Subject: RE: Email Privacy eating software

From: Lillian Komlossy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 11:13:40 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Cotton [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2000 10:14 AM
To: ietf
Subject: Re: Email Privacy eating software 

On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

>> That, in turn, would likely require monitoring of the RADIUS traffic,
>> which (if it were different from release to release) might have forced
>> the downgrade.

>RADIUS logfiles provide lots of interesting information. They'll know your
>dial-up habits, phone number, length of time connected etc. The FBI should
>just start their own ISP.

What a scary thought! Maybe then they would not need to scan email - they
could just tell us what to write.

Cheers,

~L

---

From: "David A. Higginbotham" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 10:53:50 -0400

we have the right to own anything we can dream up and build, we do not
always have the right to use it for its intended purpose

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of John Stracke
Sent: Monday, July 17, 2000 10:15 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Email Privacy eating software

Phil Neumiller wrote:

> I like this idea!  Yeah, if we can reclassify black boxes as munitions, as
> the NSA has
> done to encryption for years, then we can claim that we have the "right to
> bear black
> boxes".

...just like we have the right to own nuclear weapons.

--
/==============================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own.|
|Chief Scientist |=============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |You buttered your bread, now lie in it.      |
[email-masked]|                                             |
\==============================================================/

---

From: "Book, Robert" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 12:44:34 -0400

Hmmm, I think the federal government might have another opinion that topic,
re: Waco, etc., but this is far off the topic. It's an idyllic viewpoint,
though. But I'm afraid we're at the point in history where the phrase "a
life of freedom in the United States" is an oxymoron. And, if Carnivore
isn't as clear an example of that as one needs, then one is probably wearing
rose-colored glasses.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 13:01:10 -0700

I have had a similar experience to the one reported in the article, and was meet
with a similar dejected mood when they fired up my laptop to find not the usual,
nice, graphical widows desktop but Linux, The officer in question picked up a
phone and said to his colleague, It doesn't look like windows I think it is
something else. When I said it was UNIX, he visibly paled in front of me, and
waved me through.

So it would appear that if you are a terrorist, bomb maker, subversive or have a
hard disk full of pornography and plan to travel to London for the IETF meeting
or anything else for that matter, I would recommend trading in your Laptop's
running windows for an Apple or in my case a laptop running Linux, which cannot
be scanned.

It is sometimes kind of silly, but I am also English (working in the US) and
frankly, I have to admit that in the grand scheme of things I do sleep slightly
better at night knowing that these people (H.M. Customs & Excise and even U.S.
Customs) are there plugging away for us, I am sure that the way they look at it
,they also do not want to be doing it, but every so often they must catch a bad
person. (notice, I did not say guilty ;->) that they can charge with something
really heinous.

And let us not forget that these people are enforcing the law that the
politicians make.

What we need IMHO is more understanding by the legislators, without this we are
doomed to have our time wasted by ineffectual laws that serve no real purpose
other than to waste people's time and slow them down instead of protecting the
public interest.

The future may hold that if you are running the non-de facto O/S like MacOS or
Linux then you are technically guilty of encrypting data, because the guy that
wants to search your hard disk is only trained on the commands and how to
navigate the windows file system and no other.
Maybe the NSA will classify Linux and other non windows operating systems as
munitions of war ;-> (which would be interesting seeing as I recall they (NSA)
also run Linux, something about better security)

Jim

**************************************************************************************
       Legal Disclaimer

The opinions expressed within this mail are specifically my own and in no way
refer to or relate to any
ongoing business and/or the technical direction of 3Com Corporation, or any
subsidiary companies or
business units within 3Com Corporation and its subsidiaries.

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

"Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]> on 07/18/2000 11:45:14 AM

Sent by:  "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>

To:   Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]>
cc:   Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Jim
      Stephenson-Dunn/C/HQ/3Com)
Subject:  Re: Email Privacy eating software

In message <[email-masked]>, Matt Holdrege wr
ites:
>At 11:50 AM 7/18/00 +0100, Jon Crowcroft wrote:
>>next summer's IETF meeting is tentatively scheduled for London, England
>>http://www.ietf.org/meetings/0mtg-sites.txt
>>
>>if you turn up at customs with a laptop, you may be asked to show any
>>and all files on it to the nice chaps there. if someone has sent you
>>crypted email (say using your public key) you may be obliged to
>>connect the lapto pto the public net and  access your other key to
>>decrypt the mail for the nice chaps in customs to priove that it is
>>not to do with pornography or terrorism - whereeve yo uare from, you
>>will have no recourse to say "no" or "this is commercial in
>>confidence" or "my company will fire me if i let this go to anyone or
>>send it over the net to decrypt at my home site etc etc"
>
>As one who travels to London quite often and has red hair and is of Irish
>descent, this sounds a bit overmuch to me. I've never had anything other
>than a kind welcome by British customs officials. There are loads of crazy
>laws in the U.S. and other countries. We citizens are grateful that the
>enforcement branch of the government chooses to ignore them unless provoked.
>
>
I'm not sure what "sounds a bit overmuch" to you.  Have a look at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F150000/150465.stm

          --Steve Bellovin

---

From: "Parkinson, Jonathan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 15:37:19 +0100

"I use the computer to access the Internet, yes," I said, rather proud of
myself for my accuracy. 
"Is there any pornography on it?" she said, stoically. 

I belive she ment the Computer not the Internet. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Stracke [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2000 3:16 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Email Privacy eating software

Matt Holdrege wrote:

> How is this different than looking in your bags for porn magazines or
> videotapes? How is looking at your stored email different than looking at
> your paper correspondence?

Read it again--they were apparently going to use their program to view a
known
porn site, not porn on his hard drive.

---

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 22:36:07 -0400

In message <[email-masked]>, Matt Holdrege wr

>your paper correspondence?

Leaving out their technical limitations and assumptions (the whole 
world doesn't run Windows), the problem is that you don't know what 
they're really doing.  Indeed, the Customs officers may not -- can you 
tell from the wrapper what an arbitrary piece of software does?  A 
magazine is fairly obviously just that -- but there's a lot of very 
sensitive data on many people's laptops.  Perhaps the British 
government can be trusted -- but I can name a number of others, 
including nominal democracies, that I wouldn't trust.
>
>As I stated in my previous post "unless provoked". Customs in many 
>countries can be provoked to look at those things. What makes a computer 
>special? Why single out the U.K. government when many others do essentially 
>the same thing.

Apart from the question of what it takes to "provoke" a Customs officer 
-- skin color? -- the issue with the UK in particular is the lack of 
any checks on the powers of the House of Commons.  Usually, they show 
restraint and common sense -- but not always.  (As an aside, one of the 
Customs officials I encountered in Australia, after hearing why I was 
there, opined that the Internet was really a tool of the Devil, and 
that it was somehow related to the Mark of the Beast.  I decided not to 
argue, not even to point out that my religion knows nothing of Beasts 
nor marks thereof.)

		--Steve Bellovin