Re: Run a remailer, go to jail?
On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 01:10:56PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000336.html Quoting: Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] For those on this list in the Boston area there is a hearing scheduled on the Mass Bill at 10 Am in Room 222 of the Mass State House in Boston. It was introduced in Mass by a Rep Stephen Tobin of Boston and listed on the state website as legislation to establish a crime of illegal internet and broadband access -- Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493 PGP fingerprint 1024D/8074C7AB 094B E58B 4F74 00C2 D8A6 B987 FB7D F8BA 8074 C7AB - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Run a remailer, go to jail?
On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 01:10:56PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000336.html Quoting: Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that conceal from a communication service provider ... the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] I find another thread of concern to some of us who are hams and radio and satellite TVRO hobbyists. Quoting from the Mass version of the bill... (b) Offense defined.--Any person commits an offense if he knowingly: (1) possesses, uses, manufactures, develops, assembles, distributes, transfers, imports into this state, licenses, leases, sells or offers, promotes or advertises for sale, use or distribution any communication device: (i) for the commission of a theft of a communication service or to receive, intercept, disrupt, transmit, re-transmits, decrypt, acquire or facilitate the receipt, interception, disruption, transmission, re-transmission, decryption or acquisition of any communication service without the express consent or express authorization of the communication service provider; or (2) Communication service. Any service lawfully provided for a charge or compensation to facilitate the lawful origination, transmission, emission or reception of signs, signals, data, writings, images and sounds or intelligence of any nature by telephone, including cellular or other wireless telephones, wire, wireless, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photo- optical systems, networks or facilities; and any service lawfully provided by any radio, telephone, fiber optic, photo-optical, electromagnetic, photoelectric, cable television, satellite, microwave, data transmission, wireless or Internet-based distribution system, network or facility, including, but not limited to, any and all electronic, data, video, audio, Internet access, telephonic, microwave and radio communications, transmissions, signals and services, and any such communications, transmissions, signals and services ^^ lawfully provided directly or indirectly by or through any of the aforementioned systems, networks or facilities. --- end of quote Whilst I am no lawyer, this would seem to possibly render illegal radio and satellite TV receivers that could be used or are used to lawfully receive those radio communications the public is explicitly permitted to listen to under the ECPA (18 USC 2510 and 2511) if the originator of the communication does not provide explicit permission to listen and the transmission involves use of facilities for which a fee is paid (such as space on a leased tower). Included in this category are unencrypted public safety communications such as police and fire calls, aircraft, ships, trains and the like all of which can be picked up on the ubiquitous police scanners (and more sophisticated radios that some of us own as well). And obtaining explicit permission from all the parties involved in such communications is not always easy, nor in many cases do local agencies want to grant it. And also much more likely to be included under the rubric of at at least this very broad Mass language are unencrypted non-scrambled back hauls, news feeds, and free to air MPFG and analog services available from TVRO satellite dishes. These are pretty clearly communications services and watching them in the privacy of one's home for private non-commercial purposes has been legal under the provisions of the late 80s Satellite Viewers Rights Act (provided they weren't scrambled). Of course compared to the larger issues raised by the DMCA language and the apparent prohibition of NAT and anonymous mailers this may seem minor... But it is worrisome to some of us working on software defined radio code in Mass... which might or could be used in ways that might be found illegal under this bill. -- Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493 PGP fingerprint 1024D/8074C7AB 094B E58B 4F74 00C2 D8A6 B987 FB7D F8BA 8074 C7AB - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Active Countermeasures Against Tempest Attacks
On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 10:46:06PM -0800, Bill Frantz wrote: The next more complex version sends the same random screen over and over in sync with the monitor. Even more complex versions change the random screen every-so-often to try to frustrate recovering the differences between screens of data on the monitor. Five or six years ago I floated the suggestion that one could do worse than phase lock all the video dot clock oscillators in a computer room or office to the same master timing source. This would make it significantly harder to recover one specific monitor's image by averaging techniques as the interference from nearby monitors would have exactly the same timing and would not average out as it does in the more typical case where each monitor is driven from a video board with a slightly different frequency dot clock (due to aging and manufacturing tolerances). Modifying existing video boards to support such master timing references is possible, but not completely trivial - but would cost manufacturers very little if it was designed in in the first place. And of course one could improve the shielding on the monitor with the dummy unimportant data so it radiated 10 or 20 db more energy than the sensitive information monitor next to it. In many cases this might involve little more than scraping off some conductive paint or removing the ground on a cable shield. I am sure that it would take little effort with a spectrum analyzer and some hand tools to defeat most of the EMI suppression in many monitors and whilst this would not be entirely legal under FCC rules (at least for a manufacturer or dealer) it probably would be closer to legal than deliberately creating rf interference with an intentionally radiating jammer. I imagine, however, that the usefulness of the RF radiated by a modern TFT flat panel display fed with DVI digital video is already much less as there is no serial stream of analog pixel by pixel video energy at any point in such an environment. Most TFTs do one entire row or column of the display at a time in parallel which does not yield an easily separated stream of individual pixel energy. Thus extracting anything resembling an image would seem very difficult. So perhaps the era of the simplest to exploit TEMPEST threats is ending as both optical and rf TEMPEST is much easier with raster scan pixel at a time CRT displays than it is with modern more parallel flat panel display designs. -- Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18 - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Columbia crypto box
On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 11:32:36AM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Interestingly enough, the public references long ago published the shuttle comm frequencies. Summarizing from: The frequencies have never been secret, but in recent years some or perhaps even almost all of the Ku band TDRSS relayed telemetry and TV and a good bit of the S band relayed traffic has been encrypted. This was, I have been given to understand, part of the upgrades to the comms and TV systems on the shuttle completed in the last few years which converted analog TV transmission to digital TV. This encryption was originally publicly justified in part on the grounds that medical information was passed between crew and physicians on the ground and that federal privacy laws required protection of this information. And as far as I know, NASA while publishing link frequencies (which I have no particular reason to believe are wrong), has never released full details of modulation, multiplexing, error correction coding, randomization, interleaving, frame sync formats, channel assignments and scale factors for the data even for those links and modes that aren't encrypted. And actual link frequencies are but a small part of the data base of information one would need to successfully intercept useful information from the shuttle links - even 1980s to early-90s era digital telemetry signals are pretty complex and non trivial to deal with even if you know the frequency. Finally, the TDRSS spacecraft are also used for relaying information from NRO spacecraft and other classified military missions, and there is a significant chance that at least some of the details of the access protocols and signal formats used with these spacecraft are classified in order to protect sensitive military links. -- Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18 - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
