Re: DEA trying to subpoena book dealers

[Dave Emery <die@pig.die.com>]

On Mon, Oct 27, 1997 at 11:04:34AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
> >a subpoena for names of everyone who'd bought the book.
> 
> At the Gun Show I was at yesterday, a book dealer (who deals only in cash,
> not checks and not credit cards, and who has no interest in keeping names
> of customers in any kind of file) said that law enforcement often wanders
> around the tables at the gun show, asking about the books on making C-4
> explosives, making silencers for guns, growing dope, making
> methamphetamines, rigging booby traps, etc. This is why most of the dealers
> operate on a cash-and-carry basis. I don't know if any of the dealers have
> yielded to pressures to give up lists of customers, but I suspect most of
> them haven't. And cash makes it tough.
> 
	Sadly, it appears that another catagory of hobby flea market is
soon to join this ever growing list.   A bill (HR2369) working its way through
the House bans the "manufacture, sale, distribution, modification,
import, export" of radio equipment such as scanners (but by no means
limited to scanners) that can be used for "unauthorized interception of
wireless communications" and provides 5 year jail terms and $500,000
fines for each individual sale.   While this may or may not seem just a
bit draconian to a privacy oriented group such as cypherpunks, it should
be noted that most ham radio equipment sold in the last 20 years covers
more than just ham bands, and almost all scanners (which have legitimate
and fully legal uses to monitor public safety and other wireless (radio)
communications without a legal expectation of privacy under the ECPA)
cover frequencies which would make them contraband under this proposed
law.  

	If passed, the traditional hamfest flea markets where all sorts
of bizzare old radio junk gets traded for cash or swapped for other
gear will be largely a thing of the past, as almost all radio receivers
and transcievers that hams and other electronic hackers might want to
sell or trade will be seriously illegal, and one never knows who that
anonymous cash customer really is...

	I guess the obligatory cypherpunk relevance is that if the NSA
hadn't pressured the cell industry, cell and cordless phones would be at
least minimally  encrypted and industry lobbiests would not be pushing
to make selling or buying simple used radio receivers more illegal than
forcible rape or armed robbery in many states.

	And of course if anyone doubts NSA's real motive, think of this.
They can monitor, under warrent from the secret FISL court, virtually
anything they want by intercepting the call at the MTSO switch using
those nice CALEA wiretap subroutines...  so why do they need to
discourage over the air encryption they can't trivially deal with ?  
Well think about all the intercepts in the USA of US citizen
communications done for the TLAs (NSA in particular) by foreign
intelligence operations (notably GCHQ but also others) - obviously
foreign governments have no standing under FISL and CALEA and cannot get
FISL authority to legally wiretap US citizens - so making sure that
encrypted US wireless communications can be broken by the Brits or
Canadians or others makes sure that the NSA can get those UKUSA partners
to provide them to NSA and US TLAs when it is politically inconveniant
or downright illegal for NSA to intercept them directly.

-- 
	Dave Emery N1PRE,  die@die.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18