Re: NATIONAL SECURITY PORN RISK

[sidney@taurus.apple.com (Sidney Markowitz)]

> Does anyone on the Cypherpunks Channel have any inside information about
> the "computer porn ring" that was busted at Lawrence Livermore Labs?  Is
> there a crypto tie-in?

From the meager facts in the front page article in the San Jose Mercury
News, this whole thing could be as simple as an employee archiving two
gigabytes of alt.binaries.pictures.erotica on an unused disk volume and
setting up a passworded account for people who knew about it to ftp them.
Nobody can put that kind of stuff on an anonymous ftp site because the
traffic volume grows too high, and I would expect that such stuff is
against LLL policy, so anyone who wanted to provide an archive site would
have to only tell a few people who would tell a few people who ... and
eventually a reporter for the LA Times thought that he had discovered a
scoop.

The real news here is that the major daily newspaper in Silicon Valley
could print a front page story which goes from talking about an LLL
employee who was archiving erotic pictures to talking about software piracy
on BBS's and the internet to referring to the people who ftp'd the pictures
as "pirates" and lumping the pictures and the software together as
"illegal" material and then raising some vague issues of national security
by quoting an "anonymous computer expert" as saying that people could have
used the pictures to transmit secret information (with nothing to indicate
that there was any reason to think that anyone did). If the article had
been printed in the National Enquirer it would be funny. In the mainstream
press I find it frightening. Especially coming at the same time as reports
of Clinton's support of a national data/id card and our governor's
volunteering of my privacy to beta test it.

Is it time to move out of here? Does anyone have any suggestions of
countries where things are better, not likely to get much worse as the U.S.
decides to spread its brand of "democracy" even more universally, and which
have not closed their doors to refugees from America?

 -- sidney markowitz <sidney@apple.com>
    [In a pretty down mood at the moment]