From: George Spelvin <gs@dev.null>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 20:40:49 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: InfoWar Epilogue 9 (Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet')
Message-ID: <34684D9A.1F02@dev.null>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Title: The True Story of the Internet Part II









The True Story of the InterNet

Part III


InfoWar

Final Frontier of the Digital Revolution

Behind the ElectroMagnetic
Curtain


by TruthMonger <tm@dev.null>




Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing



InfoWar Table of Contents

Epilogue 
M$ Cowboy


Epilogue


The Criminalization of Poverty in Capitalist America by Jalil Abdul Muntaqim 

(Excerpts)

An anonymous poet in the 1700's wrote about crime: "The
law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from the hillside,
but lets the greater robber loose who steals the hillside from
the goose." 
If you steal $5 you're a thief, but if you steal $5 million-you're
a financier . 

In the dictionary, the word "crime" means "an
act which is against the law." Crime applies particularly
to an act that breaks a law that has been made for public good.
Crime in one country, the dictionary continued, "may be
entirely overlooked by the law in another country or may not apply
at all in a different historical period." 

That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts
of "crime" are not eternal. The very nature of crime
is sociopsychological and defined by time and place and those
who have the power to make definitions.


"The language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated
by the courts and by the police, is not only the voice but also
the deed of suppression. This language not only defines and condemns
the Enemy, it also creates him; and this creation is not the Enemy
as he really is but rather as he must be in order to perform his
function for the Establishment..."
-Herbert Marcuse


Hence the power to define is an awesome power. It is the power
of propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit
our agenda, to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at.
It is the power to interpret the picture we see when we look at
the world ...

It is the power to place the picture we see when we look at
the world. It is the power to place a frame around the picture,
to define where it begins and ends. It is, in fact, the power
to define where our vision begins and ends, the power to create
our collective consciousness. 

That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful,
but it is also mostly invisible. 
{We can't fight what we don't see. Most people accept the images
and definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident,
and for always.}
The power to paint the future, to define what is right
and wrong, what is lawful and what is criminal, is really the
power to win the battle for our minds.
{And to win it without ever having to fight it. Simply
said, it is hard to fight an enemy who has an outpost in our minds.}



Since 1977, when California had 19,000 inmates in its prison
system, the California Legislature has passed more than 1,000
bills lengthening sentences or defining new crimes, often in response
to high-profile offenders such as Davis. The result has been a
more-than-sixfold increase to today's population of 126,000. Between
1852 and 1984, California built 12 prisons. Since just 1984, California
has constructed an additional 16 prisons.

But during the decade and a half that imprisonment was soaring,
the crime rate in California has stubbornly refused to budge,
hovering today at approximately the 1977 rate. Indeed, during
1993 and the first half of 1994, the rate of both violent and
property crime actually fell while public fear of crime inexplicably
rose. 

A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington,
D.C., suggests one possible reason for such a paradox. The study
shows that, while the murder rate nationally remained stable
between 1992 and 1993, the number of homicides reported on the
evening news of the nation's three major networks tripled.
Not surprisingly, the report continues, from May 1992 to February
1993, there was a sixfold increase in the number of Americans
who rated crime as the country's most important problem. 

-Three Strikes


The Social Dynamics of Crime

In the March 12, 1993, issue of the Wall Street Journal an article
entitled "Common Criminals-Just About Everyone Violates Some
Laws, Even Model Citizens," byline by Stephen J. Adler and
Wade Lambert stated: 
"We are a nation of lawbreakers. We exaggerate tax-deductible
expenses, lie to customs officials, bet on card games and sports
events, disregard jury notices, drive while intoxicated --and
hire illegal childcare workers."

The last of these was recently the crime of the moment, and Janet
Reno wouldn't have been in the position to be confirmed unanimously
as attorney general yesterday if Zoe Baird had obeyed the much-flouted
immigration and tax laws. 
But the crime of the moment could have been something else,
and next time probably will be.

This is because nearly all people violate some laws, and many
people run afoul of dozens without ever being considered, or considering
themselves, criminals.


An estimated 1,585,400 persons were incarcerated in the United
States in 1995. Correctional authorities held in the Nation's
prisons and jails 600 persons per 100,000 U.S. residents.
Prisoners in the custody of the 50 States, the District of Columbia,
and the Federal Government accounted for two-thirds of the incarcerated
population (1,078,357 inmates). The other third was held in local
jails (507,044 inmates).


In America, in the l990s, as was the case in England in the 1800s,
it is a crime to be poor. The poorer you are, the more criminal
you are. If you are so poor that you have no place to live, and
you live on the pavement or sleep in a car or in a park, you have
committed a crime. It's against the law to sleep on the streets
or in a park. If we have no home, it's against the law to sleep
anywhere.

The Prison-Industrial Complex

Crime is big Business 

The political decisions of the bankers are decisions about who
will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50s to remove
industry from communities of color were about who would be unemployed.
Decisions by developers and bankers about redevelopment (redlining
and gentrification) are decisions about who will be homeless.
Such decisions affect everyone, but people have no say in the
matter. Generally people, especially the poor, have no say in
most social and economic decisions that affect their lives. Somehow
that is not part of the democratic method of government, and because
people have no say in the process, creating homelessness is not
criminal, but being homeless is. 


"Membership in the class of people known as 'law-breakers'
is not distributed according to economic or social status, but
membership in the class 'criminals' is distributed according to
social or economic status..."
- Professor Theodore Sarbin 


Hunger and homelessness are deliberately imposed socioeconomic
conditions of the disenfranchised large numbers of the American
population. This is especially significant when consideration
is given to the method and means by which the malfeasance of the
powers that be operate to ensure that such conditions stay the
same. Thus such pathology ensures the rich get richer, while the
poor get prison and early death. 

Since 1985 the total number of inmates in the custody of
State
and Federal prisons and local jails has more than doubled to
nearly 1.6 million -- an increase of 113%.
* On average, the incarcerated population has grown 7.9%
annually
since 1985. The State and Federal prison population has grown

8.3% annually, while the local jail population has grown 7.0%.
* Over the 10-year period correctional authorities have
found
beds for nearly 841,200 additional inmates or the equivalent of

almost 1,618 inmates per week.
* At yearend 1985, 1 in every 320 United States residents
were
incarcerated. By yearend 1995 that ratio had increased to 1 in

every 167.

-PIAP


Max Weber held that social stratification depends on the distribution
of three resources: wealth (economic resources), power (political
resources), and prestige (social resources). 

We are able to determine the social and racial implications of
certain classes, then, having a vested interest in crime. It can
be argued that because an elite class of criminals is in charge,
they commit capital crimes, crimes against society and humanity.
The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help --because
the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the board rooms
and in the White House. They are the social policy makers that
run this country. And today, they are increasing social repression
by building more prisons, creating harsher legal sanctions (i.e.
52 death penalty laws, three strikes you're out), and becoming
ever more heedless to the social implications of poverty as an
impetus to committing crime. 

Under their misleadership, over five million people are homeless,
37 million have no health insurance, 30 million are illiterate,
30 million more are functionally illiterate, one million are incarcerated,
and 60 million live in poverty and are struggling day to day.

Crime is big business in America. Annually the laws are changed
to ensure profitability in the industry of crime. Social conditions
that serve to maintain levels of poverty, feed the industry of
crime, also put stress on the social stratification's of society.


Within the current processes of economic globalization, the
establishment of the Joint Venture Program has opened California
prisoners to be used as a new labor supply and to be manipulated
within the world economy to meet the interests of transnational
corporations. Within the global economy, the United States is
becoming an increasingly service-based economy, and many of the
manufacturing and textile jobs prisoners are supposedly being
trained for don't even exist here anymore. Economic globalization
has completely altered the relationship between capital and labor
that existed within the economy of this capitalist nation-state,
where massive increases in incarceration directed at working-class
communities and communities of color would formerly have interfered
with the interest of many corporations by diminishing the labor
pool. The hypermobility of capital has created an economic setting
that allows for mass incarceration, because there is no longer
a strong economic need for a large, free, unskilled, unemployed
population of workers in this country. [27] Capital can easily
expand its supply of labor to include any exploitable population
of workers throughout the world, including incarcerated workers.

The Labor of Doing Time


Given the fact that America is a nation of criminals as elucidated
in the Wall Street Journal article, social conflict is inevitable.
It then becomes a matter of identifying the real culprits of crime,
and seeking the means to have them become accountable for their
criminal behavior. This may very well include the redistribution
of their wealth, and the reorganization of the social contract
between the government and the governed. 

In response to the stratification outlined above, it requires
revolutionary nationalist and socialist efforts to formulate a
national political agenda and policy that will challenge the prevailing
social contract between the oppressed and the oppressor nation.
This means revolutionary nationalists and socialists must have
a clear and concise mass-line and political program that identifies
and explains the nature of poor peoples' oppression, and how they
are to be organized to confront their oppression.


"There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing
number of laws.
Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: 'Death to
Tyrants!'"
-Timothy C. May 



M$ Cowboy



[Estevan Mercury,
Oct 22, 1997] It's just like advancing to the NHL of the computer
world.
That was the comparison used by Jeff Sandquist
to describe his new job with Microsoft, one of the giants of the
computer industry, right in their Redmond, Washington campus headquarters.

Sandquist will be leaving his position at SRI Homes (Shelter-Regent
Industries) where he has been a design technologist for the past
four years, and will hook up with like-minded individuals in Redmond
to serve big industry.

"I guess I am now a developer support engineer,"
he said with a chuckle.
"I wanted this job because I get to work with cool stuff
a year before the public gets to see it." Sandquist said
with another laugh.
He said one of his teammates is the author of the Inside Active
Server Pages, one of the more recent bibles of computerdom. Sandquist
explained that active server technology is relatively new to industry
and the public.

"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.

Sandquist starts work at Microsoft on November 3. He'll believe
it then.

(by NORM PARK of The Mercury)


CJ brought Shelter into the 'Wonderful World of Computers'
but he did it in Xenix, not in DOS. DOS is a nice, simple computer
operating system that will work fairly well for the uninitiated
without giving them a lot of grief. It's fairly primitive, but
one can do a tolerably decent job of conducting their affairs
in bits and bytes without having to worry about the dark side
of their new hi-tech/toy-nology.
-Excerpt from "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre"


Subject: Sloppy Chips from Intel 
From: Eric Cordian <emc@wire.insync.net> 
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net 

By now everyone has probably heard that Intel Pentium and Pentium
MMX chips hang when executing the instruction sequence F00FC7C8
even when in an outer ring of privilege or in V86 mode. 

With numerous small Linux-based ISPs out there, often providing
shell services to anonymous customers, or serving customer-provided
CGI programs, the existence and public disclosure such an easily
exploitable flaw in their CPU's hardware protection mechanism
is catastrophic.
...
While today's problem does not permit clandestine entry into
a system, since it kills the system when it is exercised, it does
raise the question of whether there are other more subtle problems
in the hardware protection mechanism, which might enable knowledgeable
users to execute an occasional instruction at the wrong privilege
level, or otherwise do things which should be prohibited according
to the published hardware specifications. 
...
Buggy microprocessor microcode can produce very subtle exploitable
faults in a chip, which are almost impossible to notice when running
ordinary applications and operating systems. Instructions may
do the wrong thing only when they follow certain other instructions.
There may be rare times when the processor is wrongly interruptible,
or when a restricted instruction is not forbidden, or is given
access at the wrong privilege level, or with incorrect address
translation. 

Were such features to be deliberately introduced into a chip,
in order to permit a backdoor for undetected entry, they could
be made completely undetectable, and could depend upon any number
of unlikely conditions, or even specific hidden register values,
in order to be made manifest. Every microprocessor could even
have its own "key" for the activation of such "special
features." 

Unlike UNIX, for which complete compileable source code is available,
we know little about what microcode is run through the several
million transistors on a typical microprocessor. If sloppy engineering
alone produces such dangerous faults, imagine what could happen
should industry decide to deliberately cooperate with various
LEAs and TLAs.
(In the national interest, of course.) 

The possibilities are truly mind-boggling. Perhaps exploits like
tapping Aldrich Ames' PC and crashing Saddam Hussein's PCs en
masse were not done by black bag jobs and viri, but by the activation
of "National Security" backdoors present in all complex
modern microprocessors. 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+ 
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division 
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"



"I am chaos. I am
the substance
from which your artists
and scientists
build rhythms.
I am the spirit
with which your children
and clowns laugh
in happy anarchy.
I am chaos. I am alive.,
and tell you that
you are free"


-Eris, Goddess
Of Chaos, Discord
& Confusion


Subject: 
From: Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net

In the grand tradition of RSA-in-3-lines-of-perl, we present
Crash-A-Pentium-in-44-characters:

main(){int i=0xc8c70ff0;void (*f)()=&i;f();}

-f00fie


Subject: pentium bug/microprocessor design
From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>

To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net

For those of you who don't know, there's actually a minor crisis
brewing in chip design. 

The crisis is that because of the enormous increasing complexity
of individual chips, it's becoming statistically impossible to
completely test them. 

There are new schemes in the works by which Intel etc. are trying
to deal with this, including a remarkable scheme in which new
microcode can be downloaded to the chip. it also involves encryption
in which one needs to know the encryption mechanism for the chip
to accept the new instructions. apparently it's done in such a
way that no one except those who know the encryption can successfully
alter the chip.

But this does raise a lot of cypherpunks issues such as about
reverse engineering etc.


Subject: A.Word.A.Day
- vomitorium
From: Wordsmith <wsmith@wordsmith.org>
To: linguaphile@wordsmith.org

vo.mi.to.ri.um n. A passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre
or
theatre, leading to or from the seats. Usu. pl. 

1754 Dictionary of Arts & Sciences. I. 129/2
"They were entered by avenues, at the end of which
were gates, called vomitoria."


"Programmers are the unifying force that supply the energy
enabling two separate and unique components, hardware and software,
to have a relationship that is capable of productivity and growth.
A marriage of matter that could spawn and produce a multitude
of children to go forth and do many new things in the world, for
better or worse, for good or for evil."

"You are society's last hope for thwarting
the Forces of Evil gearing up for the final battle, readying themselves
to wreak grievous havoc upon the world, such that it has never
known. It is up to you to 'raise the torch,' and let the 'light
of knowledge' spread throughout the civilized world, in the thread
of 'clues' scattered throughout the UNIX operating system, and
throughout your programming and your instructions."

"You must band together, man and woman, young and old,
into a 'Magic Circle' for your own protection from the Forces
of Darkness! You must develop your own secret codes and rituals
to deal with the Evil Forces which will beset you daily once you
set foot on the Path of Righteousness."
-Bubba Rom Dos


[Not-News NetWork-- Mohave Desert] Aug 4/97

WHAT DOES A FIVE HUNDRED POUND GORILLA READ AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE?
- sog

The "Not-News Gorilla NutWork" was rocket-launched in
the Mohave Desert
early yesterday morning by a rag-tag bunch of paramilitarist computer

gurus who unveiled an InterNet Bill of Bytes that included the
words, 
"MicroSoft shall make no laws..."

Angered by a self-appointed council of computer industry magnates
who
have announced their intention to seize fascist control of the
quickly
burgeoning Information Highway by controlling the definition of
all
information, the rebels set up a shooting range which contained
a wide
variety of targets ranging from copies of the Wall Street Journal
to
life-sized cardboard cut-outs of a hooded figure referred to only
as,
"a billionaire to be named later."
...

"We have decided on two classes of ratings." explained
a tassel-
haired young woman as she slid shells into a Winchester Defender

sitting on her lap. "On..." she said, lifting the shotgun
with one
hand, then liberating the hooded head from a nearby cardboard
cut-out,
before turning back to say, with a Cheshire grin, "...and
off."


[Estevan Mercury, Oct 22, 1997] ...
Sandquist will be leaving his position at SRI Homes (Shelter-Regent
Industries) where he has been a design technologist for the past
four years, and will hook up with like-minded individuals
in Redmond to serve big industry.
...

He said one of his teammates is the author of the
Inside Active Server Pages, one of the more recent bibles
of computerdom. Sandquist explained that active server
technology is relatively new to industry and the public.

"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.

...
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot,"
he said.
...
"I can't believe I'm getting this SHOT," he
said.


Subject: A.Word.A.Day
- vomitorium
From: Wordsmith <wsmith@wordsmith.org>
To: linguaphile@wordsmith.org

vo.mi.to.ri.um n. A passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre
or
theatre, leading to or from the seats. Usu. pl. 

1754 Dictionary of Arts & Sciences. I. 129/2
"They were entered by avenues, at the end of which
were GATES, called vomitoria."


Once again the Forces of Good have been forced underground,
faced with incredulity and disbelief when they try to reveal to
mankind that the Evil One is once again afoot in the land, making
His plans for the Final Battle. The 'Circle of Eunuchs' find themselves
working feverishly to rebuild a silent underground dedicated to
enlightening those few that are willing to listen to the Whisper
of Light that is being overwhelmed by the Roar of Darkness. 
~son of gomez


"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely
potent, for good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct,
an idea, which by its nature will resist efforts to restrict it
to bureaucrats and others who deem only themselves worthy of such
Privilege."
A thinking man's Creed for Crypto/ vbm.
Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> 


Now the Circle of Eunuchs discover themselves locked in a covert
battle with Forces that have railed against mankind for Millenniums,
facing the disbelief and terror of others in their efforts to
enlighten mankind about the Evil Forces once again massing throughout
the world in a chilling endeavor to bring us to our ultimate destruction.

While we sleep our way through our daily lives, in unawareness,
the Movement is spreading through Secret Circles spanning the
face of the globe, helping to prepare mankind for the Final Battle.

~son of gomez


"The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre"

"WebWorld & the Mythical Circle of Eunuchs"

"InfoWar (Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet')

Soviet Union Sickle of Eunuchs Secret WebSite