RE: Fwd: Re: Simple RF Weapon Can Fry PC Circuits
Sandy prognost'd: What I'm waiting for is the portable, concealable boom box killer. It's time to take back the streets. Amen, sugah, and killing the car alarm, car tracker, cellphone, digital lock, keyboard sniffer, PAL, and, and, go on, do a SCS reachback communications snuffer, to, ah, take back here-watched-unnameables. amford-bay tells about Princeton being the home of NSA's principal cryptological research until 60's student protestors got too close to the truth of it, then it was hidden in another off-campus building among the numerous edu-corp IP covert developers. Is that still going on there or is Felten among open-hearts?
SSN Publishing Banned by WA Judge
A Washington State judge has issued an injunction against publication of SSNs in City of Kirkland Cops v. JusticeFiles.org: http://cryptome.org/cops-v-1A.htm The judge ruled that publication of the names and addresses of the cops and their families is protected by the First Amendment. Tim May can now go after the IRS Intelligence Office, Seattle, Jeff Gordon AIC, for publishing his SSN. Though I'll be a co-defendant I reckon, being the shit who transcribed the revealing document and put it on the evil privacy-forget-it Net. No, now that I got my facts zapped straight, that was done by Greg Broiles. Or was it Declan McCullagh? Yes, it was Declan, panopticonartist. No, it was Hettinga, or Vulis, or Detweiler, or Denning. Choate, it was fucking fried-egg-brain Choate. I'll swear. My head hurts, gimme a pill, CJ.
Re: The Culture of Secrecy, Disinformation, and , Propaganda...
Steve Thompson blundered: With all due respect, only geezers reminisce about the good old days. You're age is showing. Steve, if you live within a nuke's radius of NYC, move. Tim's got at least a dozen Samsons lockered in this area already. This bunker can resist only a baker's. Last time I did a genital mental inspection of subscribers here most were Gzrs, and heavily armed, iron and attitude, none Viagara'd. Forget about intervention. Think safety off. Think so many to off, so little time. WMD are the problem and the solution. Freedom out of the barrel of a homeland rig, etc. AP is a kiddie version of what tickling the tiger's tail of a Gzr MAD scientist can command. Most of these venerable assassinators work for governments, but some of them moonlight. Tinker for fun. Get pissed at co-workers, bosses. Gzrs hooked on revenge. Call it dreaming of immortality.
Hypno Crypto
A 1952 document from the CIA's MKULTRA program reports on an interview with a professional hypnotist about ideas that might be useful to the Agency. An excerpt: An individual who has been hypnotized makes a very excellent courier. They can be given messages while under hypnosis which they themselves do not know and only an individual knowing the code can get this message from this courier. Even assuming that the post-hypnotic control could be broken or the individual hypnotized, it could still be protected perhaps as follows: A person could regressed to a certain time and date and then given the message and unless the person who subsequently gained control of the subject regressed the subject to the correct date and time set out, he could not get the message. Even more secure would be to move the individual forward. If he were moved from thirty years of age to thirty-five years of age at a given date and time and then given the message, unless the individual could guess the age, the time, and the date in the future, he could not obtain the message. A later document states that CIA pursued this idea. Qeustions: Has this technique been used in connection with protecting pass phrases for digital crypto, or for that matter has hypnosis been used to crack a person's pass phrase with amnesia that it had been done? --- Several Congressional investigations and hearings in the mid-1970s revealed the MKULTRA behavorial/mind control and assassination research program. We've been sent some 1200 digitized MKULTRA documents by IntellNet.org and are slowly wading through them for interesting items to transcribe and publish from the It appears that the collection is mostly composed of the FOIA material John Marks got for use in his 1978 book on MKULTRA, which is online: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm A number of documents are dated after Marks book so it is not clear where that material came from -- IntellNet claims to have got the stuff from an anonymous source.
Re: Entire ISP Forced to Close
Eric gets a star for raising a genuinely hard-core political topic here. And there has not as much good discussion for it as for other, easier, if hoary, disputes. From that lacuna, one might suspect that the feds and remnant nuclear family proponents would find sympathizers here for the crackdown on the first tier or two of stigmatized, yeah, even criminalized, differently humaned. Plonk from the Net, all right, send them sub rosa. Ah, forget it, I'm a mainstream-swimming coward, too, so fuck this little boy topic. Oops, was that a baldly put clue to my hidden desires?
Re: Kirkland SSN document, comments and snapshot of what we're
Eric fingered: But Tim, don't you realize that you, by posting to the list, have just placed the banned information into every single Cypherpunks archive on the entire Internet? And that's why Tim will get a subpoena to a Grand Jury to explain why he did this. And for him to deny who he is working with. And to refuse to provide all other material in his possession which bears on the matter. And so will his roll-over ISP who has diligently archived his subversive thoughts not because they have it in for Tim, but only because you just never know when it will be useful to re-direct attention away from yourself. Now Declan is a certified troublemaker, often getting subpoenas to disclose what his confidants have confided and taunting authorities with stories of that. Tim, on the other foot, is a clean as a whistle, a temple-going fellow, more tolerant and civic-minded than most, and there's no reason whatsoever to think he would ever be drawn into a law-defying conspiracy by Yellow Devil Declan just to boost Washington State's reputation as a hotbed of wild-eyed prosecutors conspiring to uphold the techno-dissent-suppressing products of Boeing, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, Starbucks, FBI Seattle, and so on. No other region in America west of DC city limits is so avid to teach the ways of authoritarian government as Washington State -- named you will remember for the First Father back in Neo-Europe to distinguish itself from the vulgar frontier of Oregon Territory. WA got a inferiority complex, they say in old and new Yerp. So it's like to shoot then ask for an order.
EuroParl Report on Echelon
We offer an HTML version of a 92-page draft EuroParl report on ECHELON, dated May 4, 2001: http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep.htm (246KB) This is derived from the leaked PDF original: http://fas.org/irp/program/process/europarl_draft.pdf (868KB) Before a session last night of four ex-Directors of Central Intelligence -- Woolsey, Deutch, Turner and Wester -- at the Council on Foreign Relations (web-cast), I asked James Woolsey about the EuroParl report, in which he is quoted. He said he had not seen it but had nothing to add. Instead he urged me to look into his new firm Invicta. On NSA going deaf, Woolsey and Deutch said that while NSA has some problems they will be overcome with sufficient funding, and urged that those resources be promptly provided. Deutch noted that when the telegraph was invented, French intelligence bemoaned its loss of easy access to letters, but promptly adjusted to the new technology -- indeed came to welcome its much easier access than paper letters. He said NSA will have no problem doing the same if properly financed. I had hoped to ask the ex-DCIs about privatization of intelligence and to note that several of them, like Deutch and Woosley, along with the likes of Kissinger and William Cohen, are involved in such lucrative activities. And is that reduction in governmental intelligence indicated by the burgeoning outsourcing of the IC products and the rising prowess of commercial and private spying. No luck getting the moderator's attention, only friendly questions were allowed. Nobody asked Deutch about his security lapses. To be sure, the CFR is not a forum to show hostility to the cozy intel cartel. The session is one of many nowadays where the successes of the IC are bruited and the need for more funds repeated by those reaping its private rewards by selling intel services and products. Zilch new was said.
Re: Firewall Spoofing
Several have pointed out that Frank Jones, of Codex, DIRT's producer, has allegedly had some problems with the law, fiercely attacks whoever calls attention to these problems or questions the quality of his services, and more sleaze. There have been questions about DIRT's fulfilling its promises in the past, and that it may be nothing more than a version of Back Orifice being peddled to clueless governments who think restricting the product to gov means the product is hot shit. Much of this came out in the past as noted here. What I found intriguing was the new firewall transgression feature. Whether this feasible and what could be done to prevent firewall spoofing if it is feasible. And figured that it's time to ask whether anybody had ever discovered being subject to an attack by DIRT now that it has been around for a while. And if so, what could be done to analyze a system to see if it has invaded, and what could be done to exterminate the pests. Codex's KeyKatch is a nasty little gadget, too, which registers everything done on a box.
Firewall Spoofing
The venerable DIRT remote interception program, first reported here in 1998, is now offering an anti- firewall feature that will spoof all known firewalls and allow an investigator to get inside a violated computer, to hide behind a simulated firewall icon, and then to rummage undetected, to install a keystroke and passphrase sniffer, to plant file ID tags in documents, issue covert commands, and so on, as originally offered by the gov-only program. Someone in gov got a restricted copy of DIRT's presentation and passed it along for public education on what the outlaw cops, judges and spooks are up to: http://cryptome.org/dirty-secrets2.htm A timely warning about global outlaw cops, judges and spooks from the sole superDIRT: http://cryptome.org/dirty-secrets.htm
Re: Ed Felten and researchers sue RIAA, DOJ over right to publish
May it please the court to spell Ed's name Feltun, or Feltren, or Fellwock, or just et al. Perry Fellwock wrote the anonymous 1972 Ramparts article that first described Echelon. Ed Felten is Perry's namesake, though Ed believes there's no connection between worldwide misspelling of Ed's last name and getting a free-pass of Dictionary. Perry Metzger is a different branch of the grammar diagram, find under *PLONK*, always upper case, always bi-starred as if that would not be data-mined as PAL-armed.
Re: The Credentialling of America
Note that Princeton University is not a plaintiff. Though that might come later if the institution does not have contracts with any of the defendants. So it is not yet clear if the case will benefit those affiliated with an institution, which must ever supplicate to the copyright industry. Disclaimer: I'm a licensed professional, but not for anything ever discussed here, so it's not a defense for vile behavior. First cpunk meeting I went to in a Chinese greaser in Manhattan, I paraded my credential and was immediately banished forever for callow by DF, SS, SL, DM, S, RA, two narcs and a PGP-pimp. And forbidden to ever have an online sig, though I had a beauty in the works which resumed more than in fact exists, as highly educated mod-up. As with Princeton's preen to lure, to manufacture, over-self-esteemeds needing protection from the janitors.
RE: The Credentialling of America
Many years ago I explained that I, like Sandy, write explicitly for money, as much as possible, and the people who pay me expect that I will do whatever text can do to get readers to obey those who pay for the text. One method for this is to write clearly in the most authoritarian language of the day, the most grammatically correct, the most literate, the most accepted as being the proper way to write in an unmarked, unidiosyncratic way, the most likely to have been written by someone who embraced without shame the way the masters of writing write, the way the writing manuals recommend, and recommend as nauseum, purest banal. And to never write the way poets do, oddballs do, gibbering idiots do, for that will allegedly diminish the value of your writing the way the payers want you to write, that is to write as if their and your shit don't smell, your and their skin is hued the preferred color, our accent the dominant unaccent of the day, you and they don't copulate the wrong kind of people, you and they have no faults to hide, you and they have no guts to face up to your inability to break away from hiding behind conformity not of your making. Shit, I understand Sandy all too well. And totally admire his talent to blow prefabricated sunshine where it's needed. Even so I won't do what the grammatically correct crowd never cease trying to impose here. Fuck them as one of them has said often here when he's tired of explaining why he won't do what some assholes keep demanding. Or to say it my way, correct writing, clear writing, comprehensively coherent writing, is just another way to tyrannize, bully, hector and obscure jive-ass agendas, though those who do it don't always own up to , or not admit the arousal it gives them to be part of a me-too maleducated mob. This is a friendly joke, as ever, in respect for the asshole language rules-makers here. (Spit)
Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell
http://cartome.org/homeland.htm So, say goodnight to Joshua ... Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell Deborah Natsios Cartome 8 June 2001 A sparsely attended trial which unfolded in Tacomas US district courthouse the first week of April 2001 hardly seemed an event that might open a small but revealing view onto the shifting national security apparatus. But to outside observers following the criminal prosecution of Washington State resident Jim Bell, accused of stalking and intimidating local agents of the IRS, Treasury Department and BATF, the defendant was a symptomatic target, and the governments stated case against him only a fragment of a more complex campaign linked to the evolving landscape of national and homeland defense. In the governments estimation, Bell had placed its Pacific Northwest agents in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury1. But for some trial-watchers, the case against James Dalton Bell, 43, was underpinned by a constellation of factors that made him more than the disaffected neighbor projecting antigovernment bile. Bell had invited the governments fullest prosecutorial zeal because his technical skills placed him in more ambiguous terrain, that of untested gray zones within emerging national defense landscapes, which, by calling into question the impregnability of the national border, have been taking national security tactics incountry in unprecedented ways, deploying new rules of engagement to challenge national security threats within the US domestic interior. Chapters: Homeland WarCoast Cypherpunks PosterBoy Joshua Tacoma Doppleganger BattlespaceSuburbia Holdout
Re: Pap Smear
A tactic used by the anti-pedo vigilantes and narcs is to covertly bury pedo porno amongst adult porno and then finger the adult downloaders as pedophiles knowing the evidence will be found without the downloaders knowing it is there until discovered during a raid. A federal case here in Manhattan got a conviction this way. Or so I am told by the convict, who got a ten year sentence. Cleanse your files, kiddie sluts. And who saw the arousing report in Saturday's New York Times about the practice of bestiality, yes, sex with animals, that is now coming out of the closet. The last taboo is getting its day. One gent goes on talk shows with his dog to tell what it's like. Debate rages on whether it's rape if the animal does not explicitly give consent. Some animal protection advocates say that the lovemaking is okay with them, better to go all the way with animals rather than raise for killing and eating. (No comparison of Swift's advocacy of raising Irish children for food.) Really, in the New York Times, descriptions of French kissing your dog, and why not, since that is far more sanitary than doing it with a human. Someone suggested the article is just part of Hollywood's promo of Animal.
Thermal Imaging Decision Applicable to TEMPEST?
The Supreme Court's decision against thermal imaging appears to be applicable to TEMPEST emissions from electronic devices. And is it not a first against this most threatening vulnerability in the digital age? And long overdue. Remote acquisition of electronic emissions, say from outside a home, are not currently prohibited by law as far as I know. And the language of the thermal imaging decision makes it applicable to any technology not commonly in use. Conventional wisdom of security wizards are that the emissions are very difficult to acquire from more than a hundred yards or so, but James Bamford claims in his recent Body of Secrets that NSA was able to acquire leaky emissions from Russian crypto equipment 6 miles offshore Cuba in the 1960s. Advances in technology would presumbably increase that capability.
Re: Thermal Imaging Decision Applicable to TEMPEST?
David Honig wrote: Two words: antenna design. A third is signal analysis. A principle argument against being able to sort through the geometric increase in devices that leak emissions since the 1960s is that it is nearly impossible to find a pin in the hugely noisy haystack of the electrogmagnetic spectrum. Help me out here with signal analysis capability even with the niagara of the digital age. Is it not possible to sort through a very large range of signal using readily available algorithms to then pinpoint the signature of types of sources, then home in on subsets of those sources, to finally single out a particular source? With the increase in signal volume has come a corresponding increase in signal analysis capability. Analysis of the full electromagnetic spectrum has been possible for quite a while, if public documents on military research are a reliable guide, and comprehensive analysis is ever being refined with with increasingly fine granularity. While there are billions of electronic devices leaking emissions, there are no where near as many EM slots used by those devices and their emissions. In fact, there are only a small number of public slots -- so long as devices conform to regulations. EM leakage is regulated as well. If the world's devices conform to regulations, and those EM slots are known and catalogued for signal analysis, then there is a question about the leakage of the leakage, that is, emissions that escape regulation, by poor device design, by granularity, or unintentionally. The signature of a device which leaks, or makes noise, in a unique way is what presumably is searched for in sophisticated signal analysis. A few hundred submarines are identified this way, as are potentially billions of people. Are there too many unique device signatures to acquire and identify? Perhaps so, but I suspect that enterprise is being diligently worked on, beginning with data provided by manufacturers, catalogung implanted emissive attributes in the devices, using benchmarks for types of devices, tracking taggants and moles, cooking up new variants on Hidden Markov and the host of search/sort/analyze/ID algos. Jumping off the cliff of ignorance, I suspect that signal analysis, as with cryptanalysis, will be always able to find a way to get around obscurity. If you don't want to be acquired, don't signal. Silencio, mafia.
Re: Thermal Imaging Decision Applicable to TEMPEST?
Bill Stewart wrote: TEMPEST really refers to two kinds of technology - keeping equipment quiet, and reading signals from not-quiet-enough equipment. The former category is the main thing that would apply to private citizens, and it's not addressed here. Yes, and the confusion between the two sometimes leads to gaps in understanding as well as security. And I don't know the name of the technology that acquires signals by illumination of objects bouncing emissions -- some say it is all TEMPEST, others say don't be fooled by that misnomer -- ther really good stuff is several generations beyond what is know as TEMPEST. Maybe that is what NONSTOP and HIJACK and other codewords refer to. We have tried and failed to get NSA to open up more on its standards for both types and blacker stuff. TEMPEST suppliers -- products and services -- have said that it's tough getting NSA to clarify what can be exported and what cannot by any means except by submitting products for review, waiting and getting back a yes or no, but not by getting precise requirements beforehand. Maybe that will change to follow the lead of crypto as demand for TEMPEST picks up. Meanwhile it is probable that NSA is testing TEMPEST products for blacker weaknesses, again like crypto, or rather the systems and programs for crypto use. We've been told by suppliers that the export market for TEMPEST (both types) produce would blossom without restrictions on commercial/private use. Govs get approvals for the best stuff (unspecified mil grade) but not biz and citz. Don't know about banks and telecomms and drug-kingpins, maybe they get special treatment for allowing access to data and dope. Outrageous, sure, but it is reported to happen. Still, as far as this amateur knows, there is no restriction on any type of TEMPEST inside the US, so the standard of protection is victim beware. And don't believe for a second anything you see in public about how far away emissions can be acquired or how to protect against TEMPEST with market-available products. Experts in the employ of the gov whisper you won't see the truth about TEMPEST in public any time soon though there will be a whole lot of smoke. The increasing smoke I can vouch for. Even TSCM's and electronic PI's admit all the public stuff about TEMPEST standards is prefabricated sunshine. Though that might be a DIRT ploy to sell really, really, really totally reliable, better than mil-grade, protection. Did you hear how Joel McNamara was thought to have been killed fighting a forest fire? Remember the A-10 seeming to fly aimlessly over the Rockies? The suppressed AF report on its avionics going haywire? Think NONSTOP, HIJACK.
Re: TIME.com: Nation -- Supreme Court: Relax. The Heat is Off
Let me try again after reading Time's QA and the responding attorney claiming that anything inside a home is protected but nothing outside it is. My question concerns the methodology of illuminating or radiating an object, say, within a home, in order to acquire signal that may be striking that object, say emissions from an electronic device but not escaping to the outside under there own momentum. Peter Wright in Spycatcher describes use of this technology to acquire signal from crypto machines, French as I recall. There was discussion of this here a while back, in connection with the contraption concealed by the Soviets behind the great seal in the US Embassy in Moscow. Wright analyzed that contraption for the US to understand how it worked. Wright is not altogether precise in describing the methodology nor that of other counterintelligence tools he and others invented, but some of them appear to be related to acoustic analysis. (Wright and his father worked for Marconi which specialized in producing classified comsec products for the UK military and secret services.) In any event, if a method is used to acquire signal *within* a home, would that acquisition be forbidden by the thermal decision? That is, if a signal is sent into a home to acquire an interior signal, is that a violation? This may seem to be similar to a bug planted just outside the face of an exterior wall of a home, or reading the vibrations of window glass, but I'm trying to imagine an alternative technology to these, perhaps one that remains classified. BTW, there has been speculation that NONSTOP and/or HIJACK are codewords for acoustic vulnerabilities of the sort I'm fumbling with. The reason I'm pursuing this is that I've been told we are not asking NSA the right questions to be answered under FOIA, that there is technology which has not been revealed in public and whose names are secret. But we haven't been able to determine what to ask besides stuff usually associated with TEMPEST.
Xerox Sux
A Wall Street Journal article today on the SDMI/DCMA lawsuit by Ed Felten, et al, includes this nasty: The decision to file the lawsuit hasn't been without consequences. Dr. Drew Dean is scheduled to resign from the Xerox research center tomorrow and says, without elaborating, that the resignation is 'related' to the DMCA lawsuit. A Xerox spokesman says that the legal challenge is 'not something the corporation wished to be involved in' but declined to comment further. Drew, like Dan Wallach, was a grad student of Felten's and the Xerox job was his first, I believe. Will Princeton boot Felten, will Rice boot Wallach? Depends on the courage of the trustees to resist their buddies' pressure, as half-dead Xerox could not. All hail the principled scientists, buck up trustees.
RE: Xerox Sux
Philip Zakas wrote: is a legal defense fund in place for felten/dean/wallach? if so, anyone have the contact info for it? EFF is funding the suit and welcomes contributions: www.eff.org Drew Dean should get separate headlines on the Xerox axing. If shit comes down on the other plaintiffs from their piggy institutional employers that should light a fire under Congress. Rice is loaded, not up there with the Princeton and Ivys but sitting on tons of endowment. My alma mater, and it will inherit billions from the Young's dry holes awaiting horizontal exploitation.
Re: Slashdot | @Home Cuts Newsgroups Due to DMCA Complaints
Check out today's EU final copyright directive which perfectly mirrors the DMCA: http://www.europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/dat/2001/l_167/l_16720010622en00100019.p df (153KB) We offer an HTML version: http://cryptome.org/eu-copyright.htm (57KB) Here's an excerpt on circumvention devices: Article 6 Obligations as to technological measures 1. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective. 2. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which: (a) are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or (b) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or (c) are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of, any effective technological measures. 3. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression 'technological measures' means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject-matter, which are not authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed 'effective' where the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the rightholders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective. [End excerpt]
NSA Snooping Domestic Crypto
Debate on whether the NSA spies domestically on US persons appears to be yes according to USSID 18, dated July 23, 1993, which was obtained by the National Security Archive a while back, for which we offer an HTML: http://cryptome.org/nsa-ussid18.htm Parts previously redacted concerning domestic surveillance are now revealed, among them these provisions for acquiring and retaining indefinitely domestically acquired encipherments: [Quote] (2) Domestic communications reasonably believed to contain technical data base information may be retained for a period sufficient to allow a thorough exploitation and to permit access to data that are, or are reasonably believed likely to become, relevant to a current or future foreign intelligence requirement. Sufficient duration may vary with the nature of the exploitation. (S-CCO) a. In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data bases requires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis. (S-CCO) b. In the case of communications that are not enciphered or otherwise thought to contain secret meaning, sufficient duration is one year unless the Deputy Director for Operations, NSA, determines in writing that retention for a longer period is required to respond to authorized foreign intelligence or counterintelligence requirements. (S-CCO) [End quote] Again, these sections were censored in versions of USSID 18 previously made public, a 1980 version here: http://cryptome.org/nsa-ussid18-80.htm While the quoted material is a small part of the 52-page document, variations on it are repeated more than once, and seems to be the one exception to the requirement to avoid domestic interceptions and to destroy any that are inadvertently acquired. The classification (S-CCO) is not explained but some think it perhaps indicates material limited to the UK/USA agreement and/or the Echelon partners. A better answer is welcomed.
DoJ Summons Offshore Credit Cards
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 25, 2002 The Department of Justice and The United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California today asked a federal court in San Francisco to approve its service of a John Doe summons on VISA International. John Doe summonses permit the IRS to obtain information about people whose identities are unknown. The information expected in response to the summons will help the IRS identify people who use offshore accounts to evade their United States income tax liabilities. There are VISA- sponsored credit, charge or debit cards issued by banks in more than 30 countries, including Switzerland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Bermuda and numerous Caribbean nations. Also today, in a federal court in Miami, The Department of Justice filed papers reflecting American Express's agreement to turn over records relating to people who may be subject to United States income taxes and who have credit card accounts with addresses in Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands. MasterCard has already produced over 1.7 million records, involving over 230,000 accounts, in response to a John Doe summons, According to the IRS, that information will be used in civil audits and criminal investigations. If the MasterCard information is representative of the industry, there could be 1 to 2 million U.S. citizens with debit/credit cards issued by offshore banks. This compares with only 170,000 Reports of Foreign Bank Financial Accounts (FBARS) being filed in 2000 and only 117,000 individual 1040 filers indicating they had offshore bank accounts (tax year 1999). Full press release: http://cryptome.org/doj-doe-cards.htm
Re: Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down
The White House Communications Agency is also working hard to secure presidential communications, with legacy systems needing ever-increasing maintenance and upgrades, the market continuing to outpace the big-ticket legacy clunker equipment, too expensive to chuck outright, yet having flaws begging for discovery, patches galore (most relying upon obscurity and secrecy), and the operators from the four military branches which run the system turning over regularly and each new wave needing special training to work the patchwork klutz, with retiring old salts who are the only ones who know how the hybrids work and whether they are truly secure, and not least, NSA doing it damndest to get new systems installed in all the prez's habitats and vehicles and layovers around the world, deploying crypto tools partly off the shelf, partly purpose-built at Ft Meade -- and the whole precarious mess subject to a 20-year-old pulling a thumb out of the dike and letting flow proof that the leader of the free world is up to what you'd expect despite the multi-million rig to hide the obvious. Rumor is that 98% of what is handled top secretly is trivial fluff, as with most mil comm, SIGINT, cellphone, microwave, fiber-optic, so that snake oil is apt protection. If all telecomm was shut down no more would change than pulling the plug on television. The other 2% is what the billions and billions is trying to find among the EM cataract of plaintext and speak smoke and whine -- by whoever may be plotting a world of pure bugfuck. But that could also be discovered by thoughtful analysis of any singular mania, whether religion, higher-ed, sport, stock market, politics, or mil-biz. Here's a recent account from Army Communicator of what's up at ever busier and harried and thumbplugging WHCA: http://cryptome.org/whca2003.pdg (680KB) WHCA itself is recruiting thumbs: http://www.disa.mil/whca
Irag Piss Poor Compared to 911
There was more fighting and carnage in Gulf War 1 than this piddling latest. This was not a war but a training exercise, a rattling of sabers, gunboat diplomacy. The military provided more information in Gulf War 1 than all the embedded and free-lancers in the latest. Almost no gunship videos and bombs hitting targets compared to GW1, while the US was smothered with talking heads doing not much different than they did in the studio. The videos in Baghdad showed kiddie versions of Iraqi defenses lighting up the sky, just boring shots of a few vehicles moving as if there was nothing much going on. No cowering journalists, breaking glass, running for the basement. If you wanted to kill reporting you could hardly have done better than putting the mouthpieces in the field far from the bombing, and mostly away from the diddly shit combat. The purpose of the war seems to be to scare the bejesus out of likely targets, a display of power a notch or two above a war game, but nothing as thrilling as a movie -- which are showing more warporn and gore than was shown in GW2. The attack on WTC and the Pentagon was much superior politics, theater, diplomacy, art, entertainment, grief, shock and awe. War porn lovers will just have to replay those tapes until a great blockbuster comes again. A liquified gas tanker in San Diego Bay and another off Staten Island. Tens of the highest hazard dams (thousands of them still listed and ranked on the Internet). Several stadia of sports fans. 5 or 6 suspension bridges. None of these need a MOAB to cause more casualties than GWB's GW2. Welfare mutants are not the targets, dream on racist greedy motherfuckers, your fat GWB predatory life style is. The military can't protect you from terrorists, nor can the police from mutants outfucking you every day. Blue-eyed supremacists are chasing the dodo, guns and bombs ineffectual.
Spread Spectrum Image Steganography Patent
The US Army today announced the availability of licensing of its patent for Spread Spectrum Image Steganography: http://cryptome.org/usa-patent.htm(with copy of the patent) Patent Abstract The Spread Spectrum Image Steganography (SSIS) of the present invention is a data hiding/secret communication steganographic system which uses digital imagery as a cover signal. SSIS provides the ability to hide a significant quantity of information bits within digital images while avoiding detection by an observer. The message is recovered with low error probability due the use of error control coding. SSIS payload is, at a minimum, an order of magnitude greater than of existing watermarking methods. Furthermore, the original image is not needed to extract the hidden information. The proposed recipient need only possess a key in order to reveal the secret message. The very existence of the hidden information is virtually undetectable by human or computer analysis. Finally, SSIS provides resiliency to transmission noise, like that found in a wireless environment and low levels of compression. Patent No.: 6,557,103 Granted: April 29, 2003 Inventors: Boncelet, Jr.; Charles G. (Newark, DE); Marvel; Lisa M. (Churchville, MD); Retter; Charles T. (Belcamp, MD) Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Army (Washington, DC)
