Subject: Re: [Raven] Three Questions and Some Examples

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 15:57:16 -0700 (MST)

> From: "chefren" <[email-masked]>

> ...
> So we should develop a standard that makes that as much 
> parties as possible have to be corrupt to set a tap. ...

No matter how often that is repeated, it remains nonsense.  No matter
how incorruptible and perfect tapping standard boxes and tapping rooms
might be,

  - tcpdump will continue to be available and used by good guys, bad guys,
   bad police, and good police.  It is amazingly silly to talk about making
   tcpdump hard to use and to pretend that a hard to use version of tcpdump
   would keep easy to use versions from being used.

  - there will continue to be 10,000's of Ethernets and FDD rings on
   which tcpdump can be run to capture the same interesting traffic as in
   tapping rooms.  Even if courts refused all tapped information except
   audited packet streams from official tapping rooms, we all know that
   even the best police do not present most of what they find to the court.
   The vast majority of the information police find is irrelevant to any
   particular case, including information that good police find very
   illuminating and that bad cops find far more useful than in any court.
   Recall the uses that the first head of the FBI made of phone tap
   information on various famous politicians and civil rights leaders.

  - many of us care much less about the contents of taps presented in
   court than all other taps.  "Privacy" is not merely about what is
   eventually presented in court.

  - As we all know (or have no business talking about anything technical),
   as long as the Internet is useful, everyone on the Internet has "access"
   to "insert" IP packets "on the backbone."  If you can't insert IP packets
   on the backbone, then you cannot make TCP connections to much of the
   rest of the Internet.  That's fundamental to how the thing works!

  - there will continue to be 10,000's of Ethernets and FDDI rings inside
   any ingress filtering where purely bogus TCP/IP packets with forged IP
   source addresses can be inserted, and the wonderful tapping boxes the
   perfect tapping roomes will be unable to distinguish those bogus packets
   from the real things.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

_______________________________________________
raven mailing list
[email-masked]
http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/raven

---

From: "Lyal Collins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 10:39:17 +1100

It may be considered nonsense if looked at in the narrow context if everyone
using plain-text communications.

Many people on this list have expressed a desire for encryption on all data
transfers, wherein the vanilla tcpdump tools become far less useful.

Let's take that thought a litte way forward:
It would be silly to suggest every system/LAN/backbone will magically be
upgraded overnight.
However, those services providers offering a better level or privacy have a
marketeable point of differentiation, at effectively no cost differential,
can attract more users (personal and business).
(gasp - a non-technical comment!)

Current systems will slowly get upgraded and or replaced. Again, phase-out
of the old will occur over time.

Under this concept, interoperability with legacy environments is the only
issue to consider going forward.  I expect the vendors will implement the
usual translation/conversion functional model they have for every other
device that spans 2 or more network protocols.

There is no  cohesive security environment to the core Internet
architecture.

Let's design such a cohesive security environment, or leave it to the 3l33t
doods and use something better, like the PSTN and BBS's.

Regards,
Lyal

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
> Vernon Schryver
> Sent: Wednesday, 17 November 1999 9:57
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: [Raven] Three Questions and Some Examples
>
>

---

From: "chefren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 00:49:39 +0100

On 16 Nov 99, at 15:57, Vernon Schryver wrote:

> No matter how often that is repeated, it remains nonsense.

NOT in practice, not at all.

>  No matter
>    bad police, and good police.

Sure.

>    It is amazingly silly to talk about making

Difference is that the proposed one has serious checks and 
balances.

>    even the best police do not present most of what they find to the court.

But the shouldn't even be able to use it. It should be 
prohibited by law to obtain tapping information any other 
way than the proposed auditable way. It should be 
prohibited for providers to provide taps another way and so 
on.

Cops that tap with tcpdump should go instantly to jail, 
it's as simple as that with this very serious offence.

Is there a better proposal or something that even comes 
close?

>    information on various famous politicians and civil rights leaders.

That was in a time that loggings of recordings were non 
existent like tcpdump has no serious loging/auditability.

>    eventually presented in court.

Might be, I probably even agree but I think 
NSA/army/intelligence tapping is not the question here. 
With law enforcement tapping information could be injected 
in society again via the courtroom and that should happen 
very very seriously.

>    rest of the Internet.  That's fundamental to how the thing works!

OK I thought you mentioned this earlier. One of the abuses 
of the proposed auditable tap could be false injections of 
tcp packets. I thought you mentioned also those false 
packets could be detected.

>    perfect tapping roomes will be unable to distinguish those bogus packets

I assume the tapbox can detect those errors and log them.

+++chefren

---

From: Christian Price <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 09:53:54 -0700

> Difference is that the proposed one has serious checks and

This is a logical disconnect.  The point is that people, particularly
the non-law-abiding people, will always take the path of least
resistance, and will keep copies of the old version of tcpdump.  Heck, I
still have copies of the Norton Utilities 3.0 for DOS and DOS v 3.3! 
Why?  Because they contain utilities which have been removed from later
versions which are /very/ useful.
 
> Is there a better proposal or something that even comes

If people obeyed the law, we wouldn't need encryption and we wouldn't be
having this dialog.  Your assertion is based on the naieve assumption
that people (including law enforcement) will obey the law, which we have
already demonstrated to be falicious.
 
> in society again via the courtroom and that should happen

There is another case to be made for /privacy in general/.  I suspect
that many of us simply don't want 'Big Brother' looking over our
shoulders.  If you don't think Big Brother exists, read this article and
think again:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/14/058247&mode=thread

I'm not trying to be paranoid - our privacy rights are being eaten away
in the same way the US government is controlling First Amendment rights
in electronic text by categorizing electronic versions of Bruce
Schnier's book Applied Cryptography to be a 'munition' and
non-exportable!  The real irony is that the First Amendment still
protects the printed version - as if non-US residents couldn't type!

-- 
--------.--------------------------------------.
 ------/     Christian Price                   /
  ----/     Assistant Technical Analyst       /
  ---/     Four Corners Area ITOT/OSA        /
  --/     SprintParanet, Phoenix Office     /
  -/     602-266-9242                      /
   '--------------------------------------'

---

From: "chefren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 19:38:06 +0100

On 17 Nov 99, at 9:53, Christian Price wrote:

> having this dialog.  Your assertion is based on the naieve assumption that
> people (including law enforcement) will obey the law, which we have

OK, let's throw away all those laws....

+++chefren

= =
ii.nl ontwerpt, bouwt én onderhoudt websites
100 Euro aanbrengpremie: http://www.ii.nl/premie

---

From: "Thomas Junker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 02:47:42 -0600

> OK, let's throw away all those laws....

The U.S. Congress has been reported in past years to pass 
laws at the rate of 5,000 per year, and the executive 
agencies that administer those laws to publish some 50,000 
regulations per year.  If you think that more than a small 
handful of those are productive and important to the 
functioning of the nation, you would be hallucinating.  At 
the height of the insanity of the U.S. Interstate Commerce 
Commission there were *billions* of regulations governing 
what could be shipped, from where and by whom, to where 
and to whom, in what kinds of containers and packaging, 
with what other cargo, even to the level of dictating that 
a truck delivering commodity A to point B could not return 
carrying commodity C.

Which is to say, yes, let's throw away *most* of those 
laws, especially inasmuch as the body of law and 
regulation in developed countries long ago passed the 
point where any person affected by them can possibly know 
and understand them all.  If Europe continues the way it 
has been going, I fully expect the entire continent to 
sink under the weight of its laws and regulations.

Regards,

Thomas Junker
[email-masked]