A close and reliable friend had casually commented several years ago that a good friend of his had worked on a secret project in a small country in the Middle East on "security features" in the Intel 486 chip. I had not payed this comment much attention initially, but on later reflection could not determine what "security features" could mean on a hardware level. I feel that this could perhaps mean some sort of hole into the system at the sub-OS level. This hypothesis makes sense to me on a political level. If a police agency in the US were determined to snoop on all PC based communications they would get the co-operation of major corps such as Intel, and it also makes sense that the work would be done outside the US to be able to provide them w/ "plausable deniability". Such a "hole" would of course need to co-operate w/ whatever IO device is being used on the system - ethernet or modem card - for it to be able to transmit info to a remote device. Now the question is - Is such a "hole" technically feasable? How could such a design prevent snoop programs like tcpdump from reporting the extra packets? It could ofcourse be that the "hole" could be remotely activated and one would not know of this unless such was done. Could it be used only to gather small bits of info like passwords or encryption keys? I personnally feel that the resources of the police agencies are so vast that they can always read anything they want to - the anti-encryption laws, the Carnivore etc. are mere smoke screens or simply means of facilitating what they can already do. I do not think that whatever software encryption etc. are available to us are any barrier to them at all. Imagine - these people had been able to wire the entire Pacific and Atlantic w/ microphones about 1 mile apart (to listen for submarines) - and this was in the '60s! __________________________________________________ Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help? Donate cash, emergency relief information http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/ -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/help/faq_list.html
