From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 07:14:14 +0800
To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Re: J'accuse!: Whitehouse and NSA vs. Panix and VTW
Message-ID: <199609131832.OAA17532@attrh1.attrh.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 03:58 PM 9/12/96 -0400, Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> wrote:
>I think someone should just stand right up and accuse the NSA, at the
>behest of the Whitehouse, of running a denial of service attack on Panix at
>*exactly* the time when VTW is lobbying its hardest on the PRO-CODE bill.

Let's see, 
        anon.penet.fi gets shut down (Church of Scientology),
        PRO-Code bill is being lobbied for and against,
        PANIX is attacked by TCP-spammers,
        HipCrime initiates a distributed spam against remailers,
        newspapers accuse remailers of promoting Child Pornography
        Louis Freeh's recently gotten wiretap money approved.
        Clipper-3 is trying to build an escrowed key-certification hierarchy

Could it be *conspiracy*?  Yah, sure.  But it could be just a bunch
of separate people who don't like anonymity.  (Kind of like somebody
getting stabbed twelve times at night on the Orient Express - the problem
is finding someone who _doesn't_ have a motivation to attack anonymity :-)

At least one of the newspaper articles I've read has referred to the need
for real authentication on the net to prevent the anonymity that makes
this kind of attack possible, and in particular for the major network providers
to make sure that they don't export messages with bogus addressing,
a cure that the article said would take several months to deploy.
I don't know if they were referring to IPv6, or sendmail modifications,
or router hacks, or what; the article's author seemed to think this was
about bogusly-addressed email messages rather than understanding SYNs.

Anybody for an Internet Driver's License?

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	Dispel Authority!