August 2018 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

My new piece from courthouse: Reality Winner's sentencing
by Douglas Lucas 24 Aug '18

24 Aug '18

Hi cypherpunks, Yesterday I attended NSA whistleblower Reality Winner's sentencing and wrote a detailed, descriptive article about what took place for Buffalo's print and online news outlet The Public. I put a little more focus on the document than usual - you might have noticed today Trump tweeting[1] trying to downplay the significance of her case...As the prosecution themselves admitted, Winner was incarcerated to the longest prison term ever for a federal defendant leaking to the media. Here's my article: http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/08242018/reality-winner-sentenced-63-mo… [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1032948187416416256 Thanks, Doug

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Court Rules Accessing Smart Meters is a "Search"
by jim bell 23 Aug '18

23 Aug '18

https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/23/court-rules-smart-meter-data-government… Smart meters are designed to reduce energy consumption, lower household bills and, by extension, help the planet along a little bit. But could they also be used by the government to spy on you? This is the question that was thrown into the spotlight this week when the Seventh Circuit handed down a landmark opinion ruling, stating that data collected by smart meters is protected by the Fourth Amendment. Data provided by smart meters does not facilitate spying in the traditional sense, of course. But as these devices collect energy usage data at high frequencies (every five, 15 or 30 minutes, usually) it wouldn't be difficult for someone with access to that data to build a pretty clear picture of what's going on inside that property -- information that wouldn't otherwise be available without a search. Previously, courts have ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not protect household energy data -– a precedent largely based on readings from traditional analog energy meters which don't really reveal anything at all, other than the total amount of energy used over a long period of time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Privacy International filed an amicus brief urging the Seventh Circuit (a federal court with jurisdiction in the central and northern districts of Illinois) to reconsider this position, which they subsequently did, potentially setting an example for the protection of energy data throughout the US. The court held that residents have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and government access of this data constitutes, in essence, a search. It added that the "ever-accelerating pace of technological development carries serious privacy implications" and that smart meters "are no exception." This ruling sets a critical precedent. According to the EFF more than 40 percent of American homes have a smart meter – a number set to rise to 80 percent by 2020. Some reports suggest law enforcement agencies are already trying to get access to data from energy companies without a warrant -- this ruling could be crucial in staving off unjust invasions of privacy. Via: cnet Source: EFF In this article: business, consumption, court, energy, FourthAmendment, gear, government,green, home, monitor, politics, privacy, protection, rule, security, smart, spying

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Let kids play
by Zenaan Harkness 22 Aug '18

22 Aug '18

Why You Should Forget School and Let Kids Play https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-22/why-you-should-forget-school-and-… https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/why-you-should-forg… “This may seem old-fashioned, but there are skills to be learned when kids aren’t told what to do,” said Dr. Michael Yogman, a Harvard Medical School pediatrician who led the drafting of the call to arms. Whether it’s rough-and-tumble physical play, outdoor play or social or pretend play, kids derive important lessons from the chance to make things up as they go, he said.

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Cody Wilson
by Steven Schear 21 Aug '18

21 Aug '18

A number of Cody's friends and supporters of Defense Distributed are reaching out to help raise money to defend them against the recent suits filed by several State Attorney Generals and to take his case to the Supreme Court. It seems Cody has personally been footing the bill so he really needs the bread. https://defdist.org/donate/

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Second SecureDrop Developer: Suicided (James Dolan, ref: Aaron Swartz)
by grarpamp 20 Aug '18

20 Aug '18

https://twitter.com/search?q=james+dolan+suicide https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7pcqba/second_developer_of_wik…

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Next Year's Federal Military budget over $700 billion. Is that a problem?
by jim bell 17 Aug '18

17 Aug '18

The folllowing article is from Reason Magazine. Next year's Federal budget will include over $700 billion in military spending. I have claimed that my AP idea will essentially eliminate military spending, around the world. I've said this for over 23 years. Isn't this a sufficient motivation to adopt AP? Yet, there are still people who say that AP won't, or can't, be implemented. Isn't such wasteful spending a powerful motivation to cease with the current system, and proceed with a system that will eliminate wars, military spending, and government spending? Governments in the 20th century killed over 250 million people. Is that acceptable Jim Bell http://reason.com/blog/2018/08/13/trump-signs-82-billion-spending-boost-fo "President Donald Trump on Monday signed a military budget boosting the Pentagon's spending by $82 billion in the next year—a spending increase that dwarfs the entire military budgets of most other nations on Earth. Russia, for example, will spend an estimated $61 billion on its military this year. Total. With the increased spending included in this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon will get to spend more than $700 billion next year. The budget hike was a priority for Trump and was approved by Congress as part of a March spending deal that saw spending on both defense and domestic programs hiked by about $165 billion—smashing through Obama-era spending caps. This year's NDAA is "the most significant increase in our military and our war-fighters in modern history," Trump said. "It was not very hard. I went to Congress, I said, 'Let's do it, we gotta do it.'" Indeed, it was not very hard. Democrats are quick to condemn nearly everything Trump proposes and many Republicans are less than enamored with the current occupant of the White House, but partisan animosity vanishes when defense spending comes up. The final House vote on the NDAA—technically known as the "John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act" because you wouldn't vote against something named after an American hero, right?—was 359-54, while the final Senate roll call was 87-10, with only two Republican senators opposing the bill and three declining to cast votes. The spending increase will allow the Pentagon to hire another 4,000 active duty soldiers, Trump said, and would help replace aging tanks, planes, and ships with "the most advanced and lethal technology ever developed." "Hopefully, we'll be so strong that we'll never have to use it," Trump said. "But if we ever did, nobody has a chance." Trump also used the occasion to plug his recent call for the creation of a Space Force, which would be the sixth branch of the U.S. military. A Space Force is necessary, Trump said, to counter aggression from other countries in the final frontier. "I've seen things that you don't even want to see," Trump said, apparently referencing advancements in space technology being developed by other countries. There is no funding included in this NDAA for the Space Force, but the administration plans to have the new branch up and running by 2020—and it's not going to be cheap. No worries, Trump seemed to say on Monday, as he promised more spending increases to come—reversing what he said was years of "depleted" spending on the Pentagon. But as I noted in June when the NDAA cleared the Senate: the Pentagon's biggest problem isn't a shortage of funding, but misuse of the money that it already receives. Unfortunately, we don't know much about that because the Pentagon has still not been subjected to a full scale audit, despite the fact that all federal agencies and departments were ordered to undergo mandatory audits in 1990. A preliminary audit of just one office within the Pentagon found that more than $800 million could not be accounted for. Auditors said the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)—described as "the military's Walmart" because it's responsible for processing supplies and equipment—has financial management "so weak that its leaders and oversight bodies have no reliable way to track the huge sums it's responsible for." Whether it's investing in bomb-sniffing elephants, paying $8,000 for something that should cost $50, or shelling out for the famous $640 toilet seat, there's no shortage of absurd waste in the Pentagon. A Reuters probe in 2013 found "$8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out to the Pentagon since 1996 … has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China's economic output [for 2012]." The Pentagon doesn't need more money, but until politicans from at least one party show a willingness to turn off the tap, there is no incentive for the Department of Defense to change its culture of waste and tradition of opacity.

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http://reason.com/blog/2018/08/16/newspapers-team-up-on-free-press-op-eds
by jim bell 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

Reason magazine article: Newspapers Team Up to Tell Trump They Aren't Colluding Against Him Plus: Mormons versus medical marijuana, bureaucrats are bad at protecting data, and cops tase 87-year-old woman for cutting flowers. "Journalists are not the enemy." Hot off of calling for more social-media censorship and supporting destructive speech regulations like FOSTA, newspaper editors would like you to know that Donald Trump's dissing of the news media makes them sad. More than 300 U.S. newspapers ran Thursday editorials that "call for an end to President Trump's sustained assault" on the press. Hundreds Of Newspapers Are Challenging Trump's Attacks: 'We Are Not The ... Publications across the U.S. -- from the large to the tiny, conservative and liberal -- are banding together to ... "Our role is to serve as a check on government," the Chicago Tribunedeclares. "The president ought to get used to it." "Our democracy is endangered when citizens are persuaded to reject or ignore the professionals who provide news and information," warns The Athens News in Ohio. In attacking journalists, Trump damages all Americans Editor’s note: The Athens NEWS is participating in a national campaign spearheaded by The Boston Globe to respon... And so on. The editorials were organized by The Boston Globe and, as HuffPostdescribes them, "have each been constructed with different words but bear a shared message: Mr. President, 'journalists are not the enemy.'" As a journalist (as well as general enthusiast for classical liberal principles and a person capable of making basic historical analogies), I too find the president's description of journalists as enemies of the people unsettling. But whipping up contempt toward the press has been a staple of right-wing talking points in this country for at least two decades. The president's preening anti-media tirades are not so much stirring new hatred within his base as stoking a longstanding sentiment. So far, however, Trump's anti-press antics have mostly stayed in the realm of rhetoric. Meanwhile, the good folks in Congress, state government, and federal agencies are doing things all the time that actually infringe on freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and an open internet, while the vast majority of news outlets remain silent at best. Then, in places where we could use real reporting, popular journalists fall all over themselves to create petty drama and praise John McCain for his contributions to warmongering and spending. While the ideals espoused in these editorials may be righteous, they ring a little hollow... ...and a little self-serving. Too many in media seem to have confused their own diminishing role as gatekeepers of all info and narratives with an existential threat to democracy. Yes, let's fight back against Trump and anyone else in government who seeks to suppress dissent. But maybe people wouldn't hate us so much if we fought as hard for everyone's dignity and right to speak as we do for our own tribe's. Jack Shafer shares some of these concerns. "It goes without saying that press bashing, Trump-style, is alarming," Shafer writes in Politico. "But this Globe-sponsored coordinated editorial response is sure to backfire: It will provide Trump with circumstantial evidence of the existence of a national press cabal that has been convened solely to oppose him....The Globe's anti-Trump project is also an exercise in redundancy, not to mention self-stroking. Most newspapers have already published a multitude of editorials and columns rebuking the president for his trash-talking of the press." America’s Newspapers Just Played Right Into Trump’s Hands Nothing flatters an independent journalist less than the sight of him forming a line to drink from the same foun...

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Re: Cypherpunks Mail Server [re: Krugman]
by grarpamp 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 10:08 AM, Razer <g2s(a)riseup.net> wrote: > I'm surprised you haven't been put so deep in an email relay servers > blackhole yo mama can't find you. > > You REALLY send individual copies to eighteen people? Really? Hahahaha! RFC's clearly specify minimum 100 must be accepted, that there should be no maximum wherever possible, and that error responses must be generated. I'm not getting any error responses. So no, things are fine on this end and pglaf is broken. It might not be postfix, but more likely mailman, or whatever antispam is running there, which is at least this one... https://amavis.org/ This second message was reordered and cutoff too... Message-ID: <CAD2Ti2_nB4owJLSfe6e-hy1KALiCdb0UfH9mjtnbgvL+gkOWyQ(a)mail.gmail.com> Also, pglaf is accepting mail from google over TLS, but pglaf is not sending mail back out over TLS, at least not to google. Check postfix config, and old ssl library version. https://www.openssl.org/source/ Not looked into it but there also seems to be some DKIM / DMARC issue in the headers. I'd suspect pglaf before google there too. https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124 Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; dkim=fail header.i=(a)gmail.com header.s=20161025 header.b=f+HxqAxu; spf=pass (google.com: domain of cypherpunks-bounces(a)lists.cpunks.org designates 65.50.255.19 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=cypherpunks-bounces(a)lists.cpunks.org; dmarc=fail (p=NONE sp=QUARANTINE dis=NONE) header.from=gmail.com Authentication-Results: pglaf.org; dkim=fail reason="verification failed; unprotected key" header.d=gmail.com header.i=(a)gmail.com header.b=f+HxqAxu; dkim-adsp=none (unprotected policy); dkim-atps=neutral > Hahahaha! Just spreading sunshine over a bunch of dark clouds out there.

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Re: Cypherpunks Mail Server [re: Krugman]
by Razer 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

I'm surprised you haven't been put so deep in an email relay servers blackhole yo mama can't find you. You REALLY send individual copies to eighteen people? Really? Hahahaha! null

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Cypherpunks Mail Server [re: Krugman]
by grarpamp 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

Fyi... This thread is ongoing and is having problems... The first... Message-ID: <CAD2Ti2-vW_6Xcg696cXLyV+5HZa6-GqD+n+erSAgma4m6Gy7nA(a)mail.gmail.com> with recipients 1 To + 18 Cc + 1 Bcc cpunks the cpunks server did some as yet undertermined sort method to the cc line, and stripped two people from it entirely (schear and echeque). One of the direct 18 replied offlist with the complete set of 19 visibles in proper original order, so this end is working fine and cpunks is broken. The second... Message-ID: <CAD2Ti2_nB4owJLSfe6e-hy1KALiCdb0UfH9mjtnbgvL+gkOWyQ(a)mail.gmail.com> with recipients 2 To (1 being cpunks) + 18 Cc + 0 Bcc has not shown up yet, whereas other later messages to cpunks have shown up. Also... Bcc's from list subscribers should be set or hacked to post without hitting the mod queue. The server is running old... mailman 2.1.16 from 2013-10-17 whereas current is... mailman 2.1.29 from 2018-07-24 The 1100 lines of documented updates between those two, including 5 CVEs, are here... https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.1/view/head:/NEWS http://list.org/

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