From: Information Security <guy@panix.com>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 21:47:53 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: What we are Fighting
Message-ID: <199809071345.JAA02136@panix7.panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



[Cryptography Manifesto excerpts used for replies]

   >   From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
   >
   >   Tim asks:
   >
   >   >Freeh and Company continue to mumble about "meeting
   >   >the legitmate needs of law enforcement." What can they 
   >   >be speaking of?
   >   ...
   >   >Obviously his side is contemplating domestic crypto restrictions.
   >
   >   Threat of terrorism will be the impetus for applying national security 
   >   restrictions domestically, for relaxing cold war limitations on spying
   >   on Americans, for dissolving barriers between law enforcement
   >   and military/intelligence agencies.

Funny how the NSA's ECHELON monitoring machine keeps growing endlessly...

:   The Washington Post Magazine, June 23 1996
:   "Government surveillance, terrorism and the U.S. Constitution"
:   from Main Justice, by Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, 1996, ISBN 0-684-81135-9
:           
:   The FBI is growing in tandem with the NSA. With the help of the National
:   Security Agency, the U.S. eavesdropping bureaucracy that spans the globe,
:   the FBI operates a super-secret facility in New York code-named Megahut
:   that is linked to the other FBI listening posts.
: 
:   After the OKC bombing, Janet Reno and Louis Freeh asked Congress to raise
:   to 3,000 the number of FBI agents working counter-intelligence and counter-
:   terrorism.
: 
:   With the new legislation, the funding for just the FBI's counter-intelli-
:   gence/terror goals is now ONE BILLION DOLLARS a year, and their activities
:   will rise to a LEVEL HIGHER THAN AT ANY TIME DURING THE COLD WAR.  

1984 means a constant State of War.


Here's a new war: "cyberwar".

#  "Head of CIA Plans Center To Protect Federal Computers"
#  By Tim Weiner, The New York Times, 6/26/96
# 
#  John Deutch, Director of the CIA, is building a "cyberwar" center in the NSA.
#   
#  Mr. Deutch said cyberwar could become a 21st-century national security threat
#  second only to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
# 
#  "The electron," Mr. Deutch warned, "is the ultimate precision-guided weapon."

Haven't I heard bad dialogue like this on Mystery Science Theater 3000?

----

   >   From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
   >
   >   Technical means for access to encrypted data will probably
   >   come first in communications, then to stored material. There
   >   will be an agreement for increased CALEA wiretap funding, which 
   >   is what the two cellular and wired suits against the FBI intend,
   >   (paralleling what the hardware and software industries want from
   >   federal buyers of security products).
   >
   >   This will provide the infrastructural regime for the gov to monitor 
   >   and store domestic traffic as NSA does for the global, using the 
   >   same technology (NSA may provide service to domestic
   >   LEA as it now does for other gov customers for intel).

    
Question:  How can the FBI use computers to monitor thousands and thousands
           and thousands and thousands of phone calls simultaneously, as they
           said they would do with CALEA, when we Americans speak so many 
           different accents and languages?
    
Answer:    Thirty years of fine tuning by the NSA, y'all.

----

   >   From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
   >
   >   As noted here, the features will appear first as optional, in response
   >   to demand from commerce, from parents, from responsible
   >   institutions, to meet public calls for protection, for privacy, for
   >   combating threats to the American people. 

*   "Project L.U.C.I.D.", by Texe Marrs, 1996, ISBN 1-884302-02-5
*
*   These changes are necessary, we are reminded each day by our mind control
*   jailers in the media, to solve the immigration crises, to institute gun
*   control, to counter domestic terrorism, to fight pornography, to find
*   deadbeat dads who don't pay child support, to "Save Mother Earth",
*   to war against drug kingpins, to stop crime in the streets, to watch and
*   monitor the militias, to put an end to hate crimes and bigotry,
*   to extend universal healthcare benefits, to guarantee welfare reform, to
*   improve public education...the list of crises and problems to be fixed
*   seems to be never-ending.
*
*   Implement National ID Cards, they promise, and a bright, secure future
*   can be ours. [snip]

----

   >   From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
   >
   >   Like wiretap law, use of the features for preventative snooping will 
   >   initially require a court order, as provided in several of the crypto 
   >   legislative proposals.
   >
   >   Like the wiretap orders, gradually there will be no secret court refusals 
   >   for requests to use the technology in the national interest.
   >
   >   Personal privacy will evaporate almost unnoticeably...

    *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *
    *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *
  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *
   ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***
    *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *
: The Puzzle Palace
:     Inside the National Security Agency,
:     America's most secret intelligence organization
: Author James Bamford, 1983 revision, ISBN 0-14-00.6748-5

P468-469: Within the United States, FISA still leaves the NSA free to pull
into its massive vacuum cleaner every telephone call and message entering,
leaving, OR TRANSITING the country.

By carefully inserting the words "by the National Security Agency" into the
FISA legislation, the NSA has skillfully excluded from the coverage of the
FISA statute as well as the surveillance court all interceptions received
from the British GCHQ or any other non-NSA source.

Thus it is possible for GCHQ to monitor the necessary domestic circuits  
and pass them on to the NSA through the UKUSA Agreement, giving them
impunity to target and watch-list Americans.

P475-477: Like an ever-widening sinkhole, the NSA's surveillance technology
will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and
gradually eliminating more and more privacy.

If there are defenses to such technotyranny, it would appear, at least from
past experience, that they will not come from Congress.

Rather, they will most likely come from academe and industry in the form of
secure cryptographic applications to private and commercial telecommunications
equipment.

The same technology that is used against free speech can be used
to protect it, for without protection the future may be grim.


Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, referring
to the NSA's SIGINT technology, ciirca 1975:

    At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around
    on the American people and no American would have any privacy left,
    such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations,
    telegrams, it doesn't matter.

    There would be no place to hide.

    If the government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge
    in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence commun-
    ity has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny,
    and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort
    to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how
    privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.

    Such is the capability of this technology...

    I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge.

    I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and
    we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this
    technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that
    we never cross over that abyss.

    That is the abyss from which there is no return.

  
    *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *
   ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***    ***
  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *  * * *
    *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *
    *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *

*   "Data Show Federal Agents Seldom Employ Surveillance Authority Against
*   Terrorists", By Stephen Labaton, The New York Times, 5/1/95
*
*   An item in President Clinton's five-year, $1.5 billion plan to combat
*   terrorist acts:
*
*      o It would ease restrictions on the use in American courts of
*        information from surveillance conducted by foreign governments.


#   "Moynihan Says U.S. Killed His Anti-Spy Measure"
#   By Irvin Molotsky, The New York Times, September 11, 1985
#
#   Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan charged that the CIA and State Department
#   had killed a measure he had introduced aimed at protecting American
#   citizens from having their telephone conversations intercepted by foreign
#   agents in this country.
#
#   The Senator's bill would have made telephone call interception by foreign
#   agents illegal and would have provided for their expulsion.
#
#   The Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence opposed the measure
#   as unnecessary and could lead to disclosing "sensitive intelligence
#   sources."

British wiretappers at the helm of the NSA's domestic spy-fest.

---guy

   http://www.newsguy.com/~mayday/crypto/crypto0.html