Re:quote of the day

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Carl_Ellison@vos.stratus.com writes:

>
>          Only those means of security are good, are
>          certain, are lasting, that depend on yourself
>          and your own vigor.
>                                          - Machiavelli
>

That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government
spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see
your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up
at the back of a countryside garage,  beat the shit out of you, inject
various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?

That was a bit harsh, but, going back to the essentials, a crypto system
is as weak as its weakest link, isn'it ? Now that we've got them pgp, RSA and
IDEA and whatnot, fine, we've built a 20 inches thick steel chain around our
little secrets.

Except that this marvelous piece of technology is held together with a hair
strand: your brain.
Where you key is kept, and where everybody assumes it's safe.

Isn't time we take a look at another kind of cryptographic attack, the
ancestor of which bore the delicate name of penthotal ?

Nobody ever speaks of them chemicals that make you talk. But they exist,
and as well as cryptography techniques developed fast recently, trust the
government, those chemicals must have made a few advances.
Like, for example making you tell what you don't want to and then make you
forget about anybody asking.

Or maybe I watch too many serials.

Does anybody have informations about state of the art tell-us-you-story-pills ?

- -zap

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>That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government
>spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see
>your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up
>at the back of a countryside garage,  beat the shit out of you, inject
>various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?

Because of economics and political stability.

You can build computers and monitoring devices in secret, deploy them
in secret, and listen to _everything_.  To listen to everything with
bludgeons and pharmaceuticals would not only cost more in labor and
equipment, but also engender a radicalizing backlash to an actual
police state.

Of course, if one is paranoid, these considerations of the whole do
not hold, since for only one person the cost balance is reversed.

There is safety in numbers.

Eric

Eric, the squid, writes -

> There is safety in numbers.

Large prime numbers.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Paul Ferguson                         
Sprint Managed Router Network Engineering          tel: 703.904.2437 
Herndon, Virginia  USA                        internet: paul@hawk.sprintmrn.com

> 
> There is safety in numbers.
> 

	*prime* numbers.

	:-)
(Sorry, I couldn't let that one pass up.)

-Sameer

On Wed, 26 Jan 1994, zaaaaaaaap! wrote:

> Nobody ever speaks of them chemicals that make you talk. But they exist,
> and as well as cryptography techniques developed fast recently, trust the
> government, those chemicals must have made a few advances.
> Like, for example making you tell what you don't want to and then make you
> forget about anybody asking.

The effects of the classic truth drug thiopentale (Pentotale) are widely 
known by anesthesiologists and their nurses, although other drugs with
faster elimination (meaning you can drive your car home after some ours)
are replacing it as drug of choice for anesthetic initiation. If you
inject a sub-anesthetic dose of Pentotale the subject will become loose
in his associations and frequently offer his deeper feelings about
the situation to the audience (in the operating theatre) without being asked
to do so. Pentotale and other barbiturates have also been used in special
psychiatric treatment programs to induce loquaciousness and emotional
openness (at the moment very out of fashion). Most of these effects are
not very different from those of alcohol, we all know the overfriendly
wino, and can certainly be withheld by a determined non-talker. The same
goes for benzodiazepines (like Valium). But you usually do forget a lot
about it afterwards. Amphetamines can also make the subject very, very
friendly but not against his will and you don't forget about it. Opiates
obviously are bad choices making the subjects carefree but uncooperative.
Anti-depressives and anti-psychotic drugs also have no theoretical
advantages.

Some hallucinogens might be better choices though, at least as weapons
of torture making you talk just to be spared the next shot. Publically
known hallucinogens like LSD are well known to produce states of ultimate
terror if given to uncooperative subjects at the 'wrong' time. True
hallucinogens like (high dose) atropine might be even more effective. Many
synthetic psychodelic drugs started their career in anesthesiology but
were quickly abandoned because of psychic side effects. One of the weirdest
is still used sometimes (being extremely friendly to weak hearts and lungs):
ketamine. Basically the patient on ketamine can be awake during the operation
but in a state of utter confusion through selective disruptions of 
associative brain channels. My educated guess is that if serious work is
going on trying to find a truth drug, ketamine-related substances are studied
intensely. Anyway, there is no perfect drug that just make you say the truth
and then forget about it. And there never will be. And the polygraph is 
quackery.

Mats Bergstrom

Lyle_Seaman@transarc.com writes:
> Well, there _are_ plenty of drugs that neatly cause short-term memory
> loss.  Xanex, I think, is one. (And there are some other really scary

Ah, oops.  I was thinking of Halcyon, actually.  And there are other drugs,
like Versed and Fentanyl, which have similar effects to Sodium Pent or
severe inebriation, in that they cause loquacity and memory loss. 
The effect is that people talk about whatever "is on their mind",
which might or might not be true.  Someone might try very hard to
convince you of their innocence of a particular crime.  If they were,
in fact, guilty, their ability to lie convincingly under the influence
would be rather impaired.  However, their ability to speak clearly is
often pretty seriously impaired as well.

Bit of a tangent, eh?

Lyle		Transarc		707 Grant Street
412 338 4474	The Gulf Tower		Pittsburgh 15219

Actually N2O @ 6LPM + O2 @ 3LPM works pretty good too, with less side 
effects and easier to get legally.

On Sat, 29 Jan 1994, Jim Wilson wrote:

> Actually N2O @ 6LPM + O2 @ 3LPM works pretty good too, with less side 
> effects and easier to get legally.
> 

There are several places on Haight that sell component #1, though at not 
quite so measured of dosage.

-ck

Mats Bergstrom <matsb@sos.sll.se> writes:
> intensely. Anyway, there is no perfect drug that just make you say the truth
> and then forget about it. And there never will be. And the polygraph is 
> quackery.

Well, there _are_ plenty of drugs that neatly cause short-term memory
loss.  Xanex, I think, is one. (And there are some other really scary
drugs used in medecine, that could be used for some awfully terrifying
trips.  Pavulon, for instance, which causes total paralysis, but 
does not interfere with sensory nerve function.)  So the "...then
forget about it" part is pretty simple.

Lyle		Transarc		707 Grant Street
412 338 4474	The Gulf Tower		Pittsburgh 15219

> That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government
> spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see
> your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up
> at the back of a countryside garage,  beat the shit out of you, inject
> various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?

	Because it's not their money.

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