RE: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
Adam wrote: The Russians, Americans and I believe others have moved from physical to psychological methods which have proven to work better than actual physical pain. I recall reading a story on Abdul Murad, the Al Qaeda member arrested in 1995 in the Philipines, where the way they finally got him to talk ws threatening him with being turned over to the Israelis. I recently obtained an illuminating recording of a speech by a judge sitting on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which was given before the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. In said recording, the honorable judge proposes the issuance of formal federal torture warrants. The reader may or may not take comfort in the fact that the honorable judge firmly insists that the needles he proposes to be inserted under the fingernails of suspects should be sterile. Clearly, at least hygiene has progressed in the last 300 years. --Lucky Green
Re: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 04:30:42PM -0800, Tim May wrote: | On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 12:49 PM, dmolnar wrote: | | On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote: | | to have a big jpg of a hand with middle finger extended...) More than | this, | they will have unknowingly destroyed the real data. (Perhaps a 3rd | key is | needed that DOESN'T destroy the original data, just 'hides' it a la | Rubberhose.) | | The question I've seen asked about this is then -- how do you get them | to | stop beating you? If they know you might have some number of duress | keys, | one of which might undetectably hide the data, what stops them from | beating you until | | 1) you give them a key that shows them what they want to see | 2) you die | | Maybe this isn't that different from the ordinary unencrypted case, | where | if they don't find it on your HD they can accuse you of burying disks | in | the backyard or something. Or is the goal protecting the data and not | protecting your life? | | From my reading of tradecraft, as practiced by SAVAK, MOSSAD, GRU, | etc., there is rarely anything to be gained by letting the target of | torture survive. If he or she survives, she screams to the newspapers, | 60 Minutes, etc. There's also rarely anything to be gained from torture, as people will invent all sorts of crap to get out from physical pain. | The United States draws heavily on Israel for torture methods, as their | methods come from some of the best torturers the world has ever seen, | their teachers at Auschwitz and Berlin Central. The Russians, Americans and I believe others have moved from physical to psychological methods which have proven to work better than actual physical pain. I recall reading a story on Abdul Murad, the Al Qaeda member arrested in 1995 in the Philipines, where the way they finally got him to talk ws threatening him with being turned over to the Israelis. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001363 The Russians reputedly used sensory deprivation as a means of convincing western spies to talk. 24 to 48 hours in a tank broke nearly anyone. Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Re: Psuedo-Private Key (eJazeera)
Tyler Durden wrote: [...] Let's say I've been coerced into revealing the private key to a certain encrypted message. And now, of course, the authorities use that key and open the message, and see the contents (let's assume they are picture of a demonstration or whatever). WOULDN'T IT BE NICE...If the original encrypted message actually had TWO messages inside it, both very similar. In this example, one of the messages is the incriminating pictures of the demonstration, the other is pictures of Pam Anderson or whatever. AND, this double message has two private keys associated with it: one corresponds to the Pam Anderson photos, the other corresponds to the Demonstration photos. When coerced, I give up the key that opens the Pam Anderson photos (while hopefully annhilating the Incriminating photos). Of course, there's no way the authorities know that there was another message (not if done very cleverly...Pam Anderson photos might be a little obvious) that they destroyed when they used the fake Private Key. Does this exist? Would it be difficult? Yes it exists. It's called deniable encryption. Two-level deniable encryption is not hard, but it usually involves increases in data size. There is some stuff about this in Crypto and Eurocrypt reports. Steganography and steganogaphic filing systems can do something similar, but the increase in message size tends to be larger. I am developing a form of deniable encryption (as part of m-o-o-t) that works slightly differently and does not involve message-size increases - in fact it it decreases message size. It's grammer-based and works a bit like this: A sentence is parsed, and eg a noun is encoded as a number relating to one of a publicly shared dictionary of nouns. This number is then encrypted. Decrypting with a random key will give a noun in that position in the sentence in all possible decryptions, and a good proportion of all randomly keyed decryptions will apparently make sense. There is a lot more involved, so eg both parties can give out the same false key, and so eg the same nouns used more than once in a message will decrypt to identical nouns in decryptions, as well as notions of closeness in the words used in a typical message, but I have done both the theoretical unicity calculations and some practical tests, and it works for email-length messages. The main implementation problems I have are coding time and that the only parser that works well enough is proprietary. If anyone else is working on something similar I would like to know. I'm probably not a cypherpunk, more a privacy avocate, but I do write code. :) -- Peter Fairbrother
Re: OPPOSE THE WAR! We are going to ruin Iraq to get the oil. Who's ne
Kevin Elliott wrote: 2) rifled muskets were not effective because of the ponderous reload time (I don't have precise figures, but the number 1/6th-1/10th the rate of fire of a smoothbore musket comes to mind) There isn't that much difference in reload times - say 30 seconds for a Kentucky rifle, as opposed to 20 seconds for a Brown Bess musket, for well-trained troops. However, if you are in a volley line and waiting for the last man to reload before firing a volley, that's a lifetime. Remember, you are standing up to reload! Putting a few men armed with rifles in a line of musketmen, they would seem useless, or worse, a liability. Before I get flamed about those figures, may I point out that modern black powder flintlock rifle shooters can and do shoot about one round a minute, without trying to fire fast - a hotspot on the barrel can cause the powder to cookoff unexpectedly, so they service the bore and touch hole between shots, which slows them; but this isn't so important on the battlefield when risks can be taken. It is said that Simon Kenton could reload his Kentucky rifle in 12 seconds. The world record Springfield reload is about 6.5 seconds, a Brown Bess will take a bit longer than a Springfield. At first glance the rifle was a better infantry weapon, but pitched battles at 300 yards just didn't happen - and smoke obscuring the battlefield made aimed shots difficult after a few volleys. Muskets weren't usually aimed, just pointed in the right direction - musketmen were sometimes told to close their eyes when firing to prevent injury from pan flash. In volley fire it isn't really possible to aim - for aimed fire you need to fire when the rifleman is ready, not on command. The superior accuracy of a rifle is no use if you can't or don't aim it. The time taken to aim also slows the rate of fire over an unaimed weapon. Another problem was that early rifles weren't optimised for battle or use in an army. It was often difficult starting the ball down the barrel, which can slow reload time - there's a tool to do it, and you then use the ramrod, but if the rifle/ball/patch combination is right you can start the ball by hitting it with the ball of your hand, and the ramming can be quite quick. Rifles were seldom fitted with bayonets, important to the tactics used at the time - fire a volley or two, then a bayonet charge while your opponents are reloading. They were also too fragile to use as a close quarter club. Rifles weren't standardised either, so ammunition and parts couldn't be shared and the riflemen had to cast/roll their own balls. Rifle balls need to be more accurate than musket balls. Rifles take more training to use as well. But I think the main reason that rifles didn't play a bigger part, apart from the usual military inertia (google Ferguson rifle for a British example of this), was the simple lack of rifles, and their cost. Many men fighting in the Revolutionary War didn't have any firearms at all. -- Peter Fairbrother
Torture done correctly is a terminal process
On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 12:49 PM, dmolnar wrote: On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote: to have a big jpg of a hand with middle finger extended...) More than this, they will have unknowingly destroyed the real data. (Perhaps a 3rd key is needed that DOESN'T destroy the original data, just 'hides' it a la Rubberhose.) The question I've seen asked about this is then -- how do you get them to stop beating you? If they know you might have some number of duress keys, one of which might undetectably hide the data, what stops them from beating you until 1) you give them a key that shows them what they want to see 2) you die Maybe this isn't that different from the ordinary unencrypted case, where if they don't find it on your HD they can accuse you of burying disks in the backyard or something. Or is the goal protecting the data and not protecting your life? From my reading of tradecraft, as practiced by SAVAK, MOSSAD, GRU, etc., there is rarely anything to be gained by letting the target of torture survive. If he or she survives, she screams to the newspapers, 60 Minutes, etc. And torturing a person to death maximizes the chances that a later confession will undo the earlier confession(s). To the torturer, once the target has confessed, crank up the heat some more. More shocks to the genitals, more fingers cut off, another child raped and executed before her eyes, another eyeball removed, etc., then the process _must_ continue. Once the target has actually died--not counting times brought back from clinical death with medical methods--then the Total Information Awareness (TM, DARPA) engineers can presumably say We've gotten all we can get. The United States draws heavily on Israel for torture methods, as their methods come from some of the best torturers the world has ever seen, their teachers at Auschwitz and Berlin Central. --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
Re: The End of the Golden Age of Crypto
Jim Choate wrote: On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote: Damn what a pack of geeks! (Looks like I might end up liking this list!) When we say complete, are we talking about completeness in the Godelian sense? According to Godel, and formal system (except for the possibility of the oddballs mentioned below--I hadn't heard of this possibility) is incomplete in that there will exist true statements that can not be proven given the axioms of that system. Sorry for the long delay...very busy at work. As far as I am aware formal language definitions of 'complete' and Godel's are the same. I've never seen anything from Godel that indicated otherwise. Your comment is almost correct. Complete means that all true statements can be written (which of course implies that all other statements -must- be false). Incomplete means there are true statements which can't be written in the -limited- syntax of the incomplete system (which again implies there are false statements which can't be made). Completeness has nothing to do with whether statements can or cannot be expressed within a system. A system is complete if every sentence that is valid within the system can be proved within that system. That is the formal definition, as used by Godel in his completeness theorem, in which he proved that FOPL is complete. The converse, that every provable statement is valid, is known as the Soundness theorem. The formal definition of completeness earlier used by Hilbert, Russell et al was almost identical but involved proving false statements to be false as well*. Godel used the same definition in his more famous incompleteness theorem, in which he proved proved that certain systems of logic, later (the next year iirc) proved to be those systems that allow Peano counting, cannot be both complete and consistent. FYI, consistent: no sentence can be proved both valid and false within a consistent system. -- Peter Fairbrother *I assume, I'm not that good at history of mathematics. Godel's completeness theorem also proved that his definition is all that is needed.
DMCA Feedback
There's a few opinionated people on this list, I think :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike -- Forwarded message -- From: MX%[EMAIL PROTECTED] Jonathon Giffin 20-NOV-2002 18:19:49.35 To: MX%[EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: Subj: [PKILAB] [SECRSCH] DMCA Feedback For anyone who is interested in voicing their opinion, the US Copyright Office is accepting feedback on the effects of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Feedback will not change the law but may affect enforcement. http://www.copyright.gov/1201/comment_forms/ Jon
Re: Psuedo-Private Key (eJazeera)
Variola wrote... What's missing? What part of your threat model didn't they consider? Well, that the recipient of the message may not be on their own machine (not running Rubberhose), etc... Stego your activist photos into kiddie porn which is stegoed into random plaintext cover images. When they discover your thoughtcrime, they stop looking. I thought about this, but it has some problems in some cases. For one, if I know they are looking for (say) a simple text list, and I want them to get their list (so to speak), I will need to hide the list in a simple text list, and this doesn't sound very stego-friendly. In addition, they may not know that there's some stego in that photo NOW, but they'll hold on to the evidence for later. And one day they may have reason to check for more. It's better, then, to have the option of having the data be destroyed if the fake key is used. Gotta hide the tools, too, BTW, since you can assume They know how they are used. I don't know if the CIA advised the chinese underground on this re Pink Triangle or whatever. Else mere possession of the thing (like owning a one-hole glass flute with a faucet screen occluding the hole) makes you doubleplus unperson. Yes, this I think is the rub. Of course, the encrypt and decrypt programs could be different, with the decryption program showing no hint of the fact that two keys could be used for the same message (one of which leading to the false data). But that's only good for non-savvy typesimages smuggled out of banana republics and so on. I need to dig into my theory, but of course it would be nice if some messages so encrypted were reverse-compatible with existing systems (in other words, if I sent a message so encrypted to old PGP software, both keys will work just fine to decrypt that message). I don't consider this too likely, but I'll have to dig into the nitty-gritty of PGP to see. But if this were possible, it would solve that issue. Nobody would ever know if the user were even aware of this dual encryption. --- Got Aerosil? What the heck is Aerosil? Is that like UBIK? _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Psuedo-Private Key -Methodology
at Thursday, November 21, 2002 2:26 PM, Sarad AV [EMAIL PROTECTED] was seen to say: 'A' uses a very strong crytographic algorithm which would be forced out by rubber horse cryptanalysis Now if Aice could give another key k` such that the cipher text (c) decrypts to another dummy plain text(D) the secret police gets to read the dummy plain text(D) using the surrendered key k` without compramising the real plain text(P). Depends on what (c) looks like and how it is obtained. if it is a random jumble of characters (like a scramdisk) then you might get away with claiming a key 'k is the otp key for it (and of course given (c) and the required plaintext, 'k is trivial to construct) if (c) is self-evidently in the format of a known encryption package (pgp, smime, lots of others) then your attackers are not going to believe they are really OTP encrypted if the message is intercepted, not sniffed (ie, you never receive a copy yourself) then you cannot construct 'k
[IP] Pentagon transcript on TIA (fwd)
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 06:31:58 -0500 From: Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ip [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [IP] Pentagon transcript on TIA http://usinfo.state.gov/cgi-bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/latestf=02112003.tltt=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml http://usinfo.state.gov/cgi-bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/latestamp;f=02112003.tltamp;t=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml Q: Can you help us to better understand what Admiral Poindexter's operation is all about, and how far along he is in developing his program or plan or -- (inaudible)? Clarke: I can't, but I have someone here who can. (Laughter.) And Undersecretary Pete Aldridge, who was thinking: Okay, I've been here for a while, time for me to leave -- (laughter) -- would be happy to address that question. (Laughter.) Sir? Q: What's a nice guy like him doing in place this? Clarke: That's right. Aldridge: I asked the same question. Well, I -- we anticipated that this issue may come up, so I have prepared a very short statement, and then if that statement doesn't clarify what we're trying to do, I'll stay up here for a few minutes for some questions. My statement goes along the following: The war on terror and the tracking of potential terrorists and terrorist acts require that we search for clues of such activities in a mass of data. It's kind of a signal-to-noise ratio. What are they doing in all these things that are going on around the world? And we decided that new capabilities and new technologies are required to accomplish that task. Therefore, we established a project within DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that would develop an experimental prototype -- underline, experimental prototype, which we call the Total Information Awareness System. The purpose of TIA would be to determine the feasibility of searching vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist activities. There are three parts to the TIA project to aid in this anti- terrorist effort. The first part is technologies that would permit rapid language translation, such as you -- as we have used on the computers now, we can -- there's voice recognition capabilities that exist on existing computers. The second part was discovery of connections between transactions -- such as passports; visas; work permits; driver's license; credit card; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases -- and events -- such as arrest or suspicious activities and so forth. So again, it try to discover the connections between these things called transactions. And the third part was a collaborative reasoning-and-decision- making tools to allow interagency communications and analysis. In other words, what kind of decision tools would permit the analysts to work together in an interagency community? The experiment will be demonstrated using test data fabricated to resemble real-life events. We'll not use detailed information that is real. In order to preserve the sanctity of individual privacy, we're designing this system to ensure complete anonymity of uninvolved citizens, thus focusing the efforts of law enforcement officials on terrorist investigations. The information gathered would then be subject to the same legal projections (sic) currently in place for the other law enforcement activities. Q: Protections. Aldridge: Protection. Legal protections. It is absurd to think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency. DARPA's purpose is to demonstrate the feasibility of this technology. If it proves useful, TAI [sic: TIA] will then be turned over to the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement communities as a tool to help them in their battle against domestic terrorism. The bottom line is, this is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act. We all share the frustration associated with vague warnings of terrorist threats. We hope that TIA will help the U.S. government narrow those generic -- genetic reports -- generic reports down to advance notice of specific threatening acts. I hope that's clear. Q: Pete? Aldridge: Yes? Q: There are two things that bother a lot of people -- one, the Big Brother aspect, and if you can talk about possible checks and balances -- the second thing is the choice of the man to lead it. I mean, Admiral Poindexter was under a cloud. You know, he was a convicted felon, even though the conviction was overturned on appeal, for lying to the Congress. Is he the kind of guy you'd really want in a situation like this, who has a record of lying and handling untruths? Aldridge: I'll repeat, again, that what John Poindexter is doing is developing a tool. He's not exercising the tool. He will not exercise the tool. That tool will be exercised by the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies. So -- Q: Why
RE: Compilers Can Optimize Away Security Code (fwd)
Jim Choate[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,717141,00.asp Why the heck is cypherpunks included for this post? Two weeks ago we discussed this topic in exhaustive detail (far, far beyond what the linked article provides). This article has nothing new. Peter Trei
Re: New Wi-Fi Security Scheme Allows DoS (fwd)
hi, But there's a hitch: When WPA detects a break-in attempt, it shuts down the network for a minute and then restarts. During that time, legitimate users are off the air too. Unauthorised access can be taken off by setting fake access points as such,whats the need for shutting down the network? Regards Sarath. --- Jim Choate [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,717170,00.asp -- We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Compilers Can Optimize Away Security Code (fwd)
At 17:56 -0600 on 11/20/02, Jim Choate wrote: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,717141,00.asp As if we hadn't talked the living crap out of this subject... Use the volatile keyword. That's what it's there for. Really. -- _ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827
Re: Onion Self-Censorship
On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 10:25 PM, jet wrote: At 9:01 -0800 2002/11/20, Eric Cordian wrote: Cable News is reporting that the Onion, America's Finest News Source, has pulled from its Web site an article on the recent siege at the Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels. You got any pointers to that? I'm not seeing any mention of this story searching www.cnn.com, news.google.com or news.yahoo.com. Try searching Google for likely combinations of words. This worked for me: michael bay chechen That The Onion (www.theonion.com) no longer has the article which Google and other sites linked to is precisely the point of the story. Again, the Google-cached article from 13 November is at: http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:aTDv7HqpUIsJ:www.theonion.com/ onion3842/ those_chechen_rebels.html+michael+bay+pearl+harbor+chechenhl=enie=UTF- 8 Whether the article and its removal were all part of the satire or political commentary is unknown to me, but the fact is that a bunch of Web crawlers (observers, in quantum mechanics lingo) saw the article and indexed it is enough for me to beleve it was there, at least temporarily. But as the DAs and judges in the fascist television program Law and Order like to point out every week, things are different now. --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
Aerosil digression
Got Aerosil? What the heck is Aerosil? Is that like UBIK? Extremely fine SiO2. Helps disperse pharmaceuticals, anthrax, VX. Lots of others uses. Bugs U$G that the New Next Target bought some. What's UBIK? D'you mean Dr. Seuss' Ooblek? Is Ooblek on the ITAR list? --- Got Atropine?
RE: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
At 06:34 PM 11/20/2002 -0800, Lucky Green wrote: I recently obtained an illuminating recording of a speech by a judge sitting on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which was given before the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. In said recording, the honorable judge proposes the issuance of formal federal torture warrants. The reader may or may not take comfort in the fact that the honorable judge firmly insists that the needles he proposes to be inserted under the fingernails of suspects should be sterile. Clearly, at least hygiene has progressed in the last 300 years. To flesh this out a little more - the judge was Stephen Trott, speaking on September 18 2002 at the Commonwealth Club. Trott credits the torture warrant idea to Alan Dershowitz, whom he describes as a good friend and a great civil libertarian. Edited transcripts and a RealAudio recording of Trott's speech are available at http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-09trott-intro.html - Trott's discussion (and apparent endorsement) of torture begins at about 16:28 into the audio, and again during the QA session. -- Greg Broiles -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961
Re: Psuedo-Private Key (eJazeera)
hi, I had suggested the same for an encryption product called digisecret,this is what they had to say. Here is an example where hiding cipher text in cipher text is ideal.. DigiSecret currently does not use assymmetric algorithms. Besides this the introduction of this technique will mean that the secret police will also know about this fact, so the person's harrowing experience with the secret police will just be doubled: first they will obtain the fake password and then the real one. Also it would not be hard to track it on the algorithm diciphering level and to understand that the message is not real. Regards Data. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Aerosil digression
UBIK is a book by Philip K. Dick. In the book, the main character is continually receiving messages to imbibe or otherwise apply the substance UBIK to himself. He is unaware (for most of the book) that he has died and is in deep freeze, and that his boss Runciter is sending him UBIK messages so that his consciousness won't rot too quickly. From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Aerosil digression Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:39:59 -0800 Got Aerosil? What the heck is Aerosil? Is that like UBIK? Extremely fine SiO2. Helps disperse pharmaceuticals, anthrax, VX. Lots of others uses. Bugs U$G that the New Next Target bought some. What's UBIK? D'you mean Dr. Seuss' Ooblek? Is Ooblek on the ITAR list? --- Got Atropine? _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Onion Self-Censorship
Having read the article I can't help but consider more benign reasons for its removal... 1. It's not funny. 2. It's jokes are in pretty poor taste. 3. Michael Bay got his lawyers to send a letter to the Onion. The situation raises a mildly interesting issue. The Onion, for whatever reason (nefarious or not), decided they wanted to pull the article. However, they obviously failed as I was able to read it. Google's link still works even now. I wonder: if The Onion were to attempt to pull an article due to a court order, or some such, and yet the article persisted in various caches here and there, to what extent could The Onion be charged with not complying with the order? Another angle: If Bay threatened to sue the Onion unless they pulled the article, would he still have a case against them because of Google's cache? M. Eric Cordian wrote: Cable News is reporting that the Onion, America's Finest News Source, has pulled from its Web site an article on the recent siege at the Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels. Does anyone have a copy of the article they could post? I'd like to see what sorts of comments about terrorism are unacceptable to publish, even as parody.
Re: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 09:33 AM, Greg Broiles wrote: At 06:34 PM 11/20/2002 -0800, Lucky Green wrote: I recently obtained an illuminating recording of a speech by a judge sitting on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which was given before the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. In said recording, the honorable judge proposes the issuance of formal federal torture warrants. The reader may or may not take comfort in the fact that the honorable judge firmly insists that the needles he proposes to be inserted under the fingernails of suspects should be sterile. Clearly, at least hygiene has progressed in the last 300 years. To flesh this out a little more - the judge was Stephen Trott, speaking on September 18 2002 at the Commonwealth Club. Trott credits the torture warrant idea to Alan Dershowitz, whom he describes as a good friend and a great civil libertarian. (I could check with Google, but wasn't Trott once a musician, in something like The Four Horsemen or The Information Highwaymen? Insert Hettinga-like grin symbols here if desired.) Hey, why not? Considering the state of the Bill of Rights and of liberty in general, why shouldn't the USG be torturing perpetrators until they confess additional sins? We've got secret courts, secret appeals courts, secret laws, warrantless searches, roving wiretaps, so many laws that nearly everyone is a felon in one way or another, selective prosecution, Orwellian gibberings from FL about The Evil Ones, proposals to data mine every customer purchase record (*), cooperation agreements between the IRS and other government agencies (so much for tax returns being not used except for taxes), more secret trials, persons being held without access to lawyers and without charges being filed, and on and on. (* Not being a lawyer, though reading widely, I have never understand this crap about how the 4th Amendment does not apply to Alice if Bob has the records. Perhaps _Alice_ cannot assert a 4th A. right, but _Bob_ still has all 4th A. rights to be secure in his papers and possessions, including his business records! If I have a letter sent by Greg, Greg may not be able to assert a 4th A. right about his letter, but Tim sure can! It became one of Tim's papers and possessions once he received it. Ditto for business records, purchase records, etc. This notion that K-Mart and Costco will be sharing customer purchase records with the Heimatsecuritat and that the 4th Amendment does not apply is ludicrous. Customers should, I think, organize boycotts of K-Mart and have K-Mart eventually tell Big Brother show us the specific warrant based on probable cause for a specific customer. I doubt this will happen.) --Tim May To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists. --John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General
Re: New Wi-Fi Security Scheme Allows DoS (fwd)
At 11:38 AM 11/21/02 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: I was thinkin about this... It certainly looks like Concerned Authorities might be able to easily stop a Smart Mob from uploading the images of beatings, etc... this way. That and a round-up-and-grab knapsacks/laptops as evidence of illegal activity, and they've effectively squelched unpleasant-looking images. They have to grab all the cellphones too. Cellphones take pictures, eventually movie, and can store them. I suppose They could seize control of all the local Basestations, and not only shut off service but identify all on phones in the area. NOTE TO NOKIA: Make it possible to use the camera without powering the cell RF section.
Re: Onion Self-Censorship
At 23:46 -0800 2002/11/20, Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 10:25 PM, jet wrote: At 9:01 -0800 2002/11/20, Eric Cordian wrote: Cable News is reporting that the Onion, America's Finest News Source, has pulled from its Web site an article on the recent siege at the Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels. You got any pointers to that? I'm not seeing any mention of this story searching www.cnn.com, news.google.com or news.yahoo.com. Try searching Google for likely combinations of words. This worked for me: michael bay chechen That finds a cached copy of the story that is no longer up on The Onion's site. I believe that the article existed -- I saw the cached copy myself. I'm still not finding any story, anywhere, that says The Onion pulled this or why they pulled it. That The Onion (www.theonion.com) no longer has the article which Google and other sites linked to is precisely the point of the story. Again, what story? Where is the evidence that The Onion pulled this because of the terrorism content? Maybe someone from Michael Bay's office threatened a defimation suit and The Onion pulled the story because they didn't want to bother with a lawsuit. Or maybe Michael Bay's brother-in-law-half-removed is dating someone at The Onion's step-mother and asked for a friendly favor. Maybe someone at The Onion stole the story from someone else, so it got pulled until they could sort out who actually wrote the piece. But hey, if it makes you feel better to state some sort of conspiracy to silence The Onion given the complete and total lack of information, go for it. -- J. Eric Townsend -- jet spies com buy stuff, damnit: http://www.spies.com/jet/store.html
Re: Onion Self-Censorship
On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 09:52 AM, Marc Branchaud wrote: I wonder: if The Onion were to attempt to pull an article due to a court order, or some such, and yet the article persisted in various caches here and there, to what extent could The Onion be charged with not complying with the order? Someone may be sued for the original act, but not for failing to coerce others into disremembering something they witnessed. The principle is that third parties have no obligation to act to undo the acts of others. (This is my understanding of deep legal principles, though I'm not a lawyer and the law is evolving so rapidly toward fascism that things may have changed completely. If the Red Queen orders the Doormouse to forget the acts of others, what she says is the law.) Another angle: If Bay threatened to sue the Onion unless they pulled the article, would he still have a case against them because of Google's cache? See above. In practice, Google will remove an item if the submitting party is the one to request the removal. Certain Usenet pests have been active in demanding that posts they dislike be removed, and Google Groups will in fact remove the items (rewrite history) if the submitter fills out a Web form and requests the removal. There have been no court cases that I am aware of (haven't searched, don't have access to the lawyer engines) where a third party like Google has ever been sued for committing the sin of having remembered a public event and recounting its memories to others. --Tim May
RE: Aerosil digression
Major Variola (ret)[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: What's UBIK? D'you mean Dr. Seuss' Ooblek? Is Ooblek on the ITAR list? Check out the UBIK website: http://www.philipkdick.com/ubikcorp.htm Ubik Corporation: Providing spiritual salvation through a variety of convenience products. Peter
Re: Onion Self-Censorship
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 11:46:20PM -0800, Tim May wrote: Web crawlers (observers, in quantum mechanics lingo) saw the article and indexed it is enough for me to beleve it was there, at least temporarily. It was, and as of an hour or two ago it was still on the Onion's mobile.theonion.com wireless site. Details: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04180.html -Declan
Re: DMCA Feedback
Note the rulemaking is limited. See below. --Declan http://news.com.com/2100-1023-966525.html Because it won't affect researchers or companies that publish software code that circumvents copy-protection technology, the practical impact of the new rulemaking is limited. It could not have helped 2600 magazine, for instance, which the movie studios successfully sued... On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 07:50:31PM -0800, Mike Rosing wrote: There's a few opinionated people on this list, I think :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike -- Forwarded message -- From: MX%[EMAIL PROTECTED] Jonathon Giffin 20-NOV-2002 18:19:49.35 To: MX%[EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: Subj: [PKILAB] [SECRSCH] DMCA Feedback For anyone who is interested in voicing their opinion, the US Copyright Office is accepting feedback on the effects of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Feedback will not change the law but may affect enforcement. http://www.copyright.gov/1201/comment_forms/ Jon
