.com.*|\
    ^From:.*jchoate at dev.tivoli.com.*|\
    ^From:.*mattd at useoz.com|\
    ^From:.*proffr11 at bigpond.com|\
    ^From:.*jei at cc.hut.fi)
	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

Operator:
Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at algebra.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???
Info:   ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

Operator:         drt at un.bewaff.net
Subscription:     "subscribe [password of your choice]" to 
				       cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe <password>" to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Help:             "help" to to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Web site:         http://koeln.ccc.de/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks
Posting address:  cypherpunks at koeln.ccc.de
Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and
                  every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line
                  containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. 
Digest mode:      this node is digest-only
NNTP:             news://koeln.ccc.de/cbone.ml.cypherpunks
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infonex:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at infonex.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lne:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at lne.com
Filtering policy: cooked 
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.
Message Modification policy:  
 1. messages are demimed (MIME attachments removed) when posted 
  through lne or received by lne CDR subscribers
 2. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 3. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html
(thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minder:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Help:             "help" to majordomo at minder.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at minder.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: private
Info:           send mail to cypherpunks-info at minder.net


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Help:             "help" to listproc at openpgp.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at openpgp.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder:

Subscription:     "subscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Help:             "help" to sunder at sunder.net
Posting address:  sunder at sunder.net
Filtering policy: moderated
Message Modification policy:  ???
Privacy policy:  ???
Info: ???


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pro-ns:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at pro-ns.net
Filtering policy: cooked
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.   
Message Modification policy:
 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 2. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From rah at shipwright.com  Sun Dec 28 17:22:58 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 20:22:58 -0500
Subject: With A Whisper, Not A Bang
Message-ID: <p060204ddbc15323e109b@[66.149.49.5]>

<http://www.sacurrent.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10705756&BRD=2318&PAG=461&dept_id=482778&rfi=6>

 San Antonio Current

WITH A WHISPER, NOT A BANG


By David Martin
12/24/2003


Bush signs parts of Patriot Act II into law - stealthily

O n December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George
W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also
pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping
new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the
signing - on a Saturday - as "the President signs bills seven days a week."
But the last time Bush signed a bill into law on a Saturday happened more
than a year ago - on a spending bill that the President needed to sign, to
prevent shutting down the federal government the following Monday.

By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively
consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote.
Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head
lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe
their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement
in crime or terrorism.

By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively
consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote.

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new
executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year
2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of
the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious,
redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to
banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card
companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office,
and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of
usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."

Congress passed the legislation around Thanksgiving. Except for U.S.
Representative Charlie Gonzalez, all San Antonio's House members voted for
the act. The Senate passed it with a voice vote to avoid individual
accountability. While broadening the definition of "financial institution,"
the Bush administration is ramping up provisions within the 2001 USA
Patriot Act, which granted the FBI the authority to obtain client records
from banks by merely requesting the records in a "National Security
Letter." To get the records, the FBI doesn't have to appear before a judge,
nor demonstrate "probable cause" - reason to believe that the targeted
client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Moreover, the
National Security Letters are attached with a gag order, preventing any
financial institution from informing its clients that their records have
been surrendered to the FBI. If a financial institution breaches the gag
order, it faces criminal penalties. And finally, the FBI will no longer be
required to report to Congress how often they have used the National
Security Letters.

Supporters of expanding the Patriot Act claim that the new law is necessary
to prevent future terrorist attacks on the U.S. The FBI needs these new
powers to be "expeditious and efficient" in its response to these new
threats. Robert Summers, professor of international law and director of the
new Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University, explains, "We don't
go to war with the terrorists as we went to war with the Germans or the
North Vietnamese. If we apply old methods of following the money, we will
not be successful. We need to meet them on an even playing field to avoid
another disaster."

"It's a problem that some of these riders that are added on may not receive
the scrutiny that we would like to see."
- Robert Summers

Opponents of the PATRIOT Act and its expansion claim that safeguards like
judicial oversight and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable
search and seizure, are essential to prevent abuses of power. "There's a
reason these protections were put into place," says Chip Berlet, senior
analyst at Political Research Associates, and a historian of U.S. political
repression. "It has been shown that if you give [these agencies] this power
they will abuse it. For any investigative agency, once you tell them that
they must make sure that they protect the country from subversives, it
inevitably gets translated into a program to silence dissent."

Opponents claim the FBI already has all the tools to stop crime and
terrorism. Moreover, explains Patrick Filyk, an attorney and vice president
of the local chapter of the ACLU, "The only thing the act accomplishes is
the removal of judicial oversight and the transfer of more power to law
enforcements agents."

This broadening of the Patriot Act represents a political victory for the
Bush Administration's stealth legislative strategy to increase executive
power. Last February, shortly before Bush launched the war on Iraq, the
Center for Public Integrity obtained a draft of a comprehensive expansion
of the Patriot Act, nicknamed Patriot Act II, written by Attorney General
John Ashcroft's staff. Again, the timing was suspicious; it appeared that
the Bush Administration was waiting for the start of the Iraq war to
introduce Patriot Act II, and then exploit the crisis to ram it through
Congress with little public debate.

The leak and ensuing public backlash frustrated the Bush administration's
strategy, so Ashcroft and Co. disassembled Patriot Act II, then reassembled
its parts into other legislation. By attaching the redefinition of
"financial institution" to an Intelligence Authorization Act, the Bush
Administration and its Congressional allies avoided public hearings and
floor debates for the expansion of the Patriot Act.

Even proponents of this expansion have expressed concern about these
legislative tactics. "It's a problem that some of these riders that are
added on may not receive the scrutiny that we would like to see," says St.
Mary's Professor Robert Summers.

The Bush Administration has yet to answer pivotal questions about its
latest constitutional coup: If these new executive powers are necessary to
protect United States citizens, then why would the legislation not
withstand the test of public debate? If the new act's provisions are in the
public interest, why use stealth in ramming them through the legislative
process? *




-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Sun Dec 28 23:13:56 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 23:13:56 -0800
Subject: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage
  project
In-Reply-To: <20031226213718.A32627@bitchcake.off.net>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>
 <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031228230111.02943f50@idiom.com>

At 09:37 PM 12/26/2003 -0500, Adam Back wrote:
>The 2nd memory [3] bound paper (by Dwork, Goldber and Naor) finds a
>flaw in in the first memory-bound function paper (by Adabi, Burrows,
>Manasse, and Wobber) which admits a time-space trade-off, proposes an
>improved memory-bound function and also in the conclusion suggests
>that memory bound functions may be more vulnerable to hardware attack
>than computationally bound functions.  Their argument on that latter
>point is that the hardware attack is an economic attack and it may be
>that memory-bound functions are more vulnerable to hardware attack
>because you could in their view build cheaper hardware more [....]

Once nice thing about memory-bound functions is that,
while spammers could build custom hardware farms in Florida or China,
a large amount of spam is delivered by hijacked PCs or abused relays/proxies,
which run on standard PC hardware, not custom, so it'll still be slow.

Penny Black or any other system that involves tweaking the email protocols
gets a one-time win in blocking spam, because older badly-administered
mail relays won't be running the new system - if their administrators
upgrade them to support the new features, hopefully that will turn off
any relay capabilities.  That doesn't apply to cracked zombie machines,
since the crackers can install whatever features they need,
but at least all of those Korean cable-modem boxes won't run it.






---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Mon Dec 29 07:27:58 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 10:27:58 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A742A@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

Bill Stewart wrote:

>At 07:48 PM 12/26/2003 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
>> >> Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.
>> > Are there exceptions for Buddhists and Amerinds?  Moron.
>>All symbols that are related to Nazism.  One of the reasons
>>(if not the reason) why they banned "Wolfenstein 3D".

>As Tim pointed out, the Swastika symbol had long use before the
>Nazis picked it up.  I remember going into a temple in Guangzhou China
>which had three large Buddha statues with it on their chests,
>and some of the Native American cultures prominently weave it
>into baskets.  In Asia it tends to be a sun symbol,
>or sometimes a moon symbol depending on which way it's pointing;
>in the Americas it tends to be a whirlwind symbol.

Vaguely related.... 

I used to live in upper Manhattan. One of the subway stops I
used was the 190th on the IND ("A" train). This burrows deep
under Washington Heights, and has two entrances - a long 
tunnel which slopes *down* from the station to an exit near
Broadway, and an elevator up to Fort Washington Avenue. This
section of the line opened in 1932.

The floor of the vestibule of the upper elevator lobby is
laid with geometric patterns in red, white, and black terra
cotta tiles, and when I moved there in the late 70's I was 
amused to note that the pattern included 4 swastikas, in
black tiles against a white background, about 4 inches across.

Sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, the swastikas where
chisled out, and the square areas where they had been crudely
filled with concrete. 

Ft. Washington Ave by that time had long been an area heavily
populated by immigrant Russian Jews. I often wondered 
exactly what chain of events led to this vandalism.

Peter Trei




From declan at well.com  Mon Dec 29 08:31:00 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 10:31:00 -0600
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F119qnqEBQdWfF000011bc@hotmail.com>; from
  camera_lumina@hotmail.com on Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 07:16:47PM -0500
References: <BAY7-F119qnqEBQdWfF000011bc@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20031229103100.A25424@baltwash.com>

On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 07:16:47PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
> However, I doubt I'll go to jail...now. If Bush gets re-elected, then who 
> knows.

For all the violations of the Constitution that the Bush administration
has countenanced, it has not been nearly as repressive of political opinions
after Sept. 11 as previous regimes did in previous "wars."

There are many reasons to worry about Bush being reelected, but
political speech doesn't seem to have been tremendously impacted.

-Declan




From declan at well.com  Mon Dec 29 08:32:00 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 10:32:00 -0600
Subject: lne.com CDR to close
In-Reply-To: <20031223174226.A23853@slack.lne.com>; from ericm@lne.com
  on Tue, Dec 23, 2003 at 05:42:26PM -0800
References: <20031223174226.A23853@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <20031229103200.B25424@baltwash.com>

Thanks, Eric, for keeping the lne.com node up and running for the last
few years. It's (mostly) a thankless task and you did a great job.

Best,
Declan


On Tue, Dec 23, 2003 at 05:42:26PM -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
> The lne.com CDR node will stop accepting new
> subscriptions on Jan 1 2004, and will stop forwarding
> cypherpunks mail on Jan 15.  There are other nodes
> currently and hopefully more will announce themselves.




From ericm at lne.com  Mon Dec 29 11:08:30 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:08:30 -0800
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>; from
  hseaver@cybershamanix.com on Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:42:56AM -0600
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <20031229110830.A1411@slack.lne.com>

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:42:56AM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>    Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub from
> lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". Tried

I'm experimenting with a new sendmail milter.
(the SMTP HELO arg needs to be reasonably valid in order to pass).
I've now set it to not reject mail to majordomo at
lne.com.  The blocklist thing is still
in effect, but if you're bounced by that
you get a URL in the bounce message
that you can use to get it fixed.

Eric




From jwashburn at whittmanhart.com  Mon Dec 29 09:09:49 2003
From: jwashburn at whittmanhart.com (John Washburn)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:09:49 -0600
Subject: unsubscribe cypherpunks
Message-ID: <9A1CCCE54805534C80F5BD0FC19D1E6B179994@chi-exch02.ffhq.ffconsulting.net>

unsubscribe cypherpunks




From ericm at lne.com  Mon Dec 29 11:11:31 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:11:31 -0800
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <0312291956230.-1121832784@somehost.domainz.com>; from
  shaddack@ns.arachne.cz on Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 07:58:03PM +0100
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
  <0312291956230.-1121832784@somehost.domainz.com>
Message-ID: <20031229111131.B1411@slack.lne.com>

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 07:58:03PM +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> Another alternative could be a couple lines of PHP or perl, unsubscribing
> via a web form.
> 
> On related note, what's a good node to migrate to?

pro-ns.net is running a CDR similar to lne.

A number of other people have gotten my scripts but
I havent' seen any up and running yet.

> PS: Thanks, Eric. It was a good node.

Thanks.  


Eric




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Mon Dec 29 09:42:56 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:42:56 -0600
Subject: unsub from lne
Message-ID: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>

   Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub from
lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". Tried
sending it thru a remailer but don't know if majordomo will go for that. 


 -- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Dec 29 11:48:17 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 11:48:17 -0800
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <F2D46322-3A37-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 29, 2003, at 9:42 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub 
> from
> lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". 
> Tried
> sending it thru a remailer but don't know if majordomo will go for 
> that.
>
>

An unsubscribe command sent to the lne.com administrivia address was 
rejected as spam?

I find that hard to believe, as that is one of the normal commands, 
ones which the lne regular message lists.

Perhaps you tried to send an unsubscribe message to the actual lne.com 
list site, rather than the administrivia address.


Check which address you mailed to.


--Tim May




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Mon Dec 29 11:15:34 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 13:15:34 -0600
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <20031229110830.A1411@slack.lne.com>
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
  <20031229110830.A1411@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <20031229191534.GB14968@cybershamanix.com>

   Yes, thanks a lot Eric, lne was a good job.



On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:08:30AM -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:42:56AM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> >    Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub from
> > lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". Tried
> 
> I'm experimenting with a new sendmail milter.
> (the SMTP HELO arg needs to be reasonably valid in order to pass).
> I've now set it to not reject mail to majordomo at
> lne.com.  The blocklist thing is still
> in effect, but if you're bounced by that
> you get a URL in the bounce message
> that you can use to get it fixed.
> 
> Eric

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From esj at harvee.org  Mon Dec 29 10:43:26 2003
From: esj at harvee.org (Eric S. Johansson)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 13:43:26 -0500
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW
 postage  project
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031228230111.02943f50@idiom.com>
References: <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net> <6.0.1.1.0.20031226091014.05a89888@mail.comcast.net> <5.1.0.14.2.20031228230111.02943f50@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <3FF075CE.4090200@harvee.org>

Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 09:37 PM 12/26/2003 -0500, Adam Back wrote:
> 
>> The 2nd memory [3] bound paper (by Dwork, Goldber and Naor) finds a
>> flaw in in the first memory-bound function paper (by Adabi, Burrows,
>> Manasse, and Wobber) which admits a time-space trade-off, proposes an
>> improved memory-bound function and also in the conclusion suggests
>> that memory bound functions may be more vulnerable to hardware attack
>> than computationally bound functions.  Their argument on that latter
>> point is that the hardware attack is an economic attack and it may be
>> that memory-bound functions are more vulnerable to hardware attack
>> because you could in their view build cheaper hardware more [....]
> 
> 
> Once nice thing about memory-bound functions is that,
> while spammers could build custom hardware farms in Florida or China,
> a large amount of spam is delivered by hijacked PCs or abused 
> relays/proxies,
> which run on standard PC hardware, not custom, so it'll still be slow.

do the math.

d*b
---
  s

where: d = stamp delay in seconds
        s = spam size in bytes
        b = bandwidth in bytes per second

assuming unlimited bandwidth, if a stamp spammer compromises roughly the 
same number of PCs as were compromised during the last worm attack 
(350,000) at 15 seconds per stamp, you end up with 1.4 million stamps 
per minute or 2 billion stamps per day.  When you compare that to the 
amount of spam generated per day (high hundred billion to low trillion), 
they are still a few machine short of what is necessary to totally 
render stamps useless.  Yes, maybe one spammer could muster a few 
machines to be a nuisance but that's the extent of it.

When dealing with hardware acceleration, it becomes a hardware war.  If 
they can make a custom hardware, Taiwan can make us USB stamp 
generators, postage goes to a period of rapid inflation, and the world 
goes back to where was before with no advantage to spammer's.

> Penny Black or any other system that involves tweaking the email protocols
> gets a one-time win in blocking spam, because older badly-administered
> mail relays won't be running the new system - if their administrators
> upgrade them to support the new features, hopefully that will turn off
> any relay capabilities.  That doesn't apply to cracked zombie machines,
> since the crackers can install whatever features they need,
> but at least all of those Korean cable-modem boxes won't run it.

again, work the numbers to figure out the basic model and where the 
threat roughly lives.  Personally, I think that any system that tweaks 
the e-mail protocols basically loses for reasons of adoption and 
backwards compatibility.  I've put a lot of effort into the camram 
implementation to create significant backwards compatibility without 
leaving someone vulnerable to spam.

also, zombied machines are a threat but the beauty of any proof of work 
system is that the machine will start overheating if it's used too much 
and the CPU load will become noticeable to the user.  So in a way, stand 
generating zombies might actually do the net some good and takeout these 
machines.  or cause another blackout in New York State...

---eric


-- 
Speech recognition in use.  Incorrect endings, words, and case is
closer than it appears

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Mon Dec 29 13:02:09 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 15:02:09 -0600
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <F2D46322-3A37-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
  <F2D46322-3A37-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031229210209.GA15259@cybershamanix.com>

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:48:17AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> 
> On Dec 29, 2003, at 9:42 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> 
> >   Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub 
> >from
> >lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". 
> >Tried
> >sending it thru a remailer but don't know if majordomo will go for 
> >that.
> >
> >
> 
> An unsubscribe command sent to the lne.com administrivia address was 
> rejected as spam?
> 
> I find that hard to believe, as that is one of the normal commands, 
> ones which the lne regular message lists.
> 
> Perhaps you tried to send an unsubscribe message to the actual lne.com 
> list site, rather than the administrivia address.
> 
> 
> Check which address you mailed to.
> 

   No, it went to the correct address. I've set up and run majordomo lists, so
am fairly familiar with the procedure. The problem is that my email server sits
on an ameritech dsl line, and in the last year or so, a number of domains have
begun rejecting email from such. Some because it's a "block of IPs used for home
dsl lines", some because "someone on your network has been sending spam", etc. 
   IIRC, didn't you yourself have a problem awhile back mailing to lne.com? I
haven't been able to mail to it for a long time, but stayed subscribed because
of Eric's good filter, and just posted thru another node. 
    With other domains, like new.rr.com that reject mail from my server, I just
map it to go thru the ameritech smtp server, which works but is annoying. At
this point there are eight domains I've had to do that with. Could have done it
with lne.com too, of course, but prefered to not have my posts to cpunks going
thru the ameritech server with it's (probably) attendent carnivore box. Maybe
that's irrelevant -- maybe they have it on the gateway routers instead. 




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Mon Dec 29 10:58:03 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 19:58:03 +0100 (CET)
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <0312291956230.-1121832784@somehost.domainz.com>

Another alternative could be a couple lines of PHP or perl, unsubscribing
via a web form.

On related note, what's a good node to migrate to?

PS: Thanks, Eric. It was a good node.



On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub from
> lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". Tried
> sending it thru a remailer but don't know if majordomo will go for that.
>
>
>  --
> Harmon Seaver
> CyberShamanix
> http://www.cybershamanix.com




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Mon Dec 29 11:53:47 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 20:53:47 +0100 (CET)
Subject: unsub from lne
In-Reply-To: <F2D46322-3A37-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031229174256.GE12957@cybershamanix.com>
  <F2D46322-3A37-11D8-932A-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <0312292052170.0@somehost.domainz.com>

> An unsubscribe command sent to the lne.com administrivia address was
> rejected as spam?
>
> I find that hard to believe, as that is one of the normal commands,
> ones which the lne regular message lists.

It's fairly possible the mail was rejected even before the SMTP
negotiation itself; it did little problems to me because of HELO string
not exactly matching the reverse DNS lookup on the IP.

The logs (or the bounce message) have the answer.




From scott at spamwolf.com  Mon Dec 29 20:58:17 2003
From: scott at spamwolf.com (Scott Nelson)
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 20:58:17 -0800
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black
  PoW postage  project
Message-ID: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x>

At 01:43 PM 12/29/03 -0500, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>Bill Stewart wrote:
>
>> At 09:37 PM 12/26/2003 -0500, Adam Back wrote:
>> 
>>> The 2nd memory [3] bound paper (by Dwork, Goldber and Naor) finds a
>>> flaw in in the first memory-bound function paper (by Adabi, Burrows,
>>> Manasse, and Wobber) which admits a time-space trade-off, proposes an
>>> improved memory-bound function and also in the conclusion suggests
>>> that memory bound functions may be more vulnerable to hardware attack
>>> than computationally bound functions.  Their argument on that latter
>>> point is that the hardware attack is an economic attack and it may be
>>> that memory-bound functions are more vulnerable to hardware attack
>>> because you could in their view build cheaper hardware more [....]
>> 
>> 
>> Once nice thing about memory-bound functions is that,
>> while spammers could build custom hardware farms in Florida or China,
>> a large amount of spam is delivered by hijacked PCs or abused 
>> relays/proxies,
>> which run on standard PC hardware, not custom, so it'll still be slow.


The Microsoft Penny Black system (not to be confused with the 
IBM Penny Black paper) is supposedly limited by memory /speed/ not 
memory size.  The only nice thing about that is that memory speed
doesn't vary as much between machines.  About 5 to 1 vs. 100 to 1.

>
>do the math.
>
>d*b
>---
>  s
>
>where: d = stamp delay in seconds
>        s = spam size in bytes
>        b = bandwidth in bytes per second
>

I don't understand this equation at all.

It's the rate limiting factor that counts, not a combination of
stamp speed + bandwidth.

Assuming 128Kbps up, without a stamp it takes about .6 seconds to
send a typical 10K spam.

If it takes 15 seconds to generate the stamp, then it will take
15 seconds to send a stamped spam.  It won't even take 15.6 seconds,
because the calculation can be done in parallel with the sending.



>assuming unlimited bandwidth, if a stamp spammer compromises roughly the 
>same number of PCs as were compromised during the last worm attack 
>(350,000) at 15 seconds per stamp, you end up with 1.4 million stamps 
>per minute or 2 billion stamps per day.  When you compare that to the 
>amount of spam generated per day (high hundred billion to low trillion), 
>

Not according to the best estimates I have.
The average email address receives 20-30 spams a day (almost twice 
what it was last year) and there are only 200-400 million 
email addresses, which works out to less than 10 billion spams per day.


But there's a much easier way to do the math.

If 1% of the machines on the internet are compromised,
and a stamp takes 15 seconds to generate, then spammers can send
50-60 spams to each person.

(86400 seconds per day / 15 seconds per stamp * 1% of everybody = 57.6)

You can reduce that by factoring in the average amount of time
that a compromised machine is on per day.


I fully expect that stamps will rise in "price" to several minutes,
if camram actually gets any traction.



>they are still a few machine short of what is necessary to totally 
>render stamps useless.  Yes, maybe one spammer could muster a few 
>machines to be a nuisance but that's the extent of it.
>
>When dealing with hardware acceleration, it becomes a hardware war.  If 
>they can make a custom hardware, Taiwan can make us USB stamp 
>generators, postage goes to a period of rapid inflation, and the world 
>goes back to where was before with no advantage to spammer's.
>

Custom hardware?
I can buy a network ready PC at Fry's for $199.

If it takes that machine 30 seconds to generate a stamp, and I leave
it running 24/7, and replace it after 5 months, then the cost
of a hashstamp is still less than 1/500 of a snail-mail stamp.
Granted it's a significant increase in costs over current email,
and therefore potentially a vast improvement, 
but it's still not expensive.


Scott Nelson <scott at spamwolf.com>

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From esj at harvee.org  Tue Dec 30 05:59:30 2003
From: esj at harvee.org (Eric S. Johansson)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 08:59:30 -0500
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black 
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x>
Message-ID: <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>

Scott Nelson wrote:

>>
>>d*b
>>---
>> s
>>
>>where: d = stamp delay in seconds
>>       s = spam size in bytes
>>       b = bandwidth in bytes per second
>>
> 
> 
> I don't understand this equation at all.
> 
> It's the rate limiting factor that counts, not a combination of
> stamp speed + bandwidth.

well, stamp speed is method of rate limiting.  This equation/formula 
gives you the ratio of performance degradation.  So,

Given d=15, b=49152 (aka 384kbps) and s=1000

the slowdown ratio or factor is 737.28 times over what an unimpeded 
spammer can send.  But as you increase spam size, the slowdown factor 
declines.

> Assuming 128Kbps up, without a stamp it takes about .6 seconds to
> send a typical 10K spam.
> 
> If it takes 15 seconds to generate the stamp, then it will take
> 15 seconds to send a stamped spam.  It won't even take 15.6 seconds,
> because the calculation can be done in parallel with the sending.

actually, it would take 15 but only because you can be sending one 
stamped piece of spam at the same time as you're generating the next 
stamp.  But using your spam size, , the slowdown factor becomes roughly 
73 times.  So they would need 73 machines running full tilt all the time 
to regain their old throughput.  It's entirely possible that one 
evolutionary response to stamps would be to generate larger pieces of 
spam but that would also slow them down so we still win, kind of, sort of...


>>assuming unlimited bandwidth, if a stamp spammer compromises roughly the 
>>same number of PCs as were compromised during the last worm attack 
>>(350,000) at 15 seconds per stamp, you end up with 1.4 million stamps 
>>per minute or 2 billion stamps per day.  When you compare that to the 
>>amount of spam generated per day (high hundred billion to low trillion), 
>>
> 
> 
> Not according to the best estimates I have.
> The average email address receives 20-30 spams a day (almost twice 
> what it was last year) and there are only 200-400 million 
> email addresses, which works out to less than 10 billion spams per day.

actually, I'm hearing that there are roughly one billion addresses but 
unfortunately have lost the source.  The numbers for spam I'm hearing 
are on the order of 76 billion to 2 trillion
(
2 tril spams /day 
http://www.pacificresearch.org/press/clip/2003/clip_03-05-08.html
76 bil                 http://www.marketinglaw.co.uk/open.asp?A=703
)

If you have a better source (and I am sure there are some), I would like 
to hear it.


> But there's a much easier way to do the math.
> 
> If 1% of the machines on the internet are compromised,
> and a stamp takes 15 seconds to generate, then spammers can send
> 50-60 spams to each person.
> 
> (86400 seconds per day / 15 seconds per stamp * 1% of everybody = 57.6)

unfortunately, I think you making some assumptions that are not fully 
warranted.  I will try to do some research and figure out the number of 
machines compromised.  The best No. I had seen to date was about 350,000.

> You can reduce that by factoring in the average amount of time
> that a compromised machine is on per day.
> 
> 
> I fully expect that stamps will rise in "price" to several minutes,
> if camram actually gets any traction.

well, that might be the case but I must have a who cares attitude about 
that.  For the most part I rarely send mail to strangers and the stamp 
generation process is in background.  So if it take several minutes to 
queue up and send a piece of mail a few times a month.  What's the 
problem? (yes, I know I'm being cavalier)

> Custom hardware?
> I can buy a network ready PC at Fry's for $199.
> 
> If it takes that machine 30 seconds to generate a stamp, and I leave
> it running 24/7, and replace it after 5 months, then the cost
> of a hashstamp is still less than 1/500 of a snail-mail stamp.
> Granted it's a significant increase in costs over current email,
> and therefore potentially a vast improvement, 
> but it's still not expensive.

wrong unit of costs.  The stamps still take 15 seconds (give or take) 
which means approximately 5760 stamps per day.  Hardware acceleration is 
an attack against stamps by using dedicated hardware to shrink the cost 
in time of a given size stamp.  so, if and evil someone can build an 
ASIC to shrink the cost of a stamped by 100 times, then mercenary 
somebody else can build the same functionality and performance as well. 
  Plop it onto a USB interface chip, sell for $15 and balance is restored

---eric

-- 
Speech recognition in use.  Incorrect endings, words, and case is
closer than it appears




From alanb at digistar.com  Tue Dec 30 06:41:54 2003
From: alanb at digistar.com (Alan Brown)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 09:41:54 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black 
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Eric S. Johansson wrote:

>  But using your spam size, , the slowdown factor becomes roughly
> 73 times.  So they would need 73 machines running full tilt all the time
> to regain their old throughput.

Believe me, the professionals have enough 0wned machines that this is
trivial.

On the flipside, it means the machines are "burned" faster.

> unfortunately, I think you making some assumptions that are not fully
> warranted.  I will try to do some research and figure out the number of
> machines compromised.  The best No. I had seen to date was about 350,000.

It's at least an order of magnitude higher than this, possibly 2 orders,
thanks to rampaging worms with spamware installation payloads
compromising cablemodem- and adsl- connected Windows machines worldwide.

AB




From adam.lydick at verizon.net  Tue Dec 30 10:18:14 2003
From: adam.lydick at verizon.net (Adam Lydick)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:18:14 -0800
Subject: unsubscribe cypherpunks
Message-ID: <1072808294.2386.9.camel@elessar>

unsubscribe cypherpunks




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Tue Dec 30 07:30:00 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:30:00 -0500
Subject: FW: [IP] FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

My first thought on reading this was that it was from
The Onion, but its real. 

I guess being well-informed is now a cause for suspicion, 
as it was in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

Peter Trei


-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Farber [mailto:dave at farber.net]
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 8:03 PM
To: ip at v2.listbox.com
Subject: [IP] FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers

FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers

December 29, 2003
  By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:43 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is warning police nationwide to
be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the
popular reference books covering everything from
abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist
planning.

In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police
organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs
``to assist with target selection and pre-operational
planning.''

It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops
and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs,
especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.

``The practice of researching potential targets is
consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other
terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the
likelihood of operational success through careful
planning,'' the FBI wrote.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the bulletin this
week and verified its authenticity.

``For local law enforcement, it's just to help give them
one more piece of information to raise their suspicions,''
said David Heyman, a terrorism expert for the
Washington-based Center for Strategic and International
Studies. ``It helps make sure one more bad guy doesn't get
away from a traffic stop, maybe gives police a little bit
more reason to follow up on this.''

The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent,
``the product of legitimate recreational or commercial
activities.'' But it warned that when combined with
suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a
person with an almanac ``may point to possible terrorist
planning.''

``I don't think anyone would consider us a harmful
entity,'' said Kevin Seabrooke, senior editor of The World
Almanac. He said the reference book includes about a dozen
pages out of its 1,000 pages total listing the world's
tallest buildings and bridges but includes no diagrams or
architectural schematics. ``It's stuff that's widely
available on the Internet,'' he said.

The publisher for The Old Farmers Almanac said Monday
terrorists would probably find statistical reference books
more useful than the collections of Americana in his famous
publication of weather predictions and witticisms.

``While we doubt that our editorial content would be of
particular interest to people who would wish to do us harm,
we will certainly cooperate to the fullest with national
authorities at any level they deem appropriate,'' publisher
John Pierce said.

The FBI said information typically found in almanacs that
could be useful for terrorists includes profiles of cities
and states and information about waterways, bridges, dams,
reservoirs, tunnels, buildings and landmarks. It said this
information is often accompanied by photographs and maps.

The FBI urged police to report such discoveries to the
local U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-FBI-Almanacs.html?ex=1073745956&
ei=1&en=04d038b602802322

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/




From jerrold.leichter at smarts.com  Tue Dec 30 07:41:19 2003
From: jerrold.leichter at smarts.com (Jerrold Leichter)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:41:19 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black  PoW
 postage  project
In-Reply-To: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312301020150.29666@frame>

(The use of memory speed leads to an interesting notion:  Functions that are
designed to be differentially expensive on different kinds of fielded hardware.
On a theoretical basis, of course, all hardware is interchangeable; but in
practice, something differentially expensive to calculate on an x86 will remain
"expensive" for many years to come.)

In fact, such things are probably pretty easy to do - as was determined during
arguments over the design of Java.  The original Java specs pinned down
floating point arithmetic exactly:  A conforming implementation was required
to use IEEE single- and double-precision arithmetic, and give answers
identical at the bit level to a reference implementation.  This is easy to do
on a SPARC.  It's extremely difficult to do on an x86, because x86 FP
arithmetic is done to a higher precision.  The hardware provides only one way
to round an intermediate result to true IEEE single or double precision:
Store to memory, then read back.  This imposes a huge cost.  No one could find
any significantly better way to get the bit-for-bit same results on an x86.
(The Java standards were ultimately loosened up.)

So one should be able to define an highly FP-intensive, highly numerically
unstable, calculation all of whose final bits were considered to be part of
the answer.  This would be extremely difficult to calculate rapidly on an
x86.

Conversely, one could define the answer - possibly to the same problem - as
that produced using the higher intermediate precision of the x86.  This would
be very hard to compute quickly on machines whose FP hardware doesn't provide
exactly the same length intermediate results as the x86.

One can probably find problems that are linked to other kinds of hardware. For
example, the IBM PowerPC chip doesn't have generic extended precision values,
but does have a fused multiply/add with extended intermediate values.

Some machines provide fast transfers between FP and integer registers; others
require you to go to memory.  Vector-like processing - often of a specialized,
limited sort intended for graphics - is available on some architectures and
not others.  Problems requiring more than 32 bits of address space will pick
out the 64-bit machines.  (Imagine requiring lookups in a table with 2^33
entries.  8 Gig of real memory isn't unreasonable today - a few thousand
dollars - and is becoming cheaper all the time.  But using it effectively on a
the 32-bit machines out there is very hard, typically requiring changes to
the memory mapping or segment registers and such, at a cost equivalent to
hundreds or even thousands of instructions.)

							-- Jerry

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Tue Dec 30 07:56:51 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:56:51 EST
Subject: FW: [IP] FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
Message-ID: <1eb.166279bb.2d22fa43@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/30/2003 10:36:40 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
ptrei at rsasecurity.com writes:

> My first thought on reading this was that it was from
> The Onion, but its real. 
> 
> I guess being well-informed is now a cause for suspicion, 
> as it was in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
> 
> Peter Trei
> 

You know if the "terrorists" didn't know they could use an almanac to plan 
attacks, they do now.  

Regards,  Matt-




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Dec 30 12:19:01 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 14:19:01 -0600
Subject: swastika
Message-ID: <20031230201901.GA17754@cybershamanix.com>

  Ah, now I finally understand why the PRC is so down on the Falun Gong.  8-)

http://www.falundafa.org/eng/falun.htm

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From rah at shipwright.com  Tue Dec 30 13:01:27 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 16:01:27 -0500
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black 
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>
Message-ID: <p0602048ebc17980feee1@[66.149.49.5]>

At 7:46 PM +0000 12/30/03, Richard Clayton wrote:
>where does our esteemed moderator get _his_ stamps
>from ?

A whitelist for my friends, etc...

Whitelist cryptography at metzdowd.com...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 30 16:57:32 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 16:57:32 -0800
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black 
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <p0602048ebc17980feee1@[66.149.49.5]>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>
  <p0602048ebc17980feee1@[66.149.49.5]>
Message-ID: <50C92B60-3B2C-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 30, 2003, at 1:01 PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> At 7:46 PM +0000 12/30/03, Richard Clayton wrote:
>> where does our esteemed moderator get _his_ stamps
>> from ?
>
> A whitelist for my friends, etc...
>


We're not moderated. Get used to it.

Or are people _again_ spamming the Cypherpunks list with crap from half 
a dozen of their "moderated" lists?

As for white lists, I'm all for them, though the coloreds keep trying 
to get government to force them out of business.


--Tim May




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Dec 30 17:56:43 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 17:56:43 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <3FF22CDB.57848CCC@cdc.gov>

At 07:48 PM 12/26/03 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
>Then I guess you better start liberating the world.

If I were a neocon asshole, I would.  Instead, I regard liberation as a
local task, and interfering with sovereignty as the initiation of force,

ie an act of war.

>Nice... So in the US you have :
>
>- Walmart which censors music to make it "clean".
>- Blockbuster who edits movies (or has in the past, not sure if they
>still do)
>- TV Stations who edit movies
>- Censors at TV stations who "watch" over the programming.
>- What about the FCC who restricts what can be aired?

You need to be clear: only governments can censor.  Walmart
etc can do whatever they want.  That's what private property
means.  You don't have a right to put your bumper sticker on
my car (compelled speech, see the 1st), or prohibit me from putting my
sticker on my car.
(I just drove 400 miles in a car with the US flag upside down and
"Fucked" written over it.  Its a magnetic sticker I remove when I travel

with my pharmaceutical of choice.)

TV stations which exploit the aetherial commons are a tricky case.
The government licensors have to be very careful not to induce
censorship.

>> Fuck censors dead.
>
>I agree.

Well, ok then :-)




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Dec 30 17:59:35 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 17:59:35 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
Message-ID: <3FF22D87.D4AFEFCD@cdc.gov>

At 10:52 AM 12/27/03 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
>> So a question for you: If I want to write a book on the history of
the
>> swastika, or teach about the holocuast in Germany, do I need a
license
>> or something? (And let's just assume I have a "politically correct"
>> view.)
>>
>>
>To my understanding Historical documents are exempt from this.

My "Handbook of Regular Patterns" (Stevens) includes Swastikas
under the obvious symmetry group.  Do I need a license?




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Tue Dec 30 19:11:47 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:11:47 -0800
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black
   PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
 <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x>
 <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
 <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>

At 07:46 PM 12/30/2003 +0000, Richard Clayton <richard at highwayman.com> wrote:
 > [what about mailing lists]
Obviously you'd have to whitelist anybody's list you're joining
if you don't want your spam filters to robo-discard it.

><moan>
>I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let
>alone a cryptographic one :-(
></moan>

The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries.
Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to
start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists
and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only
need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their lists,
or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the
signature so that you can discard the forgeries that
pretend to be from them.

You'll also see spammers increasingly _joining_ large mailing lists,
so that they can get around members-only features.
At least one large mailing list farm on which I've joined a list
used a Turing-test GIF to make automated list joining difficult,
and Yahoo limits the number of Yahoogroups you can join in a day,
but that's the kind of job which you hire groups of Indians
or other English-speaking third-world-wagers to do for you.







---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From jamesd at echeque.com  Tue Dec 30 19:28:55 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:28:55 -0800
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3FF22CDB.57848CCC@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <3FF1D1F7.4906.75ADC78@localhost>

    --
On 30 Dec 2003 at 17:56, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> If I were a neocon asshole, I would.  Instead, I regard 
> liberation as a local task, and interfering with sovereignty 
> as the initiation of force,

Interfering with sovereignty is not an initiation of force. The
ruler has no property right in his subjects or his rule.

We are entitled to help our allies against our enemies, an 
activity that generally interferes with "sovereignty"

While liberation is a task that can only be performed by
locals, killing enemies is a global mission. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     8NX/bTVzuEkjsnNDyd8hqD2L1efqNO6qcsqMzWac
     4qYCUwCX6Jq61h11ZMgyonG84VSxmT4ogVW1g0OTQ




From richard at highwayman.com  Tue Dec 30 11:46:14 2003
From: richard at highwayman.com (Richard Clayton)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:46:14 +0000
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black 
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
Message-ID: <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>
>>  But using your spam size, , the slowdown factor becomes roughly
>> 73 times.  So they would need 73 machines running full tilt all the time
>> to regain their old throughput.
>
>Believe me, the professionals have enough 0wned machines that this is
>trivial.
>
>On the flipside, it means the machines are "burned" faster.

only if the professionals are dumb enough to use the machines that are
"making" the stamps to actually send the email (since it is only the
latter which are, in practice, traceable)

>> unfortunately, I think you making some assumptions that are not fully
>> warranted.  I will try to do some research and figure out the number of
>> machines compromised.  The best No. I had seen to date was about 350,000.
>
>It's at least an order of magnitude higher than this, possibly 2 orders,
>thanks to rampaging worms with spamware installation payloads
>compromising cablemodem- and adsl- connected Windows machines worldwide.

the easynet.nl list (recently demised) listed nearly 700K machines that
had been detected (allegedly) sending spam... so since their detection
was not universal it would certainly be more than 700K :(

>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>The Cryptography Mailing List

and in these schemes, where does our esteemed moderator get _his_ stamps
from ? remember that not all bulk email is spam by any means...  or do
we end up with whitelists all over the place and the focus of attacks
moves to the ingress to the mailing lists :(

<moan>
I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let
alone a cryptographic one :-(
</moan>

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1

iQA/AwUBP/HWBhfnRQV/feRLEQIyoACgrWwhmPJJYbD7elJL1D7OMOQ5HV4AoIUL
5L3wNC2PEdE3BYlUiwMBps27
=jp2y
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 30 19:58:33 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:58:33 -0800
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <9A3458F6-3B45-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

(I have removed the various other mailing lists. People, please stop 
cross-posting to all of Hettinga's lists, plus Perrypunks, plus this 
CAM-RAM list.)


On Dec 30, 2003, at 7:11 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 07:46 PM 12/30/2003 +0000, Richard Clayton <richard at highwayman.com> 
> wrote:
> > [what about mailing lists]
> Obviously you'd have to whitelist anybody's list you're joining
> if you don't want your spam filters to robo-discard it.
>
>> <moan>
>> I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let
>> alone a cryptographic one :-(
>> </moan>
>
> The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries.
> Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to
> start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists
> and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only
> need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their 
> lists,
> or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the
> signature so that you can discard the forgeries that
> pretend to be from them.

I don't have to whitelist anyone. If mail doesn't get to me, less junk 
to read. I certainly won't be running some "Pennyblacknet" scam 
promulgated by Microsoft.

This "pennyblack" silliness fails utterly to address the basic 
ontological issue: that bits in transit are not being charged by the 
carriers (if by their own choice, fine, but mostly it's because systems 
were set up in a socialist scheme to ensure "free transport"...now that 
the free transport means millions of e-mails are charged nothing, they 
want the acapitalist system fixed, they hope, with either government 
laws or silliness about using memory speeds to compute stamp 
numbers...silliness).

I haven't looked closely at the Pennyblack scheme, but I expect 
cleverness with caches and background tasks will fix things. For 
example, maybe people with idle CPU/memory time will sell their time to 
spammers, at suitably close-to-zero rates. (Essentially equivalent to 
Joe Sixpack selling his machine as a spam machine, which is probably 
likely, and still cheap for the sender.)

Fixing the fundamental market distortion is the best approach to 
pursue. Not my problem.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 30 20:12:59 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 20:12:59 -0800
Subject: [IP] FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com>
Message-ID: <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 30, 2003, at 7:30 AM, Trei, Peter wrote:

> My first thought on reading this was that it was from
> The Onion, but its real.
>
> I guess being well-informed is now a cause for suspicion,
> as it was in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
>
>

Well, they've been working on the mountains of skulls in Iraq (of 
course, we have to destroy the country in order to save the country), 
so going after eyeglass wearers, the college-educated, and those who 
watch PBS is the logical next step.

Today's news is that analysts are saying a successful prosecution of 
Saddam on "war crimes" is going to be nearly impossible, given that he 
was a sovereign leader attacked by a foreign power and that none of the 
"WMD" were found (not that having WMD has been grounds for war crimes 
convictions, else the U.S., U.S.S.R., P.R.C., U.K., France, Zionist 
Entity, and numerous other states would have been prosecuted.).

So, I expect that even as I write CIA toxins experts are preparing what 
will make Saddam go away the quiet way. Look for him to go "of natural 
causes" before any War Crimes Tribunal can ever actually happen.

(This space reserved for former Marxist and now neocon standard-bearer 
James Donald to foam that I am a Saddam lover and a supporter of 
Chomsky.)


--Tim May, who owns both a Farmer's Almanac and a Rand-McNally Atlas 
(apparently the illiterates who recorded the Maximum Leader's thoughts 
on the dangers of "almanacs" may have gotten the two confused, we are 
now hearing, and the order for the droids to search for "almanacs" 
apparently got confused...so now they're looking for evildoers who have 
either of these banned books)




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Dec 30 22:49:43 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 22:49:43 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com> <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 30, 2003, at 10:01 PM, jal at jal.org wrote:

>> (This space reserved for former Marxist and now neocon standard-bearer
>> James Donald to foam that I am a Saddam lover and a supporter of
>> Chomsky.)
>
> I will say that I was a a former marxist. This is not to bow at the 
> feet
> of some better method, nor to trivialize the past.
>
> My awakening, as it were, actually happened here, for better or worse.
> Tim, Hal, Lucky, Uni and to some extent Detweiler all helped
> form my view. More than a few others. This was back in '93, mostly. At
> least, the founding, for me was then. I know some things happened later
> (I saw Uni present his Coke Presentation in 2002 for the first time),
> and I became concerned with business, or at least companies that wanted
> cash, and to be a business later.
>

I never went through a Marxist phase, never even came close. This 
despite entering college in 1970, this despite going to a school where 
the dominant paradigm was leftist (UC Santa Barbara).

I occasionally wonder what my perspective might be had I ever held 
leftist, collectivist thoughts. Oh well, I'll never know.

Thirty years ago I _was_ more charitable about the various groups which 
claim to have been aggrieved, and I dutifully referred to negroes as 
"blacks," argued earnestly with doubting leftists about the importance 
of the profit motive, cited semi-leftists who had reasonable things to 
say about capitalism and liberty and the Constitution.

But over the years, as I have seen a huge chunk of money taken from me 
at gunpoint and given to welfare skanks, inner city negro mutants, gay 
activist buttfucker San Francisco queer groups, foreign nations with 
dictators like Hussein (both of them), Mubarek, Amin, Meir, Rabin, and 
a hundred others, and as education has declined while the pigeons 
demand more handouts...I have become what I call a "vengeance 
libertarian."

While certain theoreticians of 30 years argued for silly ideas about 
how how it is "immoral" to land on another's balcony while falling from 
a building, because the property rights had not been negotiated, and 
thus argued that even self-defense is fraught with moral problems, 
another camp of us were developing the idea that vengeance is good, 
that crypto anarchy will not only let some of us "withdraw from the 
system," a la Galt's Gulch, but also it will let us execute justice on 
those who stole from us.

For every negro welfare momma who took money for the past number of 
years, tell her to pay it all back, with compounded interest, or face 
time in a labor camp to repay what she stole. And if she cannot, or 
will not, which is ovewhelmingly likely, harvest her organs (if any 
takers can be found) and send the leftovers up the smokestacks.

Ditto for the queers who have collected "public health" funds to pay 
for their sodomy. (I have no issue with their choices of partners, 
except that the diseases they contract via their habits, and their 
inability to work, is their problem, not mine. And not any 
corporations, except by the choice of that corporation.)

Vengeance libertarianism is the rational kind. It will result in 20-40 
million of the leeches, the bums, the minority grifters, the so-called 
aggrieved, the winos, the addicts, all being sent up the chimneys.

Hitler had only minor reasons to go after the Jews (many of them had 
manipulated the economy to favor Jews while also preaching a "no 
defense" loser strategy to their untermenschen), we have much more 
reason to go after the tens of millions of underpeople who have been 
using their thugs in government to steal from us. We have much more 
justification today to liquidate the parsites than Hitler ever had.

As for government, I estimate that 99% of those in Congress and 
government agencies in the past 40 years have earned killing. Of 
current Congressvarmints, only two seem to be not guilty. Of low-level 
employees, a bunch are just willing dweebs, and may be able to work off 
their debts in a labor camp for a decade or two. But probably the 
cleaner solution is just to do a thermonuclear cauterization of the 
region surrounding Washington and start fresh from there with a very 
limited government that honors the Constitution instead of catering to 
negroes and queers and welfare addicts.

Crypto anarchy will make delivering justice to  tens of millions a 
reality. The world will learn a lesson when we burn off these 
criminals.


--Tim May
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."--Barry Goldwater




From whellman at mail.utexas.edu  Tue Dec 30 20:52:26 2003
From: whellman at mail.utexas.edu (whellman at mail.utexas.edu)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 22:52:26 -0600
Subject: No subject
Message-ID: <1072846346.3ff2560a3abab@webmailapp4.cc.utexas.edu>

Tim May wrote:

> So, I expect that even as I write CIA toxins experts are preparing what will
> make Saddam go away the quiet way. Look for him to go "of natural causes"
> before any War Crimes Tribunal can ever actually happen.

Wouldn't that be completely obvious? If Saddam just happened to die of "natural
causes" it seems to me like anyone with half a brain would be able to figure
out
what probably happened. Maybe I'm remembering this incorrectly, but I think
that
when he was captured they said he was healthy. Regardless of whether or not
that
was actually the case, if it is in fact the official position, it seems like it
would create troubles for a "natural death" scenario.

What would seem more likely to me is a Jack Ruby-style assassination. US forces
let Iraqi security escort Saddam from prison to the beginning of his trial, for
a nice photo-op. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, these Iraqi guards are still
adjusting and what have you, so oops, somehow a vengeful individual gets
through
and shoots Saddam in front of all the cameras. Sure, we would have rather had
him tried in a just court, but he /did/ make a lot of enemies over the years,
and you know how that works...

Hell, they might not even have to explicitly hire anyone to do it. Just make
sure security is kind of slack and let word of this slip out, and the problem
takes care of itself...

Wes Hellman




From jal at jal.org  Tue Dec 30 19:53:20 2003
From: jal at jal.org (jal at jal.org)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 22:53:20 -0500
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>
References: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com> <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org> <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com> <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <20031231035320.GK32470@clueinc.net>

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 07:46 PM 12/30/2003 +0000, Richard Clayton <richard at highwayman.com> 
> wrote:
> > [what about mailing lists]
> Obviously you'd have to whitelist anybody's list you're joining
> if you don't want your spam filters to robo-discard it.
> 
> ><moan>
> >I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let
> >alone a cryptographic one :-(
> ></moan>

It has always been mostly a technical problem, and only partially a
social problem. 

> The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries.
> Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to
> start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists
> and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only
> need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their lists,
> or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the
> signature so that you can discard the forgeries that
> pretend to be from them.

I had to change my (admittedly simple) whitelisting recently, when
spammers started using the same domain name we do business under, or the
name of partners.

> You'll also see spammers increasingly _joining_ large mailing lists,
> so that they can get around members-only features.
> At least one large mailing list farm on which I've joined a list
> used a Turing-test GIF to make automated list joining difficult,
> and Yahoo limits the number of Yahoogroups you can join in a day,
> but that's the kind of job which you hire groups of Indians
> or other English-speaking third-world-wagers to do for you.

Yep. Spam rates have been creeping up on Debian lists, lately.
Another list I'm on having to do with Oracle has been having similar
problems. 

"Who is a meaningful member?"

That's a tough question, if you don't charge, and if you do, you miss
quite a bit, thus lowering the value. Commons, tragedy, etc.

-j


-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable." 
   -John F. Kennedy


---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From whellman at mail.utexas.edu  Tue Dec 30 21:11:03 2003
From: whellman at mail.utexas.edu (whellman at mail.utexas.edu)
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 23:11:03 -0600
Subject: [IP] FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
Message-ID: <1072847463.3ff25a6788c41@webmailapp3.cc.utexas.edu>

Hrm, apologies for the piss-poor formatting (or so it appears to me) and lack
of subject line in my last post (reproduced below with better formatting
(I hope)). I'm stuck using a webmail interface for the time being and I've not
quite gotten used to it yet.

Wes Hellman


>Tim May wrote:

>>So, I expect that even as I write CIA toxins experts are preparing what will
>>make Saddam go away the quiet way. Look for him to go "of natural causes"
>>before any War Crimes Tribunal can ever actually happen.

>Wouldn't that be completely obvious? If Saddam just happened to die of "natural 
>causes" it seems to me like anyone with half a brain would be able to figure
>out what probably happened. Maybe I'm remembering this incorrectly, but I think
>that when he was captured they said he was healthy. Regardless of whether or not
>that was actually the case, if it is in fact the official position, it seems
>like it would create troubles for a "natural death" scenario.

>What would seem more likely to me is a Jack Ruby-style assassination. US forces
>let Iraqi security escort Saddam from prison to the beginning of his trial, for
>a nice photo-op. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, these Iraqi guards are still
>adjusting and what have you, so oops, somehow a vengeful individual gets
>through and shoots Saddam in front of all the cameras. Sure, we would have
>rather had him tried in a just court, but he /did/ make a lot of enemies over
>the years, and you know how that works...

>Hell, they might not even have to explicitly hire anyone to do it. Just make
>sure security is kind of slack and let word of this slip out, and the problem
>takes care of itself...




From jya at pipeline.com  Wed Dec 31 04:38:04 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 04:38:04 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn 
  amics.com> <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <E1Abcpd-000167-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>

What's pleasurable about reading the fiction of ideologues like
Tim is the smack-down tone of their prejudices. Fake, fake,
fake.

Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with
the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national
security state. No US institution has been uncontaminated
by the wealth generated by the illusion of US enemies and the
raping of the economy to simulate battle with such fictional
threats, at home and abroad.

Welfare is puny by comparison, and Tim's castigation of
it is like the master of the house bitching about health needs
of his servants while requiring them to wipe his ass. Standard
nouveau riche conceit which reveals a fear of again being
a poor asswipe himself, the stench of self-loathing inescapable.

The favorite mindlessness of the ideologue, is to rehash endlessly
comfortable old prejudices, chanting repetitively the same
accusations, avoiding self-criticism in the manner of the
self-righteous, professing of certainty to conceal doubt,
working hard to present an image of confidence, most often
by blaming and attacking easy targets.

The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays
for their perks. And the answer to this fear is always threats
of violence, the dominant paradigm of those who reap the
most benefits from house rules of the United States.

Cloaked, as ever, in blind faith in the "Constitution," or another
rigged fat cat document used to fleece the peasants at home 
and abroad, based as they always are on justification of the 
supremacy of the over-privileged.

Eveready to shoot those who disagree, send them up the
chimneys, the teenie-bopper ideologue struts mightily
against imaginary demons.

Wasn't it a leftist who coined Goldwater's most memorable
phrase? Extremists are all alike, full of shit and hatred, their
own worst enemy. Suicide prone, but afraid to go alone.




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Dec 31 10:05:32 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:05:32 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <E1Abcpd-000167-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>
References: <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn 
  amics.com> <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <E1Abcpd-000167-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <ECBBC32A-3BBB-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 31, 2003, at 4:38 AM, John Young wrote:
> Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
> beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
> wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with
> the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national
> security state. No US institution has been uncontaminated
> by the wealth generated by the illusion of US enemies and the
> raping of the economy to simulate battle with such fictional
> threats, at home and abroad.

Utter nonsense. A corporation paying 45% of its profits in tax (not to 
mention similar high tax rates on tens of thousands of its employees) 
gets little or nothing "back" from the state.

Contrast this to the growing number of "on disability" scams, 
"services" recipients, welfare of various sorts, and general incentives 
not to work or save.

My state, California, has very high income and investment taxes, and 
very high local and property taxes...and yet the taxes can't keep up 
with the giveaways to bums, winos, unwed mothers, queers, beggars, 
"disabled," and general layabouts. And the state even makes it illegal 
to hire people for day jobs (without filling out numerous forms, 
submitting reports to Cal-OSHA, SSA, etc.).

Meanwhile, in our many Mexican towns here in California, unwed Mexican 
mamas push their baby strollers down to La Famiglia and WICC to get 
their "benefits."

I've never taken a dime of "unemployment" or "welfare" or "Social 
Security" or any other money stolen from taxpayers to give to 
layabouts. Meanwhile, I've paid a vast amount of taxes.

I say feed the bums into incinerators. The vilest of them should be 
tortured first.

--Tim May
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the 
expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 31 07:14:18 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:14:18 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3FF22CDB.57848CCC@cdc.gov>
References: <3FF22CDB.57848CCC@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <3FF2E7CA.7080305@thedarkerside.to>

Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> TV stations which exploit the aetherial commons are a tricky case.
>
>The government licensors have to be very careful not to induce
>censorship.
>
>  
>

Yet, the FCC has guidelines what can and cannot be aired. Thus no free 
speech as you claim it to be.

Michael




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 31 08:18:26 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:18:26 -0600
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com> <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20031231161826.GC19712@cybershamanix.com>

   The real problem is that the human race itself is either an alien species
that doesn't belong on this planet, or perhaps just an evolutionary mishap akin
to a cancer that has used far more than it's fair share of world resources. It's
not that just some humans are "useless eaters", it's that all are, and the
Goddess Gaia is clearly hard at work trying to rectify this situation with a
variety of new bioweapons, i.e., AIDS, ebola, etc. which will soon, I'm sure,
reduce the human population as is most necessary, by half, if not
three-quarters, or perhaps just eliminate it all together -- to the wild 
applause of the rest of the Earth. 


 -- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From mkalus at thedarkerside.to  Wed Dec 31 07:23:27 2003
From: mkalus at thedarkerside.to (Michael Kalus)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:23:27 -0500
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn
   amics.com> <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net> 
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <3FF2E9EF.4020400@thedarkerside.to>

Tim May wrote:

> For every negro welfare momma who took money for the past number of 
> years, tell her to pay it all back, with compounded interest, or face 
> time in a labor camp to repay what she stole. And if she cannot, or 
> will not, which is ovewhelmingly likely, harvest her organs (if any 
> takers can be found) and send the leftovers up the smokestacks.
>
> Ditto for the queers who have collected "public health" funds to pay 
> for their sodomy. (I have no issue with their choices of partners, 
> except that the diseases they contract via their habits, and their 
> inability to work, is their problem, not mine. And not any 
> corporations, except by the choice of that corporation.)
>
> Vengeance libertarianism is the rational kind. It will result in 20-40 
> million of the leeches, the bums, the minority grifters, the so-called 
> aggrieved, the winos, the addicts, all being sent up the chimneys.

See,

the problem with your attitude is that it results in a "me me me" approach.

If mankind would act that way we would have been extinct a long time 
ago. A single human being is a rather weak individual. There isn't much 
we could have done.

Only after we managed to work together as a society we were able to 
"conquer" the planet, and most likely ultimatly destroy it for all forms 
of life.

Even though I do not agree with people sitting on their asses and not 
working, I do not think that we should turn our backs to them and ignore 
them. If society casts out the weakest as a strategie of survival than 
something here is horribly wrong.

Your Stereotyping doesn't really help either to make your point as they 
are just simply painting black and white, and literally meaning it that way.

Quality of Life has nothing to do with how much money you make, but how 
you live your life. This seems to be something that is slowly forgotten 
in the western world, especially north america.

M.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 31 10:30:24 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:30:24 -0800
Subject: [IP] FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
In-Reply-To: <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <3FF2A540.13769.A94307A@localhost>

    --
On 30 Dec 2003 at 20:12, Tim May wrote:
> Today's news is that analysts are saying a successful 
> prosecution of Saddam on "war crimes" is going to be nearly 
> impossible, given that he was a sovereign leader attacked by 
> a foreign power

Tim, that is not news analysis, that is commie self delusion.

Saddam murdered huge numbers of civilians, we are still digging 
up the mass graves.

Solution:  Give him to his victims, who certainly have 
jurisdiction. They charge him with mass murder.

That is Bush's stated policy, and it is the obvious legal thing 
to do, plus it serves US interests. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     9dDFeBh50VfyzVEqhAXb0MHbGm7WuW5DGYKiwQca
     4bLVwdNfWF+vJtWfxn4CvL+RK0v8bccov+5B3n1Ad




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 31 10:36:01 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:36:01 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <3FF2A691.10574.A9953C4@localhost>

    --
On 30 Dec 2003 at 22:49, Tim May wrote:
> I never went through a Marxist phase, never even came close.

You are real close right now.

You just issued the "sovereignty" rationalization for Saddam's
crimes, and your peculiar recollection of the speakers at those
Vietnam war demonstrations sounds like a marxist's
recollection, and of course theire are your regular call for
various groups to be sent up the chimney's, which presupposes
some benevolent vanguard group wise enough and virtuous enough
to identify which individuals belong to these undesirable
categories and need to go up the chimneys.

It is not that you never were close to being a communist, it is
that you have never been close to repenting, except on tax and
spend issues.

Apart from taxes, you are still as commie as ever. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     n3CKSWZU6+m1x4nkwGwK0eRrgkUtI5TMsXWBKz5E
     4FWnzNBI3XNIbvyHNKS2VTD1t7nF94SM3amrrE8Lu




From ben at algroup.co.uk  Wed Dec 31 02:43:34 2003
From: ben at algroup.co.uk (Ben Laurie)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:43:34 +0000
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black  PoW
 postage  project
In-Reply-To: <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org> <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com> <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com>
Message-ID: <3FF2A856.50900@algroup.co.uk>

Richard Clayton wrote:
> and in these schemes, where does our esteemed moderator get _his_ stamps
> from ? remember that not all bulk email is spam by any means...  or do
> we end up with whitelists all over the place and the focus of attacks
> moves to the ingress to the mailing lists :(

He uses the stamp that you generated. Each subscruber adds 
cryptography at metzdowd.com as an address they receive mail at. Done. Trivial.

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Dec 31 10:51:29 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:51:29 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F100DU5zxLol1S0000b292@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F100DU5zxLol1S0000b292@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <58304580-3BC2-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 31, 2003, at 9:27 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
> beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
> wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with
> the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national
> security state."
>
> Yes...that's the thing I don't fully get. If we assume that Mr May 
> made a big chunk of $$$ at Intel, isn't it rather naive of him to 
> assume that the same system that helped make Intel the global 
> $$$-generator it is isn't the same system that keeps black folks 
> quiescent and so on? I think it's doubtful that Intel could have 
> become what it is in any other country in the world.

What's this nonsense about "keeping black folks quiescent and so on"/

I saw "minorities" practically float under the Golden Gate Bridge in 
inner tubes, coming from Vietnam. A few years after arriving, they were 
opening small shops and restaurants, then leading the way to opening 
"screwdriver shops" for building white box PCs.

As with most past "minorities"--Irish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, 
etc.--they buckled down and worked their butts off, often living 5-10 
to an apartment, saving for the day when they could buy their own 
house. Huge parts of Sunnyvale and Cupertino, to name just a few of the 
communities where this happened, became largely Asian during the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the "black folk" kept listening to Rev. Jess Jackson and 
Rev. Al Sharpton tell them that they were owed reparations, that they 
were owed a series of "entitlements." No suprise that a large fraction 
of negro teens subscribe to the view that "reading be for whitey." In 
fact, negroes have invented a whole series of insult terms for those 
who study too much, for those who break out of the "field worker" 
status: Uncle Toms, Oreos, etc.

Imagine where the Asians would be if Asian kids who did well in science 
and math were taunted as race traitors?

Today, Intel's engineering staff is about 75% "minority," mostly 
Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Pakistanis, and assorted other 
"minorities." More than half of all entering students at Berkeley, in 
all majors summed together, are Asian.

At Intel, we had very, very, very few blacks apply for engineering 
jobs. I recall three of them, and one of them was from Sierra Leone, 
not the U.S. All three left after various problems of their own making.

When I was interviewing candidates for engineering, I interviewed a 
bunch of Asians, about the same number of whites, and no negroes. Not 
by my choice, but because the negroes had largely ghettoized themselves 
into Black Studies, Sociology, and Yoruba/East African languages, or 
had not made it to graduation.

There are no negroes in senior high tech positions at any of the 
companies I am in investor in for some very obvious reasons.

"Math be for whitey. Reading be for whitey. We be owed repa-ations for 
diskiminashun!!"

>
> Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life 
> (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and 
> landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or 
> physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as 
> there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his 
> $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's 
> asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can 
> easily afford.

Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT "payed for by somebody else's 
taxes." (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for 
by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore 
to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and 
I can say precisely what role government contracts played: none.)

Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each 
year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll 
plus property plus sales plus.....) see the minority layabouts working 
not one _day_ for their "entitlements" and "benefits" and "social 
services."

Do the math, unless you think math be for whitey.
>

>  Therefore, any thought system that has as a corrollary "...and 40 
> million negros should die..." should immediately be suspect of having 
> been based on a foundation of non-mathematical muck, likely relating 
> to penis envy and getting rejected by some hot black chick Mr May 
> tried to date back in 1957 or whatever.
>

You are contemptible.


--Tim May




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Dec 31 08:21:10 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 11:21:10 EST
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
Message-ID: <15c.2a35ab04.2d245176@aol.com>

In a message dated 12/31/2003 4:44:34 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
jya at pipeline.com writes:

> Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
> beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
> wealthy individuals like himself


Government favoritism? It sounds like you don't believe a raising tide lifts 
all ships. Tim is entitled to keep the wealth he has earned, when it's taken 
its called stealing.

> The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays
> for their perks. 

What commie nonsense.  

> Wasn't it a leftist who coined Goldwater's most memorable
> phrase? 
> 


The libertarian Karl Hess wrote most of Goldwater's speeches, but the quote 
you mention was one popularized by Ben Franklin who in turn was using an 
unattributed Latin quote.

Regards,  Matt Gaylor-




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Dec 31 12:06:29 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:06:29 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
In-Reply-To: <58304580-3BC2-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <BAY7-F100DU5zxLol1S0000b292@hotmail.com>
  <58304580-3BC2-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <D297A6AF-3BCC-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote:
>>
>> Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life 
>> (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires 
>> and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or 
>> physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as 
>> there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his 
>> $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's 
>> asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can 
>> easily afford.
>
> Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT "payed for by somebody else's 
> taxes." (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid 
> for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect 
> lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the 
> micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: 
> none.)
>
> Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each 
> year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll 
> plus property plus sales plus.....) see the minority layabouts working 
> not one _day_ for their "entitlements" and "benefits" and "social 
> services."

I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing 
meme in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, 
twentysomething, self-described "geeks") that somehow government built 
or paid for technology, business, high tech, etc.

What built our "system" was essentially a _compact_, an agreement 
codified in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and even centuries of 
common law that a bunch of things would happen:

-- that interference in the business choices of a business would be 
minimal

-- that failing businesses would not be bailed out (and, indeed, none 
of the leading companies in 1850 last much beyond 1900, few in business 
in 1900 are still dominant, etc.)

-- that owners, employers, etc. and their employees, customers, etc. 
would themselves negotiate wages, prices, benefits, etc., without a 
top-down order about who might be employed, at what rates, etc.

(This of course began to change when the socialists assumed power in 
the 1930s, and then dramatically changed when the Great Society 
socialists assumed power in 1961. It then came to be seen as the role 
of government to set wages, to force businesses to deal with those they 
wished not to, to let debtors off without repaying debts or even having 
their kneecaps smashed, etc. This was the start of the Era of 
Entitlements, when some ethnic groups decided that reading be for 
whitey and that they would coast on freebies paid for by the "suckas" 
still working.)

This compact, based essentially on voluntary interaction in trade, 
employment, and investment, worked quite well for many decades. This 
compact, this way of doing things which is usually called "liberty" or 
"laissez faire," was not "built" by government...until relatively 
recent times the size of government was small and tax rates for most 
workers and investors were low. What made the system work was that the 
system largely worked on the "non-initiation of force" principle, which 
is what begets voluntary transactions. If a person thought he was not 
being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own 
business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their 
option. Customers were free to purchase or not.

The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that 
both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of 
capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made 
companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which 
needed little or no government role, and that this makes government 
intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim 
that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in 
companies are profiting at the expense of the "less privileged."

"You are successful because of the taxes paid by the less-privileged, 
so now it is right that you be taxed at high rates so that welfare 
benefits can be maintained." is the essential message here.

This is hokum. Very few U.S. or even European and Asian businesses were 
built with public funds. Neither Sony nor Honda, two examples of 
post-war successes, were built by MITI (MITI, in fact, frequently 
criticized Sony and Honda for the courses they pursued...meanwhile MITI 
was funding the now-defunct TRON microprocessor and the Fifth 
Generation Computer, utterly missing out on workstations, PCs, modern 
microprocessors, CAD, routers, and the Internet).

None of Intel's achievements, whether the first dynamic RAM (the 1101), 
the first EPROM, the first microprocessor, the first single board 
computer, the first...., etc., was paid for by any kind of DARPA or DOD 
or government grant. In fact, the military was pissed off at us for not 
developing their kind of "mil-spec" components, for not bidding on 
military contracts. We made our products by selling to those who wanted 
to buy them. Period. And we risked our savings by buying stock in the 
company and others of its kind.

Make a list of companies of the past 50 years, in the U.S., Japan, and 
Europe, and virtually none of them had significant U.S. funding. Sure, 
some of them had a lot of government purchases...aircraft companies, 
for example, will almost always end up selling heavily to national 
governments. But Boeing beat out Convair (on the 707 vs. 880 race) for 
very basic reasons. Likewise, Boeing again "bet the company" on the 
747, between 1965 and 1970. It succeeded, and only partly because of 
government purchases. Mostly it was just competency.

And so on. The best examples are in Silicon Valley, now being taxed at 
cumulative rates exceeding 75%. For what? To pay mostly for things they 
will not, and cannot, ever benefit from.

This is one of the reasons Intel and other companies are expanding so 
rapidly in other countries, places where the work force is not made up 
of increasingly illiterate high school kids, mall rats, and whiggers. 
In China and India and Malaysia they have no translation of "reading be 
for whitey."

In 30 years America and Europe are going to be in a precarious position.

--Tim May


"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the
people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some
rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New 
York Historical Society, October 7, 1789




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 31 09:27:57 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:27:57 -0500
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
Message-ID: <BAY7-F100DU5zxLol1S0000b292@hotmail.com>

"Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with
the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national
security state."

Yes...that's the thing I don't fully get. If we assume that Mr May made a 
big chunk of $$$ at Intel, isn't it rather naive of him to assume that the 
same system that helped make Intel the global $$$-generator it is isn't the 
same system that keeps black folks quiescent and so on? I think it's 
doubtful that Intel could have become what it is in any other country in the 
world.

Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life (from 
his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and landmines 
and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or physical needs. So 
this system has served him pretty well, insofar as there was a place for him 
to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. That system was payed for by 
somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking (well, demanding from) him for 
some $$$ that he apparently can easily afford.

This doesn't necessarily annhilate his "arguments" or main thesis, but in 
this light the call for the killing of millions so that he can afford a few 
more landmines seems perplexing.

As for the middle east and US foreign policy, I'd be more convinced if Mr 
May and others pointed to that as a main reason to stop paying taxes and 
back out of the system. In other words, that there may or may not be any 
'inherent' flaw to a fairly light form of "statism", but that it's defacto 
application (in the case of the US) is creating a seriously destabilized 
global political environment, while decreasingly serving (though a piss-poor 
education system) those that ought to benefit from taxes and spending. (This 
was why I became interested in "Crypto-Anarchy".)


Of course, I'll add the usual boiler-plate notion invoked by physicists, 
mathematicians, and hard-scientists almost universally, in their heart of 
hearts: Only mathematics and experimental physics (as a thought system or 
philisophy) are truly reliable and able to make definitive conclusions about 
the world...all other so-called systems of thought (including sociology, 
political 'science', economics and so on) are half-baked hodge podges at 
best. Therefore, any thought system that has as a corrollary "...and 40 
million negros should die..." should immediately be suspect of having been 
based on a foundation of non-mathematical muck, likely relating to penis 
envy and getting rejected by some hot black chick Mr May tried to date back 
in 1957 or whatever.

-TD








>From: John Young <jya at pipeline.com>
>To: cypherpunks at algebra.com
>Subject: Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
>Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 04:38:04 -0800
>
>What's pleasurable about reading the fiction of ideologues like
>Tim is the smack-down tone of their prejudices. Fake, fake,
>fake.
>
>Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
>beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
>wealthy individuals like himself, especially those associated with
>the greeders of the defense industry, rather the national
>security state. No US institution has been uncontaminated
>by the wealth generated by the illusion of US enemies and the
>raping of the economy to simulate battle with such fictional
>threats, at home and abroad.
>
>Welfare is puny by comparison, and Tim's castigation of
>it is like the master of the house bitching about health needs
>of his servants while requiring them to wipe his ass. Standard
>nouveau riche conceit which reveals a fear of again being
>a poor asswipe himself, the stench of self-loathing inescapable.
>
>The favorite mindlessness of the ideologue, is to rehash endlessly
>comfortable old prejudices, chanting repetitively the same
>accusations, avoiding self-criticism in the manner of the
>self-righteous, professing of certainty to conceal doubt,
>working hard to present an image of confidence, most often
>by blaming and attacking easy targets.
>
>The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays
>for their perks. And the answer to this fear is always threats
>of violence, the dominant paradigm of those who reap the
>most benefits from house rules of the United States.
>
>Cloaked, as ever, in blind faith in the "Constitution," or another
>rigged fat cat document used to fleece the peasants at home
>and abroad, based as they always are on justification of the
>supremacy of the over-privileged.
>
>Eveready to shoot those who disagree, send them up the
>chimneys, the teenie-bopper ideologue struts mightily
>against imaginary demons.
>
>Wasn't it a leftist who coined Goldwater's most memorable
>phrase? Extremists are all alike, full of shit and hatred, their
>own worst enemy. Suicide prone, but afraid to go alone.

_________________________________________________________________
Enjoy a special introductory offer for dial-up Internet access  limited 
time only! http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Dec 31 12:45:51 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:45:51 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <15c.2a35ab04.2d245176@aol.com>
References: <15c.2a35ab04.2d245176@aol.com>
Message-ID: <5226A355-3BD2-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Dec 31, 2003, at 8:21 AM, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 12/31/2003 4:44:34 AM Eastern Standard Time,
> jya at pipeline.com writes:
>
>> Nowhere in Tim's spew is the recognition that the largest
>> beneficiaries of government favoritism are corporations and
>> wealthy individuals like himself
>
>
> Government favoritism? It sounds like you don't believe a raising tide 
> lifts
> all ships. Tim is entitled to keep the wealth he has earned, when it's 
> taken
> its called stealing.

I prefer NOT to use language like "a raising tide lifts all ships," as 
it essentially endorses the pragmatist view supporting capitalism.

Rather, I favor the fundamentalist view that if Alice and Bob make a 
transaction, be it a trade of goods or labor or whatever, it is not 
right/wise/proper/constitutional to take some fraction of the alleged 
profit to give to someone else. It is "redistribution" that I am mostly 
arguing against, for multiple reasons. (Including the corrosive effects 
of teaching a growing fraction of the population that they are 
"entitled" to things.)

I don't claim this is a "right" implicit in the fabric of space-time, 
or handed down by Moloch or YHWH or some other supernatural 
myth-figure. Rather, societies which have taken money from workers to 
give to others to sit at home and breed or eat Doritos while watching 
Oprah have failed.

Jamestown was a recent example, with the initial settlers adopting the 
usual "from each according to his ability, to each according to his 
need" arrangement. It failed miserably, as various settlers found good 
reasons--exhaustion, the hot sun, to much to drink the night before, 
sex, or just laziness--to not show up for work parties. This meant 
those working had to work even harder. A vicious circle, much like the 
one now facing American industry, where more and more workers are 
claiming bogus "disability" and where the insurance costs are driving 
companies out of the country. And where some ethnic communities treat 
those who work and study as "suckas," as "Oreos."

Jamestown's solution was a harsh one: "no work, no eat."

This sounds harsh ("what about cripples?"), but it's basically the only 
stable attractor, in a Schelling point sense, that exists, along with 
the other attractor, where a growing percentage are not working, on 
disability, on unemployment, etc. and the remaining workers are 
carrying a heavier and heavier burden.

This Schelling point analysis applies to a lot of our so-called 
"rights," as with religious expression (where the non-coercion 
principle is that neighbors will come to a "territorial boundary" 
arrangement not to interfere with the religious views of each other, as 
dogs might reach a territorial boundary arrangment with other dogs.

So the issue is not "a rising tide lifts all ships" as the defense of 
capitalism, the issue is one of stable attractors.

That this lifts all ships is because, as Jamestown learned, having 
nearly all able-bodied people working to grow crops and make things and 
trade is, for nearly all involved, better than having 30% of the 
workforce slaving away in the hot sun so that 70% can find excuses not 
to be working.

That is not a stable attractor. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend 
to work."

People like Tyler Durden, James Donald, and John Young are using the 
tired old cliches about how it is "society that paid for business" and 
hence "society" has some right to take a cut of each transaction 
between Alice and Bob.


>
>> The rich fear the poor, and rightly so, for they know who pays
>> for their perks.
>
> What commie nonsense.
>

A lot of collectivists here on the Cypherpunks list.

Chortle. For them to think that strong crypto means more freebies and 
entitlements for "the poor" is hilarious to see.

--Tim May




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 31 11:14:01 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:14:01 -0600
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312311358020.2907-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
  om>
References: <20031231161826.GC19712@cybershamanix.com>
  <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312311358020.2907-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>
Message-ID: <20031231191401.GA19843@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 01:59:50PM -0500, Sunder wrote:
> If those are your beliefs, then by all means, set the first example, and
> go kill yourself.  Better yet, sacrifice yourself to your goddess...  By
> doing so, you'll also earn yourself a Darwin Award... unless you've
> already fathered kids...  But from your tone of voice, I'd say you've
> probably castrated yourself years ago.

    No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human?


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Dec 31 10:59:50 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:59:50 -0500 (est)
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <20031231161826.GC19712@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312311358020.2907-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

If those are your beliefs, then by all means, set the first example, and
go kill yourself.  Better yet, sacrifice yourself to your goddess...  By
doing so, you'll also earn yourself a Darwin Award... unless you've
already fathered kids...  But from your tone of voice, I'd say you've
probably castrated yourself years ago.

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    The real problem is that the human race itself is either an alien species
> that doesn't belong on this planet, or perhaps just an evolutionary mishap akin
> to a cancer that has used far more than it's fair share of world resources. 




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Dec 31 14:09:43 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 14:09:43 -0800
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <5226A355-3BD2-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <15c.2a35ab04.2d245176@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3FF2D8A7.24399.B5CFD22@localhost>

    --
On 31 Dec 2003 at 12:45, Tim May wrote:
> People like Tyler Durden, James Donald, and John Young are
> using the tired old cliches about how it is "society that
> paid for business" and hence "society" has some right to take
> a cut of each transaction between Alice and Bob.

The proposition that I am saying such things is considerably
sillier than the proposition that you are saying such things.

you have left out your reasoning as to how I am supposedly
saying such things.

Perhaps your logic is "James Donald says that rulers have no
right to sovereignty, thus it is OK to whack Saddam, thus it is
OK to tax and conscript to whack Saddam"  ?


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     ldyLHi1NpqKPMhX9XAgAYoGo4H6JIR+Ha6goGIdN
     4MjfF7Xt9wIsNTh9Ttnln47I3YfYOfw8RMzuH0+sT




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 31 11:17:12 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 14:17:12 -0500
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
Message-ID: <BAY7-F55QAiPgTN4tNN00065729@hotmail.com>

James Donald wrote...

"You just issued the "sovereignty" rationalization for Saddam's
crimes,"

Hey...I just heard that a country that's even MORE free than the US has 
decided to liberate us from our oppressors in Washington DC. Don't stand on 
your balcony to cheer for them as they roll through your town, 
however...some of the "instigators" that support the old regime have been 
causing trouble, so you're bound to mistaken for one of them and get shot. 
Just remember: this is so you can be FREE....

-TD


>From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com>
>To: cypherpunks at algebra.com
>Subject: Re: Vengeance Libertarianism
>Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 10:36:01 -0800
>
>     --
>On 30 Dec 2003 at 22:49, Tim May wrote:
> > I never went through a Marxist phase, never even came close.
>
>You are real close right now.
>
>You just issued the "sovereignty" rationalization for Saddam's
>crimes, and your peculiar recollection of the speakers at those
>Vietnam war demonstrations sounds like a marxist's
>recollection, and of course theire are your regular call for
>various groups to be sent up the chimney's, which presupposes
>some benevolent vanguard group wise enough and virtuous enough
>to identify which individuals belong to these undesirable
>categories and need to go up the chimneys.
>
>It is not that you never were close to being a communist, it is
>that you have never been close to repenting, except on tax and
>spend issues.
>
>Apart from taxes, you are still as commie as ever.
>
>     --digsig
>          James A. Donald
>      6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
>      n3CKSWZU6+m1x4nkwGwK0eRrgkUtI5TMsXWBKz5E
>      4FWnzNBI3XNIbvyHNKS2VTD1t7nF94SM3amrrE8Lu

_________________________________________________________________
Have fun customizing MSN Messenger  learn how here!  
http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/reach_customize




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Dec 31 12:48:21 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 15:48:21 -0500 (est)
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <20031231191401.GA19843@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312311547140.2907-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Damn, and I was hoping to read about you in the next Darwin Awards... oh
well... 

Ok, so, you're not human, you're a lunatic.  Howl at the moon much lately?


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

> 
>     No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human?




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Wed Dec 31 07:56:34 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 16:56:34 +0100 (CET)
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydyn
   amics.com> <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net> 
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <0312311642520.0@somehost.domainz.com>

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Tim May wrote:

> Vengeance libertarianism is the rational kind. It will result in 20-40
> million of the leeches, the bums, the minority grifters, the so-called
> aggrieved, the winos, the addicts, all being sent up the chimneys.

It will result in couple dozen (at most) vengeance "libertatians" being
steamrolled over by the masses of those they so despise, after first few
shots.

Face it, you're outgunned.

> The world will learn a lesson when we burn off these criminals.

Who "we"? Is there somebody other who thinks it's a viable idea, or is it
a grammatical form of the "We the King" type?




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Dec 31 15:50:01 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 17:50:01 -0600
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312311547140.2907-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
  om>
References: <20031231191401.GA19843@cybershamanix.com>
  <Pine.BSO.4.21.0312311547140.2907-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>
Message-ID: <20031231235001.GA20388@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 03:48:21PM -0500, Sunder wrote:
> > >
> >     No, I have offspring. But what makes you think I'm human?
> >
> Ok, so, you're not human, you're a lunatic. 

   Well, with an emphasis on the "luna" ...

> Howl at the moon much lately?
> 
    
    As a matter of fact, yes. Good for the soul, and "what ails ye". Also often
a fairly sociable event, at least among my volken. 



-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Wed Dec 31 17:19:44 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 20:19:44 -0500
Subject: Singers jailed for lyrics
In-Reply-To: <3FF22CDB.57848CCC@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031231191300.00a75ac0@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 05:56 PM 12/30/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>At 07:48 PM 12/26/03 -0500, Michael Kalus wrote:
> >Then I guess you better start liberating the world.
>
>If I were a neocon asshole, I would.  Instead, I regard liberation as a
>local task, and interfering with sovereignty as the initiation of force,
>ie an act of war.

Well, clearly bombing and invading them was an initiation of force, in the 
most literal sense--we shot first.  But while I can see that individuals 
have a right that you violate by initiating force against them, I don't see 
how that can apply to governments, especially governments whose main method 
of keeping power involves terrorizing their citizens.  Did the Iraqi 
government have a right to stay in power, or at least not to be 
invaded?  Where did that right come from?  From the rights of its people, 
most of whom apparently didn't have a hell of a lot good to say about 
it?  (That doesn't mean they like *us*, of course.)

In the most morally neutral case, this is like one criminal gang attacking 
another.  If the Sopprano family invades the Bozini family's turf, takes 
over their protection rackets, and hunts down their godfather, it could be 
messy, and it really will be an initiation of force in the most literal 
sense.  But is this the same kind of "initiation of force" that we normally 
talk about when, say, a mugger knocks me over the head and takes my laptop 
and wallet? (And of course, it's not that morally neutral.  It's more like 
a bunch of vigilantes from the neighborhood next door getting rid of the 
gang running your neighborhood, for reasons of their own, but probably to 
your benefit.)

None of this means it made any sense for us to invade Iraq, or that we did 
it mainly to liberate oppressed Iraqi citizens.  But I think using the same 
kind of language for interactions between individuals and between 
governments is a mistake.

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Wed Dec 31 17:45:50 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 20:45:50 -0500
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <20031231161826.GC19712@cybershamanix.com>
References: <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A064A7434@exna07.securitydynamics.com>
  <9EB2B0E8-3B47-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <20031231060154.GL32470@clueinc.net>
  <83EFD866-3B5D-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031231203012.04bcba30@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 10:18 AM 12/31/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>It's
>not that just some humans are "useless eaters", it's that all are, and the
>Goddess Gaia is clearly hard at work trying to rectify this situation with a
>variety of new bioweapons, i.e., AIDS, ebola, etc. which will soon, I'm sure,
>reduce the human population as is most necessary, by half, if not
>three-quarters, or perhaps just eliminate it all together -- to the wild
>applause of the rest of the Earth.

You do know she's been trying the same scheme for several hundred thousand 
years, right?  As an artist, I think she's in a creative decline.  Ebola is 
picturesque and flashy, but not all that scary unless your funeral rites 
involve lots of contact with the blood of your dearly departed.  AIDS is 
more subtle, rather like syphlus before good antibiotics, but it's not her 
best work.  Even SARS is Yet Another Coughed Contagion.  If I recall 
correctly, smallpox got 90% of the American Indians who were exposed, and 
measles killed something like 1/3 of Roman citizens.  Bubonic and pneumonic 
plague swept through European cities and wiped out huge numbers of people, 
and they're still with us, though mainly places with lousy public health 
and sanitation.  And lets not forget her original innovation for 
discouraging cities, death-by-crapping-out-all-your-electrolytes.

If diseases get us, they won't be Gaia's work, but rather some of her more 
modern imitators in the bioweapons labs of various countries.  Like every 
great artist, she's spawned a host of followers, mostly not too 
imaginative, but some of whom may take her ideas and techniques to 
undreamt-of levels.

...
>Harmon Seaver

--John (*cough, cough*) Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Dec 31 17:53:25 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 20:53:25 -0500
Subject: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
Message-ID: <BAY7-F101ARf3sllNY300001fa1@hotmail.com>

Tim May wrote (and fairly cogently, I might add)...

"If a person thought he was not being paid enough, it was his option to go 
elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or 
lower prices, their option. Customers were free to purchase or not."

This is an idealization, of course, and to the extent that it was true I 
agree with some of the main conclusions here. Another idealization is that, 
once in a while, someone will get caught in a downsizing or without a job 
for a while. Knowing that some small cushion existed allowed those with 
fairly minimal capital to take the kinds of risks implicit in what you're 
talking about.


"The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both 
are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are 
popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was 
*government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no government 
role, and that this makes government intervention in business justifiable. 
Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard and risked 
their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the expense of the 
"less privileged." "

Well. I wasn't exactly trying to say that. At least, "Intel was successful 
because the government gave it tax breaks..."...that's what I'm NOT saying. 
However, add my point above to the notion that the whole American social 
fabric probably can not be separated into small discete chunks, and you get 
my point. Or at least, the logic that compels one to conclude that the 
murder of 40 million African Americans is justifiable should somehow make 
one take those notions with a grain of salt.

Intel or National Semiconductor doesn't and never did exist in a vacuum. 
They were started by great engineers and physicsts that were educated in 
places like Stanford, or that worked in Bell Labs. And this isn't an 
argument for tax-and-spend 'statism' per se, but simply that there's a 
social/political/economic environment that can't be diced and sliced. You'd 
dice and slice an African American population, but then again it's from 
these inner cities that much of popular American culture has arisen (ie, 
between pro sports, various forms of music and so on...). Who knows the 
impact these people have had in terms of providing 'content' for the chips 
and TV screens and so on.

Am I therefore arguing that this justifies US tax policies? Hell no. I might 
bother trying if I thought $$$-towards-blacks amounted to anything more than 
mere mollification and storage. (Hell, my household probably pays more than 
the whole rest of the Cypherpunks list in annual taxes...including May, I'd 
bet.)

No, blacks aren't the enemy. I'm not even convinced that the basic notion of 
the "state" is the enemy. But those who currently adminster the state and 
utilize it for various ends have morphed themselves, and (most likely) the 
American State into the defacto enemy that billions of people throughout the 
world are starting to resent. For that reason I'd like to cut out the cancer 
that eats my hard-earned resources and utlizes them to benefit a preselected 
few.

-TD

PS: Is there any comment that Mr May would like to profer on the issue of 
having been rejected by some hot black tail back in the day? (ie, aside from 
"I'd like to see you are your infant children stripped of epidermis and 
dipped in seasalt")






>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks
>Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:06:29 -0800
>
>On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote:
>>>
>>>Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life 
>>>(from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and 
>>>landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or 
>>>physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as 
>>>there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. 
>>>That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking 
>>>(well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can easily 
>>>afford.
>>
>>Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT "payed for by somebody else's 
>>taxes." (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for by 
>>DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore to 
>>the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and I can 
>>say precisely what role government contracts played: none.)
>>
>>Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each year 
>>to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll plus 
>>property plus sales plus.....) see the minority layabouts working not one 
>>_day_ for their "entitlements" and "benefits" and "social services."
>
>I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing meme 
>in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, 
>twentysomething, self-described "geeks") that somehow government built or 
>paid for technology, business, high tech, etc.
>
>What built our "system" was essentially a _compact_, an agreement codified 
>in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and even centuries of common law that 
>a bunch of things would happen:
>
>-- that interference in the business choices of a business would be minimal
>
>-- that failing businesses would not be bailed out (and, indeed, none of 
>the leading companies in 1850 last much beyond 1900, few in business in 
>1900 are still dominant, etc.)
>
>-- that owners, employers, etc. and their employees, customers, etc. would 
>themselves negotiate wages, prices, benefits, etc., without a top-down 
>order about who might be employed, at what rates, etc.
>
>(This of course began to change when the socialists assumed power in the 
>1930s, and then dramatically changed when the Great Society socialists 
>assumed power in 1961. It then came to be seen as the role of government to 
>set wages, to force businesses to deal with those they wished not to, to 
>let debtors off without repaying debts or even having their kneecaps 
>smashed, etc. This was the start of the Era of Entitlements, when some 
>ethnic groups decided that reading be for whitey and that they would coast 
>on freebies paid for by the "suckas" still working.)
>
>This compact, based essentially on voluntary interaction in trade, 
>employment, and investment, worked quite well for many decades. This 
>compact, this way of doing things which is usually called "liberty" or 
>"laissez faire," was not "built" by government...until relatively recent 
>times the size of government was small and tax rates for most workers and 
>investors were low. What made the system work was that the system largely 
>worked on the "non-initiation of force" principle, which is what begets 
>voluntary transactions. If a person thought he was not being paid enough, 
>it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a 
>business wanted to raise or lower prices, their option. Customers were free 
>to purchase or not.
>
>The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both 
>are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are 
>popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was 
>*government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no 
>government role, and that this makes government intervention in business 
>justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard 
>and risked their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the 
>expense of the "less privileged."
>
>"You are successful because of the taxes paid by the less-privileged, so 
>now it is right that you be taxed at high rates so that welfare benefits 
>can be maintained." is the essential message here.
>
>This is hokum. Very few U.S. or even European and Asian businesses were 
>built with public funds. Neither Sony nor Honda, two examples of post-war 
>successes, were built by MITI (MITI, in fact, frequently criticized Sony 
>and Honda for the courses they pursued...meanwhile MITI was funding the 
>now-defunct TRON microprocessor and the Fifth Generation Computer, utterly 
>missing out on workstations, PCs, modern microprocessors, CAD, routers, and 
>the Internet).
>
>None of Intel's achievements, whether the first dynamic RAM (the 1101), the 
>first EPROM, the first microprocessor, the first single board computer, the 
>first...., etc., was paid for by any kind of DARPA or DOD or government 
>grant. In fact, the military was pissed off at us for not developing their 
>kind of "mil-spec" components, for not bidding on military contracts. We 
>made our products by selling to those who wanted to buy them. Period. And 
>we risked our savings by buying stock in the company and others of its 
>kind.
>
>Make a list of companies of the past 50 years, in the U.S., Japan, and 
>Europe, and virtually none of them had significant U.S. funding. Sure, some 
>of them had a lot of government purchases...aircraft companies, for 
>example, will almost always end up selling heavily to national governments. 
>But Boeing beat out Convair (on the 707 vs. 880 race) for very basic 
>reasons. Likewise, Boeing again "bet the company" on the 747, between 1965 
>and 1970. It succeeded, and only partly because of government purchases. 
>Mostly it was just competency.
>
>And so on. The best examples are in Silicon Valley, now being taxed at 
>cumulative rates exceeding 75%. For what? To pay mostly for things they 
>will not, and cannot, ever benefit from.
>
>This is one of the reasons Intel and other companies are expanding so 
>rapidly in other countries, places where the work force is not made up of 
>increasingly illiterate high school kids, mall rats, and whiggers. In China 
>and India and Malaysia they have no translation of "reading be for whitey."
>
>In 30 years America and Europe are going to be in a precarious position.
>
>--Tim May
>
>
>"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the
>people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some
>rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
>majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New 
>York Historical Society, October 7, 1789

_________________________________________________________________
Take advantage of our limited-time introductory offer for dial-up Internet 
access. http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup




From esj at harvee.org  Wed Dec 31 18:08:01 2003
From: esj at harvee.org (Eric S. Johansson)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 21:08:01 -0500
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black 
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <3FF2A856.50900@algroup.co.uk>
References: <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <$Z2sQuJGYd8$EADj@highwayman.com> <3FF2A856.50900@algroup.co.uk>
Message-ID: <3FF38101.3080107@harvee.org>

Ben Laurie wrote:

> Richard Clayton wrote:
> 
>> and in these schemes, where does our esteemed moderator get _his_ stamps
>> from ? remember that not all bulk email is spam by any means...  or do
>> we end up with whitelists all over the place and the focus of attacks
>> moves to the ingress to the mailing lists :(
> 
> 
> He uses the stamp that you generated. Each subscruber adds 
> cryptography at metzdowd.com as an address they receive mail at. Done. 
> Trivial.

take a look at my headers and you'll see a real example.

---eric (No. 1 generator of stamps on the Internet)

-- 
Speech recognition in use.  Incorrect endings, words, and case is
closer than it appears




From kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com  Wed Dec 31 19:13:13 2003
From: kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com (John Kelsey)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 22:13:13 -0500
Subject: [camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black
  PoW postage  project
In-Reply-To: <9A3458F6-3B45-11D8-8654-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <aT5vaIe86J8qbrTpk02@x> <3FF184C2.9070002@harvee.org>
  <Pine.GSO.4.58.0312300939100.19005@digistar.com>
  <5.1.0.14.2.20031230190058.029c8d90@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20031231215608.04bc9670@pop.ix.netcom.com>

At 07:58 PM 12/30/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:

>This "pennyblack" silliness fails utterly to address the basic ontological 
>issue: that bits in transit are not being charged by the carriers (if by 
>their own choice, fine, but mostly it's because systems were set up in a 
>socialist scheme to ensure "free transport"...now that the free transport 
>means millions of e-mails are charged nothing, they want the acapitalist 
>system fixed, they hope, with either government laws or silliness about 
>using memory speeds to compute stamp numbers...silliness).

The cost in machine resources to transmit one more e-mail is *really* 
small.  The cost I care about is my time, specifically my time spent 
leafing through my likely-spam folder checking to see if someone I actually 
want to hear from sent me something worth seeing.  (This is a hassle, 
because sometimes people e-mail me with questions or comments about papers 
I've written, and I'd like to see those e-mails.  And those e-mails can 
come from all over the world, can have oddly-worded subject lines, etc.)

If spammers had to pay for the true cost of transferring all their e-mails, 
spam might slow down a bit, but it wouldn't stop; bandwidth is too 
cheap.  If they had to pay for the true cost of all the time they wasted, 
spam would be seriously rare.  (So would telemarketing calls, and probably 
even junk mail; those are businesses built on shifting many of the real 
costs of their marketing effort onto their targets.)

The only way to make spammers pay for the cost of my time is to set up some 
scheme where your initial e-mail to me costs some amount I set, and then I 
can let you in after that.  But that's a lot harder to set up than hashcash 
or the memory-bound schemes.  And certainly, doing something that takes one 
second on a reasonably fast machine won't make sending e-mail unusable even 
for fairly slow machines, while it will make spamming require getting 
access to lots of other peoples' machines, either by paying them or by 
taking them over remotely.

...
>--Tim May

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD  BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259




From xtwej at blueconsultants.com  Wed Dec 31 16:28:34 2003
From: xtwej at blueconsultants.com (Edward Coleman)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 22:28:34 -0200
Subject: MOSAIC 
Message-ID: <727253062.51168123428130@blueconsultants.com>

Have you ever wished for a high dollar Watch?


We have the problem solved for you!

We provide all the top quality 
for a very small precentage of the expense.

www.miasjuejj.com




From miqejuneaufew at ejuneau.net  Wed Dec 31 18:48:19 2003
From: miqejuneaufew at ejuneau.net (Adolph Gould)
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 01:48:19 -0100
Subject: Become fit and happy again
Message-ID: <695668140.06348208426868@thhebat.net>


Anatrim – The latest and most attracting flesh loss product is now easily available – As were seen on ABC.

Do you count up all the situations when you appeal to yourself to do anything to get rid of this desperately growing pounds of fat? Luckily, now no major offering is required. Thanks to Anatrim, the ground-breaking pound-melting mixture, you can achieve naturally health mode of life and become really thinner. Have a look at what our customers write!

"I hate to admit it but I was an awful food addict. 

I swallowed up all this rubbish 

and was unable to stop. 

This ruinous passion stopped when I started course of taking Anatrim! 

Holy God,

 my craving for food abated, 

mood improved and I turned to the happiest person in the world 18 pounds in 2.7 months. 

So, I can tell you now I turned to the happiest person!"
 

Victoria K., Las Vegas

 
"Since my early childhood I was a bulky boy. 

You can't fancy how I abhorred being derided at school. 

I hated my plumpness and I detested myself. 

After trying this and that I heard about Anatrim. 

This stuff literally took me out of this terrible nightmare! Many thanks and a great respect to you, fellows."

 
Mike Brown, San Diego

 
"Do you know what? Anatrim saved my marriage! I got into this circle, depression – eating more – more depression. My wife was about to leave me as I was turning in overweight psycho. 

My friend showed me site and I asked for my pack of Anatrim at the same time. 

The results were excellent, my appetite became normal, I was in good spirits oftener, and, certainly, I went some belt holes back. And you see, the sex became fantastic, too!"

 
Luis

 There is a great number of gratitudes happy people leave after taking Anatrim. Why don't you join the thousands and thousands of slender customers and try this original appetite suppressing energy lifting product now!

Don’t lose your opportunity!
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 2583 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks-legacy/attachments/20040101/fde274fb/attachment.txt>