Little known facts about the infohigh....

uuh...
	I'm sitting here in shock right now,not knowing if this is yet
another round of propganda, or another scheme set up by the NSA and other
branches of our government's "protectful" branches <smirk> to keep an eye
on "terrorist activities" in the homes of our American citizens. I just
finished reading "1984" to get me in the mood for a paper I am working on
concerning computer surveillance...and now I receive this post regarding
the use of TV technology being used to create the infamous Orwellian
"Telescreen" which can hear and see our every move. Does anyone on this
list have any further information about this? Perhaps (and I am crossing my
fingers here) this was a post- April Fool's Day gag.. trouble is- it seems
just feasible enough to make me worry.
	MM- one more thing. Did anyone see the Los Angelas time pieceby
Michael Scrage from MIT entitled "Why Clipper's Unlikely to Chip Away
Privacy?" (14 April 94). I can re-post if necessary. A couple of quotes
from it at least:

"Now, unless the government makes such private encryption illegal (such as
PGP), Clipper is going to foment (sic) entrepreneurial digital
cryptographers feeding off the paranoid fantasies of individuals and
institutions that fear their communications might be compromised by Big
Brother".

and:

"As long as there is a thriving market in commercial cryptography, CLipper
is unlikely to be a threat to our privacy or our criminals."

Comments Anyone?

        -- Julie

______________________________________________________________________________
Julie M. Albright
Ph.D Student        
Department of Sociology
University of Southern California
albright@usc.edu

Julie Albright wrote:

...
> on "terrorist activities" in the homes of our American citizens. I just
> finished reading "1984" to get me in the mood for a paper I am working on
> concerning computer surveillance...and now I receive this post regarding
> the use of TV technology being used to create the infamous Orwellian
> "Telescreen" which can hear and see our every move. Does anyone on this
> list have any further information about this? Perhaps (and I am crossing my
> fingers here) this was a post- April Fool's Day gag.. trouble is- it seems
> just feasible enough to make me worry.

Rest assured, that's just another wildly implausible paranoid rant.
The red LED on a VCR or cable box is no more capable of acting as any
kind of t.v. camera than doorknobs can act as palmprint scanners. (I
mean, they _can_, but only with expensive reengineering.) This "cable
boxes are spying on us" tale has been reposted several times in
various groups. Kind of like the "IDealOrder" psychic t.v. broadcast
people and their claims.

It perhaps has been given superficial credence because some of the
television ratings companings (Arbitron, Nielson (sp?). etc.) are
toying with the idea of installing "body sensors" in their ratings
boxes that would tell them how many people were actually in fron to
the t.v. As these ratings families voluntarily agree to be part of the
sample, any such system would be voluntary. (And I intend no irony here.)

Monitoring people inside their homes is something not even Denning and
Sternlight are arguing for.

----

And now for a rare opportunity for a _reverse_ spelling flame:

> "Now, unless the government makes such private encryption illegal (such as
> PGP), Clipper is going to foment (sic) entrepreneurial digital
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^

I don't know who added the "(sic)" after "foment," but foment is
indeed the right usage here, meaning to "incite." As in "fomenting
revolution." An alternative might be "ferment," which is perhaps what
the (sic)-adder thought the word was meant to be, but that would be a
much less appropiate usage.

--Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Tim May wrote:

> 
> Rest assured, that's just another wildly implausible paranoid rant.
> The red LED on a VCR or cable box is no more capable of acting as any
> kind of t.v. camera than doorknobs can act as palmprint scanners. (I

> 
> It perhaps has been given superficial credence because some of the
> television ratings companings (Arbitron, Nielson (sp?). etc.) are
> toying with the idea of installing "body sensors" in their ratings
> boxes that would tell them how many people were actually in fron to
> the t.v. As these ratings families voluntarily agree to be part of the
> sample, any such system would be voluntary. (And I intend no irony here.)
> 
> Monitoring people inside their homes is something not even Denning and
> Sternlight are arguing for.
>  

	I guess I have been too immersed in surveillance theory lately
- I'm begining to get a bit paranoid! However, I do sometimes wonder if
some of the new technologies (such as "interactive TV") which will be be
brought into the homes of the populus could in fact be used for more
insidious purposes than was the original intent (I am generously assuming
the original intent was as it was presented to the consumer).
I mean- what's to stop the government- or perhaps the big capitalists-
from utilizing the technologies, such as that suggested by the Neilson
people, to monitor citizens *not* part of some voluntary rating program. 
Are you suggesting that since Denning et al aren't "argueing for it"
that it is inconceivable? Hmm....

Julia

_________________________________________________________________________
Julie M. Albright
Ph.D Student 
Department of Sociology
University of Southern California
albright@usc.edu

Julie (or is it Julia or Julietta?) writes:

> 	I guess I have been too immersed in surveillance theory lately
> - I'm begining to get a bit paranoid! However, I do sometimes wonder if
> some of the new technologies (such as "interactive TV") which will be be
> brought into the homes of the populus could in fact be used for more
> insidious purposes than was the original intent (I am generously assuming
> the original intent was as it was presented to the consumer).
> I mean- what's to stop the government- or perhaps the big capitalists-
> from utilizing the technologies, such as that suggested by the Neilson
> people, to monitor citizens *not* part of some voluntary rating program. 
> Are you suggesting that since Denning et al aren't "argueing for it"
> that it is inconceivable? Hmm....

Let me make an important clarification: there *is* a privacy danger
that multimedia/cable companies will use information...they already do
in the sense that they get real-time feedback on who's ordering which
premium pay-per-view channels. (My brother-in-law was marketing
manager for a cable company in San Luis Obispo and he maintained that
the cable companies could not tell which channel was being watched via
the box, but that new 2-way boxes, coming Real Soon Now, would allow
this.)

This is the same "privacy" danger faced by subcribers to magazines, by
purchasers of goods by mail order, and by any other system that allows
purchasing or renting preferences to be correlated to True Names.

(In the special case of videotape rentals, a specific law was passed
to make compiling of rental records a crime. This was during the Bork
imbroglio of some several years back.)

The "cryptographic" solution, the one that does not involve passing a
mess of new laws which will likely be ignored and exploited, is to
allow the following, either separately or in combination:

* receiver anonymity, via cryptographic codes which descramble some
widely-broadcast transmission (complicated issues of how to ensure
only one customer can view it, suggesting some Chaumian tie-ins and
"is-a-person" credentialling, albeit identity-blinded).

* digital money, so that goods and services may be bought over the
cable system without any explicit mapping to viewer identity (e.g., no
billing to the home address or VISA card is needed).

(Example: coin-operated televisions are already this way, in airports
and bus stations. Could extend to dorm rooms, hotels, etc., using
either coins (a theft problem, hence digital cash a better idea) or
tokens.)

* blinding protocols a la Chaum, whereby one proves ownership of some
credential (one's age, when entering a bar, for example) without
providing a name which could too easily be entered into a database.

Anyone interested in ways to defeat Orwellian surveillance technology
(and it goes without saying that all Cypherpunks should read "1984,"
as Julie has just done) should run out and find David Chaum's paper
"Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete," November 1985,
"Communications of the ACM." This paper has been cited _so_ many times
here, but it remains the single most important paper I can think of.

A slightly updated version was published in the First Computers,
Freedom, and Privacy Conference Proceedings.

Both of these sources should be findable in any large university
science library.

(It's not been scanned and OCRed and placed in the soda archives
because it's a very long paper, and the diagrams are pretty much
essential for figuring out the paper.)

Crypto technology wins out over well-intentioned privacy laws any day.

Locality of reference, and self-empowerment...if you buy books from
me with a credit card, should there be a "privacy law" saying I can't
keep a record of your purchases? That's the route some European
countries are going. All kinds of problems, and not something most
Cypherpunks would want, as it involves other invasions of
privacy: "Open up! This is the Privacy Protection Police."

The better solution: pay with cash for your books and then I _can't_
keep a record of who bought what. That's method over law.


--Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."