[Cu-wireless] southern Illinois

[Illustrious niteshad]

----- Original Message -----
From: Jon Weissman <jweiss at uni.uiuc.edu>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 00:20:24 -0600 (CST)
To: Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Cu-wireless] southern Illinois

> Don't forget with the Total Information Access Act, not only will 
> corporations spy on you through your DSL, but the government will too.
> Everyone say hi to the FBI agent reading these.
> 

OK, first of all, I'd like to give a shout out to Special Agents Mulder and Scully, thanks for reading tonight. ;)

Second of all, I'd like to point out that there are many, many ways to really foul up any sort of centralized logging system like President Bush and Adm. Poindexter would like to implement (in fact, I could say the same thing about most of the actions taken in the "War on Terror.)  Encryption comes to mind.  Right now, the general public has access to several different software crypto-systems.  At least one, GNU's Privacy Guard (GPG) based on Phillip Zimmerman's PGP (128-bit encryption, with key lengths of up to 4096 bits supported; for reference, 4096 bits of ASCII text is approxmately the length of a 500 word, two page essay) will always remain free and available, because it's covered under the GPL, and more importantly many people in the computer community are willing to fight to keep such software and algorithms publicly available.  If you are ultra-paranoid of the NSA's abilities to factor truly large integers, we could always reimplement the RSA algorithim using, say 4096-bit encryption and key lengths of several megabits.

Now, once an appreciable part of Internet traffic is encrypted, the only ways to track individual users would be transaction logs of IP (or possibly MAC, but you can spoof those if you run Linux or similar operating systems) addresses.  With a pod of wireless nodes, like CU-wireless, several households could all be sharing a single IP address via a router and Network Address Translation.  If the router were configured not to keep transaction logs (our right, since the router is our property), presto change-o folks, we have Reasonable Doubt.  Without the proper local logs, no one will know which computer behind the firewall requested "illegal" information from the internet.  

While I disagree vehemently with the policies set forward in the USA-PATRIOT act, the Total Information Access Act, and other recent legislation, (Look, a broad and vague  dependent clause, just like actual Congressional legislation!) I ultimately see them as essentially Darwinian selection pressures on popular technological development.  If "the Internet routes around censorship, like it routes around obstacles" then it also routes around poor decisions on the part of the executive, legislature and judiciary.  Take Napster, the court battle and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act sure worked together to solve the problem of peer-to-peer file sharing.  Yessir, we don't have to worry about Napster no more...now alls we have to worry about is KaZaA, Morpheus, LimeWire, FreeNet, eDonkey, Audiogalaxy, Aimster...  Anyway, software piracy is a thing of the past thanks to the brave leadership of Congress. ;)

FBI disclaimer: I'm not condoning violating the DCMA or copyright law, I'm merely observing that, like the War on Drugs, the War on P2P is absolutely doomed to failure.  It is impossible to keep a person from something they desire terribly, whether its drugs or the latest bootleg MP3 of Shakira or Avril LaVigne.

Thank you, God bless and good night,

Mark

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