Singapore TOILET ALERT

[Apologies to my friends in Singapore, but I am NOT making this up. --Declan]

 And the top five toilets are...
     SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A drive to keep public toilets clean
and dry is meeting with overwhelming success, the Ministry of
Environment said in a "toilet alert" Tuesday.
     The statement said that in the first week "5,000
Singaporans have called the Clean Public Toilets hotline to
identify Singapore's model toilets and to vote for their top
five favorite toilets."
     The ministry launched a poster competition earlier in the
month featuring three model toilets and inviting the public to
identify their locations, as well as to nominate their favorite
public toilets in five categories of locations.
     Various prizes are involved, including a return trip to Hong
Kong to be won in a draw.
     Singapore is known for public campaigns promoting causes
ranging from discouraging littering to encouraging people to
have more children.




-------------------------
Declan McCullagh
Time Inc.
The Netly News Network
Washington Correspondent
http://netlynews.com/

Declan -

> [Apologies to my friends in Singapore, but I am NOT making this up. --Declan]

No apologies needed.  You don't have to make things up - we have lobotomized 
civil servants and ministers to do that.  On the other hand, some of the users 
of public toilets themselves are or need to be lobotomized!

Another issue: The Singapore Broadcasting Authority has issued "clarifications"
to their own lobotomized Internet Code of Practise (issued July 1996).
Check www.sba.gov.sg for more info.

>  And the top five toilets are...
>      SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A drive to keep public toilets clean
> and dry is meeting with overwhelming success, the Ministry of
> Environment said in a "toilet alert" Tuesday.
>      The statement said that in the first week "5,000
> Singaporans have called the Clean Public Toilets hotline to
> identify Singapore's model toilets and to vote for their top
> five favorite toilets."
>      The ministry launched a poster competition earlier in the
> month featuring three model toilets and inviting the public to
> identify their locations, as well as to nominate their favorite
> public toilets in five categories of locations.
>      Various prizes are involved, including a return trip to Hong
> Kong to be won in a draw.
>      Singapore is known for public campaigns promoting causes
> ranging from discouraging littering to encouraging people to
> have more children.

And for banning the sale of chewing gum, purchase of guns, jaywalking,
speeding, armed robberies, rapes, defamations suits, murders etc.  Damn,
we are beginning to sound (smell??) like New York City. *shivers*

Enjoy.
-- 
Harish Pillay                             	  h.pillay@ieee.org
Singapore      *** Ask me about Linux *** http://home.pacific.net.sg/~harish

Adam,

Sometimes it's useful to inject a bit of humor in every serious discussion.

The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social
controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of
Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you
don't, well, you can always delete it. :)

As for CMR... I was travelling when the discussion started on cypherpunks
so I haven't been following it very closely.

My position is something along these lines: corporations have a right to go
down the CMR path; it is unwise to restrict them through the coercive power
of the state. At the same time, we need to speak out against crypto-foolish
practices. If corporations start building CMR products, the political
consequences could be devestating. It's like building a gallows for your
own hanging.

>From my perch in Washington, I see PGP 5.5/CMR as an existence proof that
key recovery can be done. So far the crypto-advocates have been able to
wave around the Blaze et al white paper that says we don't know how to do
it. Even Dorothy Denning agreed. But now when a mandatory GAK bill goes to
the House floor, all Rep. Solomon etc. have to do is wave around a
shrinkwrapped copy of PGP and say: "I bought this for $19 at the Egghead
shop at 21st and L." Details will be lost in the fearmongering.

I suspect that there's not that substantial a market for CMR. The apparent
market demand now is an artificial one created by the Clinton
administration.

-Declan

At 14:06 -0400 10/22/97, Jonah Seiger wrote:
>While I suspect that new key recovery or CMR products may create some new
>traction for supporters of mandatory GAK, PGP 5.5 is not the first example
>of such a product (TIS has been marketing key recovery products for a
>while).

Of course TIS has been doing this forever. But TIS, a shop staffed by
former NSA spooks, is not the PGP that Phil Zimmermann founded. For PGP to
release such a product changes the political dynamic in important ways.

>More importantly though, the Blaze et al study
>(http://www.crypto.com/key_study) did not say that key recovery/key escrow
>systems can't be built.

In fact it said: "Building the secure infrastructure of the breathtaking
scale and complexity that would be required for such a scheme is beyond the
experience and current competency of the field." Sounds like "can't be
built" to me.

>So far, Soloman, the FBI, nor other mandatory GAK supporters have said that
>PGP 5.5 or other key recovery products on the market today solve their
>so-called 'problems'.  I don't really expect them to. They seem to want
>much much more.

I agree that PGP 5.5 doesn't meet the FBI's demand for realtime access. But
it can be used as a waving-around-on-the-House-floor prop to pass a law
that requires mandatory key escrow.

-Declan

Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
> >More importantly though, the Blaze et al study
> >(http://www.crypto.com/key_study) did not say that key recovery/key escrow
> >systems can't be built.
> 
> In fact it said: "Building the secure infrastructure of the breathtaking
> scale and complexity that would be required for such a scheme is beyond the
> experience and current competency of the field." Sounds like "can't be
> built" to me.

They are right: it can't be built securely.  But that's not what the
NSA et al are saying, they are saying we can build it if you trust us
not to divulge the keys.  Clearly they can.  Also clearly we don't
trust them.  The Ames syndrome dictates that sooner or later someone
will sell the database or government master key.

pgp5.5 or 6.0 when it comes out, are viable for such purposes.  Quite
similar to clipper: all you need is for the NSA to publish a public
key, and for Clinton to pass a presidential decree that all companies
using (the yet to be released) pgp6.0 should add that key to the list
of CMR recipients.

People sticking up for CMR (Lucky, Jon Callas, others) say: but you
can by pass it.  I say so what.  You could by pass clipper too, it
still didn't make it a good idea.  You can be detected when you by
pass it.  With stiff penalties for companies or individuals for by
passing, and the chance of detection, it sounds viable to me.

> >So far, Soloman, the FBI, nor other mandatory GAK supporters have said that
> >PGP 5.5 or other key recovery products on the market today solve their
> >so-called 'problems'.  I don't really expect them to. They seem to want
> >much much more.
> 
> I agree that PGP 5.5 doesn't meet the FBI's demand for realtime access. 

Why do you think it doesn't meet their demand for real-time access?

pgp5.5 supports multiple CMR fields attached to userids on the key.
So in a company scenario, that would mean that before the presidential
decree, the listed CMR key would be: snoopy@acme.com.  After the
presidential decree, they would have to list two extra crypto
recipients: snoopy@acme.com, and thoughtpolice@nsa.gov.

I think that pgp6.0 (or whatever it will be called) when it is
released will allow keys to have multiple CMR key requests attached to
userids.  This will enable it for real.  (pgp5.5 as far as I can
understand only provides support in the GUI for adding one CMR key
request per userid).  pgp5.5 already supports multiple CMR key
requests per userid in that it knows how to reply to them.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

* Adam Back wrote:
>I think that pgp6.0 (or whatever it will be called) when it is
>released will allow keys to have multiple CMR key requests attached to
>userids.  This will enable it for real.  (pgp5.5 as far as I can

PGP 5.0 still supports this.

Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
> The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social
> controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of
> Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you
> don't, well, you can always delete it. :)

The net-filtering and social control aspects of Singapore are very
interesting.  Seems that somewhere like Singapore might be an earlier
adopter of mandatory GAK -- social ills have hugely disproportionate
treatment over there.  I hear (and our Singaporean contributer
confirms) that chewing gum is illegal, jay walking too.  (Hey you have
the jay walking laws in the US too don't you?)  (I missed the social
control aspect of the vote for kewlest public toilet story).

We all suffer this kind of mind numbing stupidity on part of our
governments to some extent.  Outlawing of `rambo' knives, laws
defining pi = 3, etc., etc.

> [CMR topic:] My position is something along these lines:
> corporations have a right to go down the CMR path; it is unwise to
> restrict them through the coercive power of the state. 

The question is really what _is_ the CMR path?  PGP Inc are arguing
that it is merely a recovery procedure to recover stored data in event
of disaster (stored emails in mail folders, and files encrypted to
yourself).  However the design seems itself much more suited to
message screening, or message snooping.

I have yet to see any PGP Inc representative admit to the message
screening design motivation.  In fact they have fairly clearly denied
this.  Either you believe that, or you figure they are being careful
not to admit to this.  I don't know what to believe.

The CDR approach (http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/cdr/) is more
secure, less politically dangerous, and equally privacy respecting.

> At the same time, we need to speak out against crypto-foolish
> practices. If corporations start building CMR products, the
> political consequences could be devestating. It's like building a
> gallows for your own hanging.

Yes, I think it is potentially dangerous.

> >From my perch in Washington, I see PGP 5.5/CMR as an existence proof that
> key recovery can be done. So far the crypto-advocates have been able to
> wave around the Blaze et al white paper that says we don't know how to do
> it. Even Dorothy Denning agreed. But now when a mandatory GAK bill goes to
> the House floor, all Rep. Solomon etc. have to do is wave around a
> shrinkwrapped copy of PGP and say: "I bought this for $19 at the Egghead
> shop at 21st and L." Details will be lost in the fearmongering.

This is one example of why CMR may be dangerous.  Another is the
danger that we have a couple of years of mass CMR enabled software
deployed.  Tim has been using the acronym GMR, which nicely says what
a well deployed CMR software base can be converted to with an over
night presidential decree.  Lethal.

> I suspect that there's not that substantial a market for CMR. The apparent
> market demand now is an artificial one created by the Clinton
> administration.

Again, what _is_ CMR?

I do think companies if they are storing lots of data in encrypted
form will want to assure themselves that they can get it back.  Sort
of like unix/windows NT passwords; if every time users forgot their
password, you had to start over with an empty account, people would
get annoyed.

The problem is that pgp5.x is both an email encryption system and a
file encryption system.  So PGP Inc argue that they need the recovery
features for files.  Well OK, but for emails in transit?  The way to
treat emails in transit is to encrypt with recovery info after
receipt, if the employee feels that particular email is worthy of
saving for company records.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

Hi.  For the sake of sanity and completeness, the following has to be
corrected.

> Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
> > The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social
> > controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of
> > Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you
> > don't, well, you can always delete it. :)
> 
> The net-filtering and social control aspects of Singapore are very
> interesting.  Seems that somewhere like Singapore might be an earlier
> adopter of mandatory GAK -- social ills have hugely disproportionate
> treatment over there.  I hear (and our Singaporean contributer
> confirms) that chewing gum is illegal, jay walking too.  (Hey you have
> the jay walking laws in the US too don't you?)  (I missed the social
> control aspect of the vote for kewlest public toilet story).

Chewing gum per se is not illegal.  I just cannot buy them from any store
in Singapore.  I can chew to my heart's content.  I can go up north to 
Malaysia, buy a whole month's supply of gum (name your flavour) and bring
it back into Singapore.  

So, what is moronically illegal is that I cannot sell that pack of gum.

Regards.
-- 
Harish Pillay                             	  h.pillay@ieee.org
Singapore      *** Ask me about Linux *** http://home.pacific.net.sg/~harish

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

In <199710231543.XAA02822@ganymede.contact.com.sg>, on 10/23/97 
   at 11:43 PM, Harish Pillay <harish@ganymede.contact.com.sg> said:

>Hi.  For the sake of sanity and completeness, the following has to be
>corrected.

>> Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
>> > The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social
>> > controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of
>> > Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you
>> > don't, well, you can always delete it. :)
>> 
>> The net-filtering and social control aspects of Singapore are very
>> interesting.  Seems that somewhere like Singapore might be an earlier
>> adopter of mandatory GAK -- social ills have hugely disproportionate
>> treatment over there.  I hear (and our Singaporean contributer
>> confirms) that chewing gum is illegal, jay walking too.  (Hey you have
>> the jay walking laws in the US too don't you?)  (I missed the social
>> control aspect of the vote for kewlest public toilet story).

>Chewing gum per se is not illegal.  I just cannot buy them from any store
>in Singapore.  I can chew to my heart's content.  I can go up north to 
>Malaysia, buy a whole month's supply of gum (name your flavour) and bring
>it back into Singapore.  

>So, what is moronically illegal is that I cannot sell that pack of gum.

Signapore is a prime example of "mirco management" at it's worst. Whenever
such management is attempted either in the public or private sector they
fail. It should be intresting to see how long Singapore can keep it up.


- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3a
Charset: cp850
Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000

iQCVAwUBNE+Ar49Co1n+aLhhAQFkGgP9EBgH35RfnpFLuWUnZnLESCeShTmAiOMG
hClqCT7hKdjjqnfxAaPU5DlLKcTsgYlssMXiv8q0T2C+g7vooI+QAHvEowArY4Vo
UxjaQgcsCF7gbVccJwTzBzaGBushiMJx1bUVsdFpWn/H/LfOaPbKSaBj4uFCV71q
zOuU1jIqbZg=
=2hOc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

William -

Hi.

> In <199710231543.XAA02822@ganymede.contact.com.sg>, on 10/23/97 
>    at 11:43 PM, Harish Pillay <harish@ganymede.contact.com.sg> said:
> 
> >Hi.  For the sake of sanity and completeness, the following has to be
> >corrected.
> 
> >> Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
> >> > The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social
> >> > controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of
> >> > Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you
> >> > don't, well, you can always delete it. :)
> >> 
> >> The net-filtering and social control aspects of Singapore are very
> >> interesting.  Seems that somewhere like Singapore might be an earlier
> >> adopter of mandatory GAK -- social ills have hugely disproportionate
> >> treatment over there.  I hear (and our Singaporean contributer
> >> confirms) that chewing gum is illegal, jay walking too.  (Hey you have
> >> the jay walking laws in the US too don't you?)  (I missed the social
> >> control aspect of the vote for kewlest public toilet story).
> 
> >Chewing gum per se is not illegal.  I just cannot buy them from any store
> >in Singapore.  I can chew to my heart's content.  I can go up north to 
> >Malaysia, buy a whole month's supply of gum (name your flavour) and bring
> >it back into Singapore.  
> 
> >So, what is moronically illegal is that I cannot sell that pack of gum.
> 
> Signapore is a prime example of "mirco management" at it's worst. Whenever
> such management is attempted either in the public or private sector they
> fail. It should be intresting to see how long Singapore can keep it up.

I don't think the "micro management" is at it's worst in Singapore - not by 
a long shot.  It is true that the Singapore government tries to do so and 
in a lot of what they attempt, they somehow come out smelling roses.  But 
they have goofed up royally as well.  

Regards.
-- 
Harish Pillay                             	  h.pillay@ieee.org
Singapore      *** Ask me about Linux *** http://home.pacific.net.sg/~harish

At 11:38 AM -0700 10/22/97, Adam Back wrote:

>This is one example of why CMR may be dangerous.  Another is the
>danger that we have a couple of years of mass CMR enabled software
>deployed.  Tim has been using the acronym GMR, which nicely says what
>a well deployed CMR software base can be converted to with an over
>night presidential decree.  Lethal.

About "GMR," I use it only because it's a direct parallel to CMR, with
"Government" replacing "Corporate." In fact, as others also suspect, I
anticipate some countries will mandate the precise form CMR is taking in
PGP 5.5, with a requirement that the corporate keys be given ("escrowed" in
the older terminology) to government agencies. This would actually take
very little in the way of additional regulation in many countries--the same
departments of corporations which file various reports with the government
would be compelled to provide keys.

GMR is CMR with the government being one of the keyholders. And the users
need not even be involved in this...all that is needed is an order, or
finding, by the SEC, FTC, IRS, etc., that CMR keys be deposited with the
government.

(When the Justice Department was suing IBM and AT&T and demanding every
scrap of paper they could get, including thousands of boxes of documents,
wouldn't they have surely demanded the CMR keys, had they existed back
then? Were Microsoft to be using CMR, don't you expect these keys will be
demanded by Janet Reno? This, by the way, ought to be reason enough for MS
to abandon its internal programs on message recovery. But I wouldn't be
surprised if failure to adopt CMR is itself seen as part of a conspiracy to
thwart government investigations...speculating wildly, this may be a reason
many companies adopt CMR, and why many other companies eschew CMR.)

In the U.S., there may be various challenges to the constitutionality of
this. Certainly some organizations--hospitals, psychiatric facilities,
newspapers, etc.--will have First and Fourth Amendment claims, e.g.,
protection of confidential sources, protection of medical privacy, etc..
Will XYZ Corporation have such protections? Unclear to me. (Recall the Jim
Choate  mantra that "only individuals have rights.")

I don't mean for GMR to replace GAK, which has served us so well for
several years (since being coined by Carl Ellison, of course). But the
Newspeak everyone is using is "message recovery," with a disaster planning
spin on it (however incorrectly), so maybe we should change with the times,
too.

"GMR" serves to deconstruct and monkeywrench the CMR term.

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

On Wed, Oct 22, 1997 at 02:23:29PM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> At 14:06 -0400 10/22/97, Jonah Seiger wrote:
> >While I suspect that new key recovery or CMR products may create some new
> >traction for supporters of mandatory GAK, PGP 5.5 is not the first example
> >of such a product (TIS has been marketing key recovery products for a
> >while).
> 
> Of course TIS has been doing this forever. But TIS, a shop staffed by
> former NSA spooks, is not the PGP that Phil Zimmermann founded. For PGP to
> release such a product changes the political dynamic in important ways.
> 
> >More importantly though, the Blaze et al study
> >(http://www.crypto.com/key_study) did not say that key recovery/key escrow
> >systems can't be built.
> 
> In fact it said: "Building the secure infrastructure of the breathtaking
> scale and complexity that would be required for such a scheme is beyond the
> experience and current competency of the field." Sounds like "can't be
> built" to me.

In that case, it is completely inaccurate to call PGP5.5 an existence 
proof.  In any case, the Blaze et al paper explicitely acknowledges 
that there is a "business case" for corporate level key recovery, and 
clearly distinguishes the LEA infrastructure model from more limited 
cases. 

> I agree that PGP 5.5 doesn't meet the FBI's demand for realtime access. But
> it can be used as a waving-around-on-the-House-floor prop to pass a law
> that requires mandatory key escrow.

They could wave around TIS's products (designed by noted cypherpunk
Carl Ellison, I believe), or NorTel's Entrust, just as well.  Hell, in
a few months they may be able to wave around Adam Backs CDR product,
which also facilitates GAK -- access to communications is worse than
access to data, by some measure, but the LEA's will certainly be
grateful to Adam for his legitimization of Key Escrow... 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

Kent Crispin <kent@bywater.songbird.com> writes:
> Declan writes:
> > I agree that PGP 5.5 doesn't meet the FBI's demand for realtime access. But
> > it can be used as a waving-around-on-the-House-floor prop to pass a law
> > that requires mandatory key escrow.
> 
> They could wave around TIS's products (designed by noted cypherpunk
> Carl Ellison, I believe), or NorTel's Entrust, just as well.  Hell, in
> a few months they may be able to wave around Adam Backs CDR product,
> which also facilitates GAK -- access to communications is worse than
> access to data, by some measure, but the LEA's will certainly be
> grateful to Adam for his legitimization of Key Escrow... 

I think there is a large difference between storage key recovery and
message key recovery.  Also a difference between message key recovery
and including information with the message allowing it to be recovered
by fourth parties.

Yes, governments would like to come take your disk, but they've got to
come and get it first.  And when they get there they may find you are
not using GAKked keys on your disk encryption.  They won't know until
they try.  With email GAK and recovery info with the email, they can
tell from remote snooping if you are cheating.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
>
> [puff piece on toilets]
> 

No offense Declan, but what has this got to do with cypherpunks,
cryptography, crypto politics etc?  (This is not a perrygram, this is
a message saying I found that particular article uninteresting).

I think we'd be more interested to see an analysis piece of the
political merits/demerits of the pgp5.5 CMR corporate message recovery
technique than of _toilets_.

Where do you stand on the CMR argument?  Or are you staying away from
the hot potato :-)

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

At 9:17 AM -0700 10/22/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:

>As for CMR... I was travelling when the discussion started on cypherpunks
>so I haven't been following it very closely.
>
>My position is something along these lines: corporations have a right to go
>down the CMR path; it is unwise to restrict them through the coercive power
>of the state. At the same time, we need to speak out against crypto-foolish
>practices. If corporations start building CMR products, the political
>consequences could be devestating. It's like building a gallows for your
>own hanging.

Just to make things clear, none of us is arguing for any restrictions on a
corporation's adoption of CMR, nor of PGP, Inc.'s right to manufacture and
distribute CMR software.

Many of us think it is a foolish thing for PGP, Inc., especially, to be
building. Both because it helps Big Brother make his arguments (as he has
already, pace the testimony before Congress about key recovery being
practical because PGP, Inc. is now selling similar software), and because
of how it squanders the reputation capital of Phil Zimmermann and PGP, Inc.

Further, CMR addresses the wrong problems. For reasons I and Adam Back and
several others have discussed at length in the past couple of weeks.

>
>>From my perch in Washington, I see PGP 5.5/CMR as an existence proof that
>key recovery can be done. So far the crypto-advocates have been able to
>wave around the Blaze et al white paper that says we don't know how to do
>it. Even Dorothy Denning agreed. But now when a mandatory GAK bill goes to
>the House floor, all Rep. Solomon etc. have to do is wave around a
>shrinkwrapped copy of PGP and say: "I bought this for $19 at the Egghead
>shop at 21st and L." Details will be lost in the fearmongering.

Yep, they're already doing this. This was reported a week or so ago,
somewhere here in Cypherpunks.
>
>I suspect that there's not that substantial a market for CMR. The apparent
>market demand now is an artificial one created by the Clinton
>administration.

Agreed. What amazes me is how PGP, Inc. would decide this should be a core
part of their company. "PGP for Business," indeed. What were they thinking?

--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Tim May <tcmay@got.net> writes:
> Declan writes:
> >[...]all Rep. Solomon etc. have to do is wave around a
> >shrinkwrapped copy of PGP and say: "I bought this for $19 at the Egghead
> >shop at 21st and L." Details will be lost in the fearmongering.
> 
> Yep, they're already doing this. This was reported a week or so ago,
> somewhere here in Cypherpunks.

Another interesting thing was that the French picked up on it too --
very interesting for them because they are just switching from
crypto-ban to mandatory GAK.  I suspect if PGP Inc could get an export
license they would buy in to it heavily.

(Fabrice Planchon <fabrice@math.Princeton.EDU>, and Jean-Francois Avon
kindly translated a French document on the web "pgp tows the line" or
something like that I think was the consensus they arrived at on
correct translation of the title of the document).

The indirect other danger is that in going the CMR route, PGP Inc may
be standards setters either through the OpenPGP standard, or outside
of it (in a similar way to the way netscape extensions are supported
by many vendors long before they are part of HTML 3.x or whatever).

If CMR becomes the standard, this greatly simplifies the task of TIS,
or TIS europe, or anyone else in building a much more GAK friendly
product which can interoperate with OpenPGP.  I think I saw a tis.com
address on ietf-open-pgp discussions list and wouldn't be surprised if
they are busy building TIS OpenPGP compliant GAKware right now.

A second indirect danger is that by taking this approach PGP Inc
damages itself by isolating itself from the large cypherpunk and
pro-privacy community, and that an even less friendly crypto email
standard wins by default.  How much protection do we have in S/MIME
vendors.  We were relying on PGP Inc to set the pro-privacy, anti-GAK
line, and then we all would have been behind them in pushing the
OpenPGP standard ahead of other standards because of it's GAK
resistance.

As it is various cypherpunks are scrambling trying to keep the OpenPGP
standard a CMR free-zone, at least as a temporary measure for this
version of the standard.


As to what PGP Inc were thinking, I'm not sure I understand what they
were thinking ...

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

At 12:17 PM -0400 10/22/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:

>>From my perch in Washington, I see PGP 5.5/CMR as an existence proof that
>key recovery can be done. So far the crypto-advocates have been able to
>wave around the Blaze et al white paper that says we don't know how to do
>it. Even Dorothy Denning agreed. But now when a mandatory GAK bill goes to
>the House floor, all Rep. Solomon etc. have to do is wave around a
>shrinkwrapped copy of PGP and say: "I bought this for $19 at the Egghead
>shop at 21st and L." Details will be lost in the fearmongering.

While I suspect that new key recovery or CMR products may create some new
traction for supporters of mandatory GAK, PGP 5.5 is not the first example
of such a product (TIS has been marketing key recovery products for a
while).

More importantly though, the Blaze et al study
(http://www.crypto.com/key_study) did not say that key recovery/key escrow
systems can't be built.  It said that such systems designed to meet law
enforcement specifications (24/7 real time access, the infrastructure for
key exchanges, and security considerations necessary for such a system to
function) are beyond the scope of the field and would create significant
vulnerabilities in the network.

This is an important distinction.

So far, Soloman, the FBI, nor other mandatory GAK supporters have said that
PGP 5.5 or other key recovery products on the market today solve their
so-called 'problems'.  I don't really expect them to. They seem to want
much much more.

Jonah



* Value Your Privacy? The Government Doesn't.  Say 'No' to Key Escrow! *
            Adopt Your Legislator -  http://www.crypto.com/adopt

--
Jonah Seiger, Communications Director              (v) +1.202.637.9800
Center for Democracy and Technology              pager +1.202.859.2151
<jseiger@cdt.org>
                                                    PGP Key via finger
http://www.cdt.org
http://www.cdt.org/homes/jseiger

Jonah Seiger <jseiger@cdt.org> writes:
> While I suspect that new key recovery or CMR products may create some new
> traction for supporters of mandatory GAK, PGP 5.5 is not the first example
> of such a product (TIS has been marketing key recovery products for a
> while).

PGP has stated that their corporate user requirement is recovery of
stored data.  This can be easily be acheived by escrowing storage
keys, or other stored data recovery methods.  That includes sent and
received email archives.

CMR seems more functionally suited to wire-tapping or corporate
snooping.  PGP denies that this is a design decision.  PGP states that
they want to make a system which is hard for governments to abuse as
the basis of mandatory GAK.

If we accept those denials, the CMR design does not meet it's design
well.  It sends recovery information with the communication, which is
both a bad security practice, and easy for government to abuse.

Please read:

	http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/cdr/

for an example of a storage key recovery design for data recovery
which is more resilient to government abuse.

> More importantly though, the Blaze et al study
> (http://www.crypto.com/key_study) did not say that key recovery/key escrow
> systems can't be built.  It said that such systems designed to meet law
> enforcement specifications (24/7 real time access, the infrastructure for
> key exchanges, and security considerations necessary for such a system to
> function) are beyond the scope of the field and would create significant
> vulnerabilities in the network.
> 
> This is an important distinction.

That study was talking about the design problems in centralised key
escrow.  PGP Inc's design means that these design problems are
bypassed; the CMR design (if/when it gets abused by government to
become a "GMR" design) means that the NSA can publish a GMR master key
on their web page today, and that Clinton can pass the presidential
decree tomorrow.

Some have argued, that you _could_ build a similar system with pgp2.x
using it's multiple recipients feature.  I agree, you could.

However that is no excuse to go and build such a system!  It is much
less dangerous to build CDR systems; much less dangerous to build systems
which are able to recover only data stored on disk.

> So far, Soloman, the FBI, nor other mandatory GAK supporters have said that
> PGP 5.5 or other key recovery products on the market today solve their
> so-called 'problems'.  I don't really expect them to. They seem to want
> much much more.

All that they want is possible with pgp5.5, or will be with pgp6.0,
and backwards compatibility is already in place in 5.5 (and perhaps
5.0, tho' this compatibility seems to be hard to get anyone to clarify).

Another claim is that the CMR system is easy to by pass, and therefore
it is privacy friendly.

I'm not sure this argument amounts to much, because clipper was also
easy to by pass.  Unless you're using steganography, the government
could detect the bypass, and then the GAK system becomes just another
one of those laws that the die-hards break, but which can translate
into 10 years jail time if you get caught, or if the government
decides you need knocking down a peg or two.

I would have thought if any one understood this, it would have been
Phil Zimmermann, after his Federal investigation.

Really, if you are familiar with the clipper design, PGP Inc's CMR is a very
related design, it is almost exactly clipper implemented in software.

The design allows for multiple "message recovery" keys, or it allows for one
single centralised one (belonging to the NSA, if the NSA has their way).

The Blaze et al report you are quoting just says that having a single
central recovery key is an incredible security risk.  It also says that
managing many frequently changing recovery keys centrally is also complex.

The NSA still seemed to think it worth the risk with the clipper design,
because they figured they could keep the key recovery database locked up
well enough to prevent another Ames selling it to the Russians, or whoever.

PGP 5.5 is clipper written in software.  Yes it can be bypassed, yes the
software has privacy options which make the recovery option optional; it
also has installation options to make it non-optional; by passing the
non-optional version can be detected by a corporate or government snoop.

Corporate snoops are yucky but they are much less ominous than government
snoops.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

In <199710221356.OAA02611@server.test.net>, on 10/22/97 
   at 02, Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> said:

>Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
>>
>> [puff piece on toilets]
>> 

>No offense Declan, but what has this got to do with cypherpunks,
>cryptography, crypto politics etc?  (This is not a perrygram, this is a
>message saying I found that particular article uninteresting).

>I think we'd be more interested to see an analysis piece of the political
>merits/demerits of the pgp5.5 CMR corporate message recovery technique
>than of _toilets_.

>Where do you stand on the CMR argument?  Or are you staying away from the
>hot potato :-)

Exactly who died and made you the guardian of Truth, Justice, and the
Cypherpunk Way??? Sometimes I think you take yourself way too seriously
Adam.


-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
---------------------------------------------------------------

William Geiger <whgiii@invweb.net> writes:
> Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:
> >I think we'd be more interested to see an analysis piece of the political
> >merits/demerits of the pgp5.5 CMR corporate message recovery technique
> >than of _toilets_.
> >
> >Where do you stand on the CMR argument?  Or are you staying away from the
> >hot potato :-)
> 
> Exactly who died and made you the guardian of Truth, Justice, and the
> Cypherpunk Way??? 

I just react to issues I think are important, or which seem
interesting to me, same as anyone else.  I happen to think this CMR
issue is important.

If you disagree, and think the CMR danger is over-rated, well speak up
please!

If you think I am a big mouth speak up too (as you have:-)

> Sometimes I think you take yourself way too seriously Adam.

Well there is always a `d' key, or one of your nifty O/S2 spam
filters.

Also I would be interested in your personal views as a PGP compatible
mail script implementor on how easy CDR is to implement
(http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/cdr/) with your setup.  Some people are
objecting to the difficulty of implementing it.  I think it is fairly
easy.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`