Subject: Re: [Raven] Executive Power / Opinion Toss

From: "Richard Payne" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 22:28:25 -0500

You wrote, in response to my question:

>> "It's possible to catch the transporters but never the organizers" seems
to
>> imply that old-fashioned police work is the problem, not the Internet.
>> Nobody ever tails the transporters when they get paid?
>
>Very simple to mask very good. Money can be transferred all
>over the world. It can be taken off a bank given to another
>on a silent beach or Times Square while crossing.

And stings don't work, and money can't be traced, and the transporters never
turn state's evidence on the organizers, and nobody ever leaves
fingerprints, and the police never tail the transporter to that silent
beach, and... ?

This is getting silly. I asked for a pure cyberspace crime and you're
veering way off.

You also wrote, in response to my other questions:

>> Point-blank questions: do you believe that all governments are
democracies?
>
>Of course not.
>
>> and that democracies are always right?
>
>They have to.

We'll let the second one go (was U.S. democracy right when it passed
Prohibition, or when it repealed it?) and focus on the first one.

If, as you admit, there are countries that are not democracies, then you
must admit:

1) that your arguments, which are all based on "democracy says", don't apply
there; and

2) people there are likely to be using IETF protocols, same as the rest of
the world.

Therefore, if the IETF makes a tapping protocol, people will be subjected to
tapping without any democratic checks or balances.

How do you feel about making it easier for those non-democratic governments
to spy on their "citizens" (subjects?), thereby making it easier for them to
crack down on dissidents and harder for democracy to emerge there?

Don't tell me about auditability: it's easy enough for bad guy #1 to audit
bad guy #2 by ignoring him. This is the weak spot in any supposed
"technical" solution.

Richard Payne

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---

From: "chefren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 22:14:06 +0100

On 3 Dec 99, at 22:28, Richard Payne wrote:

..

> This is getting silly. I asked for a pure cyberspace crime and you're

Excuse me for the latter but I do think its "silly" that 
you don't want to see or give in that enormous rise in 
possibilities given by the Internet to the public makes the 
old methods to catch criminals "not enough".

..

> tapping without any democratic checks or balances.

That's realy nonsense. IETF is one of the organizations in 
this world that can provide a protocol with optimum checks 
and balances. If the proposed tapbox can be misused it's 
because the IETF has designed a security leak in it.

> crack down on dissidents and harder for democracy to emerge there?

We cannot make that more easy than already possible with 
tcpdump.

> bad guy #2 by ignoring him. This is the weak spot in any supposed

Auditable taps and the tapbox are only a solution against 
misuse. If we design it well, it will be very difficult for 
law eforcement agencies to manipulate tapped data.

For example because of the publicly published MD5 hashes of 
details of the tap that I came up here because of 
serious critics here in this list.

+++chefren