date:20050302

China charges U.S. monopolizes the Internet, seeks global control

2005-03-02 Thread R.A. Hettinga



World Tribune.com


 China charges U.S. monopolizes the Internet, seeks global control

 Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COMWednesday, March 2, 2005

 China's ambassador to the United Nations last week called for
international controls on the Internet.

 Chinese Ambassador Sha Zukang told a UN conference that controls should be
multilateral, transparent and democratic, with the full involvement of
governments, the private sector, civil society and international
organizations.

 "It should ensure an equitable distribution of resources, facilitate
access for all and ensure a stable and secure functioning," he said at the
conference on Internet governance.

 Sha said China opposes the "monopolization" of the Internet by one state,
a reference to the Untied States, which ultimately controls the digital
medium.



 "It is of crucial importance to conduct research on establishing a
multilateral governance mechanism that is more rational and just and more
conducive to the Internet development in a direction of stable, secure and
responsible functioning and more conducive to the continuous technological
innovation," he said.

 China's communist government fears the Internet would dilute Beijing's
control over its population, as information passes unfiltered throughout
the country and outside of strict government censorship.

 China strictly prohibits any public criticism of the ruling communist
party and closely monitors and censors Internet usage. Periodically,
Chinese security forces raid Internet cafes and arrest people who violate
Chinese rules.

 Sha said China has 94 million Internet users out of a worldwide total of
about 810 million.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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'

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2005-03-02 Thread eBay Security

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Re: [IP] Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping (fwd from dave@farber.net)

2005-03-02 Thread Tyler Durden

Keefe says of Cryptome: "The site is a good litmus test
for your attachment to freedom of speech." He is not happy about 
excessiveness of any kind.
"Attachment to freedom of speech"?
'NK'.
-TD

Re: [FoRK] X.509 certificate collision via MD5 collisions (fwd from jeff@k2.com)

2005-03-02 Thread "Hal Finney"

Eugen forwards from FoRK:
> >Colliding X.509 Certificates version 1.0
> >1st March 2005
> >Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger
> >
> >http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/067
> >
> >We announce a method for the construction of pairs of valid X.509
> >certificates in which the ?to be signed? parts form a collision for
> >the MD5 hash function. As a result the issuer signatures in the
> >certificates will be the same when the issuer uses MD5 as its hash
> >function.

The real news of the paper was the announcement that Wang's techniques
will be revealed this May at Eurocrypt.  I'm looking forward to finding
out what the secret is!  Presumably everyone will receive MD5 collision
finding software at around that time.

The cert collision is not a surprise, people anticipated this possibility
shortly after the MD5 collisions were announced.  And notice that Xiaoyun
Wang was an author of this paper; she was of course the lead author
on the original MD5 collision paper and presumably the originator of
the technique for finding MD5 collisions.  Using her technology it is
straightforward to do this kind of thing.  But no one else could have
written this paper at this time.

The only nontrivial part (given the remarkable ability to generate MD5
collisions) was arranging that both keys were valid RSA moduli with
known factors.  The did this by generating random bignums and trying to
factor them.

And keep in mind that her methods find random-ish collisions.  They don't
find matches to existing hashes, and (as far as we know) they don't
find structured collisions as would be necessary to get two certs with
different and plausible-sounding names in them.

>From what I've read (mostly http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/264), the way
these collisions are found is to start with analysis of the structure
of the hash, and decide on an XOR difference between the two inputs.
This implicitly makes certain assumptions about where and when carries
and other nonlinearities will occur in the hash calculation.  Then you
do a search for inputs which match that pattern of carries and for
which the pre-determined XOR difference yields an actual collision.
This doesn't give you much ability to control the content of the two
inputs that you create.

Hal

Academics, artists back file-sharing firms before high court

2005-03-02 Thread R.A. Hettinga

<http://www.the-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20050302&Category=APF&ArtNo=503020585&SectionCat=&Template=printart>

The Lexington Dispatch

Article published Mar 2, 2005
Academics, artists back file-sharing firms before high court

By ALEX VEIGA
AP Business Writer

Several major technology companies, consumer groups and academics want the
U.S. Supreme Court to stay out of a long-running legal dispute between
online file-sharing firms and the entertainment industry.

Recording companies and Hollywood movie studios are appealing to the high
court to reverse lower court decisions that absolved Grokster Inc. and
StreamCast Networks of responsibility when their customers illegally swap
songs and movies using their software.

The tech firms and others argue that a court victory by the entertainment
companies would stifle innovation in the technology sector.

In briefs filed Tuesday, Grokster, StreamCast and their supporters urged
the court not to reinterpret the legal doctrine it established in the 1984
Sony Betamax case. At the time, the court ruled that Sony's video recorder
was legal because it had legitimate uses apart from making unauthorized
copies of movies and television shows.

The entertainment industry has asked the court to reconcile the 20-year-old
ruling to protect copyright holders it says are hard-pressed to safeguard
their intellectual property in today's digital and online world.

But such a move is exactly what the file-sharing firms and their supporters
hope to avoid.

"A rule like this will make it almost impossible for anyone to innovate or
create new products unless they have the blessing of the copyright
holders," said Grokster attorney Michael Page during a conference call with
reporters Tuesday. "And when the copyright holders also control the
distribution systems, that blessing will not be forthcoming."

A group of 17 computer science and engineering professors at nine
universities, including Harold Abelson of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Edward W. Felten of Princeton and David J. Farber of Carnegie
Mellon, stressed in their brief that they feared if the court sided with
the entertainment companies it could chill technological progress in
computers and the Internet.

"If this court should announce a more restrictive rule, those who create
the latest advances in technology will halt or significantly scale back
their work, for fear of massive copyright infringement damages," the
professors' brief asserts.

Four consumer and public-interest groups also weighed in, arguing that any
steps to change the Betamax doctrine would give Hollywood and other
copyright owners the power to censor information technology that ultimately
could benefit consumers.

Entertainment companies "would turn this into a surveillance society in
which every file is fingerprinted, every user is tagged, every transaction
is monitored," said Mark Cooper, a spokesman for the Consumer Federation of
America.

Others who filed briefs in support of Grokster and StreamCast included a
group of law professors, the National Association of Shareholder and
Consumer Attorneys, the National Venture Capital Association, Creative
Commons and trade groups representing technology companies such as Intel
Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Apple Computer Inc.

A brief by several telecom firms argues "only Congress has the
constitutional mandate and institutional capacity to address peer-to-peer
technology in a way that promotes the good and punishes the bad."

Intel also submitted a separate brief, where it argues that any changes to
the Sony Betamax decision would put the onus on it and other companies to
"anticipate the potential uses of their innovations ..." and then redesign
their technology to make sure it doesn't violate copyright laws.

That "would stifle innovation and dramatically increase the cost of such
technologies and of the consumer and enterprise products based on those
technologies," the company argued.

Several recording artists, conservative family groups, professional sports
leagues, state attorneys general from 39 states, the U.S. government,
university professors and online services that legally sell music or movies
have filed briefs in support of the entertainment industry.

The justices are scheduled to hear arguments in the case March 29.

--
-
R. A. Hettinga
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'

Re: [IP] Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping (fwd from dave@farber.net)

2005-03-02 Thread John Young

Patrick Keefe is overly fond of disparaging "conspiracy"
targets, among them John Gilmore, Duncan Campbell,
Wayne Madsen, EPIC, EuroParl members, just about 
anyone who takes an balanced (!) view of governmental
and corporate malfeasance.

His book may not be TLA-sponsored but it could be read
as an apology for the agencies, despite his avowal of
concern for privacy in these days of overweening calls
for more security.

He repeats, and quotes other characters prattling, the 
formulaic mantra of how much privacy must be sacrificed 
for security, a sure sign that security will be favored and 
that privacy loss will be faux-regretfully mourned, a view
mighty supportive of the TLAs.

This tipping of the discourse toward more security at
the loss of privacy appears to be the raison d'etre of
the book -- not the only one since the security agencies 
went into a decline with the Cold War winddown, and
then re-surged after 9/11 -- but his is the first to argue
that Echelon and its new domestic offshoots may not 
be such a bad thing, both overseas and at home, and
that a public debate about them is overdue.

Keefe says of Cryptome: "The site is a good litmus test
for your attachment to freedom of speech." He is not 
happy about excessiveness of any kind.

'Perfect storm' for new privacy laws?

2005-03-02 Thread R.A. Hettinga



CNET News
 http://www.news.com/


 'Perfect storm' for new privacy laws?

 By Robert Lemos
http://news.com.com/Perfect+storm+for+new+privacy+laws/2100-1029_3-5593225.html

 Story last modified Tue Mar 01 04:00:00 PST 2005



A series of security break-ins is kick-starting a political drive to
reshape federal laws that dictate how companies protect personal
information--and what they have to do if that data leaks out.

 What began with the leak of tens of thousands of records from data broker
ChoicePoint earlier this month was quickly compounded by a series of
rapid-fire incidents involving Bank of America, Science Applications
International Corp., an online payroll services company and the T-Mobile
Sidekick of hotel heiress Paris Hilton.

 That avalanche of high-profile breaches in the last month has captured the
attention of a growing number of U.S. senators, mainly Democrats, who have
called for new laws as a response. Sen. Arlen Specter has pledged to
convene hearings in his Judiciary committee, often an initial step in the
legislative process. An aide to the Pennsylvania Republican said Monday
that a hearing is being scheduled and is expected to be held soon.
 News.context

What's new:
 An avalanche of high-profile breaches in the last month has captured the
attention of a growing number of U.S. lawmakers.

 Bottom line:Advocates hope it will spur greater regulation of the shadowy
industry that creates digital dossiers on Americans.

 More stories on data theft

"Ten days after the ChoicePoint breach of personal data involving between
145,000 and 500,000 people was revealed, today another breach of data was
revealed, this time by loss," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat,
said in response to Bank of America's admission that it had misplaced
backup tapes containing 1.2 million customer records. "These two instances
dramatize the need to take steps for the protection of an individual's
personal data. The Congress needs to address it."

 At the federal level, privacy laws tend to be created erratically, spurred
by one well-publicized emotional anecdote after another. Congress approved
the Video Privacy Protection Act in 1988 after a newspaper published
Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental records. The murder of
actress Rebecca Schaeffer, whose killer found her address through DMV
records, led to the Drivers Privacy Protection Act.

 Advocates of greater regulation are hoping the latest security breaches
will be just as politically potent. "I don't think Congress can ignore
what's happened," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. "This may be the
first mass disclosure of personal information that triggers congressional
action."

 For ChoicePoint and similar data aggregators, including Acxiom and Westlaw
(a research service operated by Thomson West), the recent breaches could
hardly come at a worse time. The start of a new congressional session often
leaves politicians casting about for new issues, and a pair of recent books
has cast a critical light on the typically shadowy industry that creates
digital dossiers on Americans.

 The price of ChoicePoint shares have plummeted about 15 percent, from a
high of nearly $48 to around $40, since the scandal became public. Rival
Acxiom's shares also have suffered, and a Westlaw "People-Find" service
came under attack last week from Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York.

 An "Exxon Valdez of privacy"?
 "I don't think it's right to wait until there's an Exxon Valdez of
privacy," Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said nearly five years
ago, back when Congress was more concerned with Web companies than data
brokers. Now that kind of privacy disaster finally has arrived, at least
according to congressional Democrats.

 One possible response from Congress would be an attempt to extend an
existing federal law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which deals
with credit-reporting agencies such as Equifax, to cover data-  aggregators
like ChoicePoint and Acxiom. "Records that look a lot like credit
reports--which is the basis of ChoicePoint and Acxiom's business
model--have escaped regulation," EPIC's Rotenberg said.

 Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida is readying legislation to revise
the FCRA, which Congress already altered last year. Earlier this month,
Nelson wrote to the Federal Trade Commission to ask for its help in
revising the FCRA "to reflect the modern information age, where consumer
information can be transmitted and assembled electronically and cheaply"
(PDF here).

 Data breaks

High-profile breaches are finally waking lawmakers up to the need to make
sure personal data is securely protected on computers.
ChoicePoint
Date: February 2005
Incident: Data collection company confirms that information from its
consumer database has been stolen.
At risk: Names, addresses and Social Secu

subscribe cypherpunks

2005-03-02 Thread anon

[FoRK] X.509 certificate collision via MD5 collisions (fwd from jeff@k2.com)

2005-03-02 Thread Eugen Leitl

- Forwarded message from Jeffrey Kay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

From: Jeffrey Kay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 11:02:42 -0500
To: FoRK Discussion 
Subject: [FoRK] X.509 certificate collision via MD5 collisions
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.619.2)

This is a pretty interesting paper -- worth reading.

>Colliding X.509 Certificates version 1.0
>1st March 2005
>Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger
>
>http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/067
>
>We announce a method for the construction of pairs of valid X.509 
>certificates in which the ?to be signed? parts form a collision for 
>the MD5 hash function. As a result the issuer signatures in the 
>certificates will be the same when the issuer uses MD5 as its hash 
>function.

It seems that the approach was to generate two RSA moduli that could be 
swapped but still produce the same MD5, hence the same signature.  
Another interesting question is whether, given an arbitrary modulus, 
another can be generated that produces the same MD5.  It almost seems 
like the same problem to me, so I must be missing something here.  The 
attack isn't on the public key itself since the factors necessary to 
generate the private key are still computationally hard to obtain but 
rather on the content of the certificate.  The key assumption is that 
the certificate is signed by a third party signer, which supplies the 
public key for verification.

Even as posed, this is a pretty scary paper.  You could generate a 
certificate with your legitimate content in it (distinguished name, 
etc.), get that signed by a TTP and reuse that signature on another 
certificate with content in it that masqueraded as someone else.  You 
could also conceivable just recode parts of the certificate (such as 
the length of issue) and be safe.  Since you generated the pair of keys 
that causes this to happen, you could masquerade as anyone you wanted 
as long as you got your initial certificate signed.

Pretty interesting attack.  Computationally intense in some areas, but 
definitely a viable attack particularly against downloadable browser 
plug-ins.  It reminds me of when Verisign signed a fraudulent Microsoft 
certificate;  this attack makes that much more possible.  This attack 
could end the usefulness of TTPs in many circumstances.

-- jeff

jeffrey kay
weblog  pgp key  aim 
share files with me -- get shinkuro -- 

"first get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure" -- 
mark twain
"if the person in the next lane at the stoplight rolls up the window 
and locks the door, support their view of life by snarling at them" -- 
a biker's guide to life
"if A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z. X 
is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." -- albert einstein

___
FoRK mailing list
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

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

pgpdUBg0HVO2f.pgp
Description: PGP signature

William F. Buckley: Death of a comic

2005-03-02 Thread R.A. Hettinga



Townhall.com

Death of a comic
William F. Buckley (back to web version) | Send

March 1, 2005

If what was before the house was just the formal news bulletin, a famous
person who had left Earth for other bournes, then OK, let him go with
conventional solemnities. I once attended funeral services at which the
rabbi didn't remember the name of the deceased, so that he mourned the
passage of Priscilla, remarking the good she had left behind in her
lifetime -- never mind that the lady who lay in the coffin was called Jane;
never mind, the incantations were generic.

 But Hunter Thompson would never be confused with anyone else, and when his
wife was led through the police cordon to his room, she reported to the
press that "he did it (fired the .45-caliber pistol) in his mouth," leaving
"his face beautiful. It was not grisly or gruesome by any means. He lived a
beautiful life."

 He didn't. What he did do was inspire devotional encomiums from people who
included blood relatives (my son), and superstar mentors (Tom Wolfe). Wolfe
spoke first of his stylistic achievements. He wrote "in a style and a voice
no one had ever heard before." And Wolfe found in Hunter's life an
originality perversely appealing. It was "one long barbaric yawp, to use
Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all
conventional proprieties." What he wrote was "'gonzo.' He was sui generis."
"In the l9th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the
20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's
greatest comic writer in the English language."

 Writing in The New York Sun, John Avlon spoke of Thompson's determination
"to puncture the pretenses of the powerful with ruthless humor, a loyalty
to deeper truth, and a hatred of hypocrisy. Beneath what could be called
amoral behavior there was in fact an inflexible moral code. The intensity
of his writing unsentimentally highlighted the real stakes of this life."
What deeper truths?

 Henry Allen of the Washington Post wrote that "People will forgive almost
anything of writers who can astonish them and make them laugh." What was
it, in Thompson, that we were forgiving? Is that question answered in
Allen's sentence that "despite his rants about the onanistic squalor of
journalism, (Thompson) had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the
very edges of madness and menace"? Laughable stuff?

 Thompson had a gift for vitriol. All -- everything -- was subsumed in his
exercise of that art. Consider one entire paragraph on Richard Nixon. "For
years I've regarded (Nixon's) very existence as a monument to all the
rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the
American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no
inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison
toad. I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic
who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the
voting machine."

 We were asked to believe (by the San Francisco Chronicle) that in reading
Thompson we are reading the work of a hero of an entire generation of
American students. Concerning that claim a little skepticism is surely in
order. After all, an exhibitionist can be spectacular, and even lionized,
in the Animal Houses. Hunter Thompson elicited the same kind of admiration
one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral. Here is a
passage from Thompson, in which he seeks amusement by recounting the end of
a long day with a visiting British friend, identifying himself as "the
journalist":

 The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger (the visiting Brit), who
is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds
out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright
red and his face and chest are soaked with the beer he's been using to
rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is
soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild
choking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a
spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the
passenger's side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: 'Bug off, you
worthless faggot! You twisted pig-(expletive deleted), all the way to
Bowling Green, you scum-sucking foreign geek.'

One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry,
surely, that he stopped writing.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review.
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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'

Electronic Anklets Track Asylum Seekers in U.S.

2005-03-02 Thread R.A. Hettinga



NPR :

Legal Affairs

Electronic Anklets Track Asylum Seekers in U.S.

 by Daniel Zwerdling
Audio for this story will be available at approx. 10:00 a.m. ET
  


Morning Edition, March 2, 2005 ·  The Department of Homeland Security is
experimenting with a controversial new method to keep better track of
immigrants awaiting appeals on their applications to remain in the United
States. It is requiring aliens in eight cities to wear electronic monitors
24 hours a day.

 The ankle bracelets are the same monitors that some rapists and other
convicted criminals have to wear on parole. But the government's pilot
project is putting monitors on aliens who have never been accused of a
crime.

 So far, the Department of Homeland Security has put electronic monitors on
more than 1,700 immigrants. Victor Cerda, director of Detention and Removal
Operations at Homeland Security, says the anklets will help prevent tens of
thousands of immigrants who are ordered to leave the country each year from
"absconding" -- going into hiding to avoid deportation.

But critics say Cerda and other Homeland Security officials have
exaggerated the extent of the problem. They point to a Justice Department
study that put much of the blame on immigration officials, saying they'd
failed to keep adequate records to track illegal aliens.



Another Take on Ankle Monitors

 Sarah Barry fled Liberia's civil war in the early 1990s. She's now
awaiting a decision on her appeal of a government deportation order. Barry
says she's glad to be able to wear an ankle monitor. Hear why:
Hear Sarah Barry
 

Alternatives to Anklets

 A three-year pilot program in New York City tested how supervision
affected immigrants' rates of appearance in court and compliance with court
rulings. The program found that supervision -- regular phone calls from
program workers, reminders about court dates, referrals to legal
representatives and other such measures -- is more cost effective than
detention and almost doubles the rate of compliance.
Read the Vera Institute of Justice Report on Community 
Supervision
 


Related NPR Stories
Feb. 9, 2005
Panel: U.S. Mistreats Asylum Seekers
Nov. 23, 2004
Special Report: Jailed Immigrants Allege Abuse
 


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-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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'

[IP] Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping (fwd from dave@farber.net)

2005-03-02 Thread Eugen Leitl

- Forwarded message from David Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

From: David Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 07:17:45 -0500
To: Ip 
Subject: [IP] Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global
 Eavesdropping
User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.1.0.040913
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

-- Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:57:49 -0500 (EST)
To: johnmac's living room <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Dave Farber 
Subject: Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping

>From the New York Times --
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/02/books/02grim.html

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'CHATTER'
The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Remember chatter? After 9/11, it was all over the news. For
months, snatches of cellphone conversations in Karachi or Tora
Bora routinely made the front page. Television newscasters
could chill the blood instantly by reporting on "increased
levels of chatter" somewhere in the ether. But what exactly
was it? Who was picking it up, and how were they making sense
of it?

Patrick Radden Keefe does his best to answer these questions
and demystify a very mysterious subject in "Chatter," a
beginner's guide to the world of electronic espionage and the
work of the National Security Agency, responsible for
communications security and signals intelligence, or "sigint."
In a series of semiautonomous chapters, he describes Echelon,
the vast electronic intelligence-gathering system operated by
the United States and its English-speaking allies; surveys the
current technology of global eavesdropping; and tries to sort
out the vexed issue of privacy rights versus security demands
in a world at war with terrorism.

Mr. Keefe writes, crisply and entertainingly, as an interested
private citizen rather than an expert. A third-year student at
Yale Law School, he follows in the footsteps of freelance
investigators like James Bamford, who, through sheer
persistence, managed to penetrate at least some of the
multiple layers of secrecy surrounding the National Security
Agency in his book "The Puzzle Palace."

"Chatter" is a much breezier affair, filled with anecdotes,
colorful quotes and arresting statistics. The United States
has fewer than 5,000 spies operating around the world, for
example, but 30,000 eavesdroppers. The National Security
Agency employs more mathematicians than any other organization
in the world, and every three hours its spy satellites gather
enough information to fill the Library of Congress. Menwith
Hill, the American listening station in North Yorkshire,
England, has a staff as large as MI5, Britain's domestic
intelligence service.

Menwith Hill is just one in a network of American-run bases
and overhead satellites that, Mr. Keefe writes, "have wrapped
the earth in a spectral web of electronic surveillance." In
some respects, their task is not that tough. "The air around
us and the sky above us are a riot of signals," Mr. Keefe
writes. "To intercept those signals is as easy as putting a
cup out in the rain." As fiber-optic cables become the main
channel for data transmission, surveillance will become more
difficult, but at the moment the ability to collect electronic
signals is far outstripping the ability to analyze it.

Some messages are chatter. Others are chit-chat. In February
2003, the New York City police went on high alert, sending
special teams into the subways and posting extra police at the
tunnels leading in and out of Manhattan, all because the word
"underground" had been picked up in an intercepted
conversation between terrorists. Nothing happened.

Was the word or the context misinterpreted? Or did the police
presence thwart an attack? It's impossible to know. The
National Security Agency has invested heavily in technology
while cutting back on human analysts and foreign-language
interpreters with the skill to detect shades of nuance in
casual conversations. Should it now reinvest in training
people fluent in Baluchi, the dialect spoken by Mohamed Atta,
the lead hijacker in the 9/11 attacks? By the time their
training is completed, voice-recognition technology may have
turned out to be the smart bet. Sigint is a murky business.

"Chatter" is often quite amusing. Mr. Keefe has great fun with
Total Information Awareness, the ill-fated antiterrorist
program announced by the Pentagon in the late summer of 2003.
By linking private and government databases, Total Awareness
would pick up on every electronic click, ping or chirp created
by private citizens in the course of their daily lives.

The very name, Mr. Keefe, points out, was ominous, Orwellian.
So was the symbol for the Information Awareness Office, a
pyramid with an eye on top surveying planet Earth. "In case
anyone had any doubt about the program's intentions, the Web
site bore the motto scientia est potentia, 'knowledge is
power,' " Mr. Keefe writes. Hastily, the name was changed to
Terrorism Information Awareness, but a suspicious Co

Re: OS X in a Classified Environment... (fwd from bryan.jones@m.cc.utah.edu)

2005-03-02 Thread Eugen Leitl

- Forwarded message from Bryan Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

From: Bryan Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 22:42:48 -0700
To: Kit Plummer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Apple Scitech Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: 
Subject: Re: OS X in a Classified Environment...
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.619.2)

Well,

Nobody currently involved in a classified project is likely to respond 
to this question, but here is some historical (and unclassified) data:  
I have personally seen the current Vice President putting in on the 
Snake River (flyfishing) after using his Powerbook.  Also, OS X has 
been used reasonably extensively in at least the FBI & CIA, but the 
lack of a couple of GIS programs on the platform were preventing its 
use in NIMA and the corollary division within the CIA.  The presence of 
OS X within those agencies should not be surprising given that NeXT 
systems were used extensively within the CIA with black slabs and cubes 
everywhere, even on the secretaries desks which was pretty cool.  Also, 
there are a number of current Xserve clusters that are going in to 
various mil and gov agencies and operations including some with the 
Navy for work in lasers, and a fairly sizable cluster going into an 
Army contractor for aerodynamics work.  I would be interested to find 
out what happened to the Navy sonar cluster compute project that used 
G4 servers running Linux...

As for a bit of trivia, going back a ways, there was a project called 
Cluster Knave (I think that was the project name), developed by ONI 
running on the old Mac OS that was deployed on submarines for tactical 
imagery capture, processing and transmission.  That was most certainly 
a classified environment at the time, and one certainly cannot forget 
those big clunky TEMPEST shielded Macs.

Bryan

>Anyone have OS X in a Classified/secure environment?  Auditing?  Just 
>curious...as I may be entering this unforgiving realm.
>
>Kit

Bryan William Jones, Ph.D.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Utah School of Medicine
Moran Eye Center  Rm 3339A
75 N. Medical Dr.
Salt Lake City, Utah 84132
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/
iChat/AIM address:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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