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[B <beeline AT mindspring.com>]

Update on terror reaction:

No encryption backdoors: "Sen. Judd Gregg has abruptly changed his mind
and will no longer seek to insert backdoors into encryption products."
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47635,00.html

But the Senate Patriot Act and the House USA Act do contain things that
worry civil rights advocates....

1. Sneak and Peek, where the spooks can come into your house and conduct
a search -- including searching and copying files on your computer --
without letting you know about it. The last attempt to pass this (in
2000) resulted in much outcry from constituents and so was removed from
the main bill.

2. Know Your Customer, where banks are required to know you well enough
to know your "usual" and "unusual" banking activities, and report any
"unusual" activities to the feds. If you'll remember, this 1998 gem
resulted in a lot of bitching, so was turned down. This latest version
would expand the rule to include foreign banks that want to do business
with the U.S.

3. Carnivore, the tech the FBI has wanted to unleash for several years,
last came before the lawmakers -- and was shouted down -- last year. The
current manifestation calls for less judicial oversight (no court order
required) and expanded surveillance of, basically, all of our electronic
communications.

I leave it up to you to decide if this current crisis merits such laws,
which will be around much longer than the terrorists as the PTB insist
that they won't accept sunset provisions (which would impose a
shelf-life of sorts on the measures).

Rowland Smith wrote:
> 
> Beth Ellison wrote:
> 
> >> > "Among the arguments in favor of Linux: reports that some versions of
> >> > Windows contain backdoors designed to grant the U.S. National Security
> >> > Agency access to users' data."
> >> >
> >> > Does anyone know anything more about this? That's some spooky shit.
> >>
> >> I've heard this one floating around since the NT 4.0 days. There was some
> >> incident, that I don't remember well at all now, about a year before
> >> W2K hit
> >> the streets that started this off. A good deal of speculation mixed with
> >> just enough fact to get everyone excited.
> >>
> >> Of course, the real interesting part is that anyone who hears this
> >> actually
> >> *thinks* that it's possibly true. That speaks volumes about how much the
> >> general technical community trusts MS.
> >
> >
> > Ah. It's not new, just new to me. Got it. And your last sentence sums
> > things up beautifully.
> 
> It's funny how someone always wants to make the old "new" again.
> Remember the good ol' Clipper chip and Key Escrow?  That's just
> Clinton/Gore era terminology for "backdoor", which is just a shorter way
> of saying "please lower your trowsers, thank you very much".
> 
> Some of our members of congress are already trying to figure out how to
> repackage the backdoor/key-escrow clusterf*&k and get it passed as law:
> 
> Excerpt from Cryptogram from Bruce Schnier re Sept 11th:
> 
> "In the wake of the devastating attacks on New York's World Trade Center
> and the Pentagon, Senator Judd Gregg and other high-ranking government
> officials quickly seized on the opportunity to resurrect limits on
> strong encryption and key escrow systems that ensure government access
> to encrypted messages."
> 
> Here's a link to the Cryptogram that's quoted above.
> 
>     http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0109a.html
> 
> >
> > Beth
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >> --
> >>  Scott
> >>
> >> ---
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> >
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
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> >
> >
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> 
> --
> Talk to ya,
> Rowland
> 
> "The whole problem with the world is
> that fools and fanatics are always so
> certain of themselves, and wiser people
> so full of doubts."
> 
> -- Bertrand Russell,
>     quoted in the book
>     A Word a Day
> 
> ---
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