Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing
An anonymous poet in the 1700's wrote about crime: "The
law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from the hillside,
but lets the greater robber loose who steals the hillside from
the goose."
If you steal $5 you're a thief, but if you steal $5 million-you're
a financier .
In the dictionary, the word "crime" means "an act which is against the law." Crime applies particularly to an act that breaks a law that has been made for public good. Crime in one country, the dictionary continued, "may be entirely overlooked by the law in another country or may not apply at all in a different historical period."
That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts of "crime" are not eternal. The very nature of crime is sociopsychological and defined by time and place and those who have the power to make definitions.
"The language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated
by the courts and by the police, is not only the voice but also
the deed of suppression. This language not only defines and condemns
the Enemy, it also creates him; and this creation is not the Enemy
as he really is but rather as he must be in order to perform his
function for the Establishment..."
-Herbert Marcuse
Hence the power to define is an awesome power. It is the power of propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit our agenda, to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at. It is the power to interpret the picture we see when we look at the world …
It is the power to place the picture we see when we look at the world. It is the power to place a frame around the picture, to define where it begins and ends. It is, in fact, the power to define where our vision begins and ends, the power to create our collective consciousness.
That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful,
but it is also mostly invisible.
{We can't fight what we don't see. Most people accept the images
and definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident,
and for always.}
The power to paint the future, to define what is right
and wrong, what is lawful and what is criminal, is really the
power to win the battle for our minds.
{And to win it without ever having to fight it. Simply
said, it is hard to fight an enemy who has an outpost in our minds.}
Since 1977, when California had 19,000 inmates in its prison system, the California Legislature has passed more than 1,000 bills lengthening sentences or defining new crimes, often in response to high-profile offenders such as Davis. The result has been a more-than-sixfold increase to today's population of 126,000. Between 1852 and 1984, California built 12 prisons. Since just 1984, California has constructed an additional 16 prisons.
But during the decade and a half that imprisonment was soaring, the crime rate in California has stubbornly refused to budge, hovering today at approximately the 1977 rate. Indeed, during 1993 and the first half of 1994, the rate of both violent and property crime actually fell while public fear of crime inexplicably rose.
A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., suggests one possible reason for such a paradox. The study shows that, while the murder rate nationally remained stable between 1992 and 1993, the number of homicides reported on the evening news of the nation's three major networks tripled. Not surprisingly, the report continues, from May 1992 to February 1993, there was a sixfold increase in the number of Americans who rated crime as the country's most important problem.
The Social Dynamics of Crime
In the March 12, 1993, issue of the Wall Street Journal an article
entitled "Common Criminals-Just About Everyone Violates Some
Laws, Even Model Citizens," byline by Stephen J. Adler and
Wade Lambert stated:
"We are a nation of lawbreakers. We exaggerate tax-deductible
expenses, lie to customs officials, bet on card games and sports
events, disregard jury notices, drive while intoxicated --and
hire illegal childcare workers."
The last of these was recently the crime of the moment, and Janet
Reno wouldn't have been in the position to be confirmed unanimously
as attorney general yesterday if Zoe Baird had obeyed the much-flouted
immigration and tax laws.
But the crime of the moment could have been something else,
and next time probably will be.
This is because nearly all people violate some laws, and many people run afoul of dozens without ever being considered, or considering themselves, criminals.
An estimated 1,585,400 persons were incarcerated in the United
States in 1995. Correctional authorities held in the Nation's
prisons and jails 600 persons per 100,000 U.S. residents.
Prisoners in the custody of the 50 States, the District of Columbia,
and the Federal Government accounted for two-thirds of the incarcerated
population (1,078,357 inmates). The other third was held in local
jails (507,044 inmates).
In America, in the l990s, as was the case in England in the 1800s,
it is a crime to be poor. The poorer you are, the more criminal
you are. If you are so poor that you have no place to live, and
you live on the pavement or sleep in a car or in a park, you have
committed a crime. It's against the law to sleep on the streets
or in a park. If we have no home, it's against the law to sleep
anywhere.
Crime is big Business
The political decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50s to remove industry from communities of color were about who would be unemployed. Decisions by developers and bankers about redevelopment (redlining and gentrification) are decisions about who will be homeless. Such decisions affect everyone, but people have no say in the matter. Generally people, especially the poor, have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect their lives. Somehow that is not part of the democratic method of government, and because people have no say in the process, creating homelessness is not criminal, but being homeless is.
"Membership in the class of people known as 'law-breakers'
is not distributed according to economic or social status, but
membership in the class 'criminals' is distributed according to
social or economic status..."
- Professor Theodore Sarbin
Hunger and homelessness are deliberately imposed socioeconomic conditions of the disenfranchised large numbers of the American population. This is especially significant when consideration is given to the method and means by which the malfeasance of the powers that be operate to ensure that such conditions stay the same. Thus such pathology ensures the rich get richer, while the poor get prison and early death.
-PIAP
Max Weber held that social stratification depends on the distribution of three resources: wealth (economic resources), power (political resources), and prestige (social resources).
We are able to determine the social and racial implications of certain classes, then, having a vested interest in crime. It can be argued that because an elite class of criminals is in charge, they commit capital crimes, crimes against society and humanity. The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help --because the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the board rooms and in the White House. They are the social policy makers that run this country. And today, they are increasing social repression by building more prisons, creating harsher legal sanctions (i.e. 52 death penalty laws, three strikes you're out), and becoming ever more heedless to the social implications of poverty as an impetus to committing crime.
Under their misleadership, over five million people are homeless, 37 million have no health insurance, 30 million are illiterate, 30 million more are functionally illiterate, one million are incarcerated, and 60 million live in poverty and are struggling day to day.
Crime is big business in America. Annually the laws are changed to ensure profitability in the industry of crime. Social conditions that serve to maintain levels of poverty, feed the industry of crime, also put stress on the social stratification's of society.
Within the current processes of economic globalization, the establishment of the Joint Venture Program has opened California prisoners to be used as a new labor supply and to be manipulated within the world economy to meet the interests of transnational corporations. Within the global economy, the United States is becoming an increasingly service-based economy, and many of the manufacturing and textile jobs prisoners are supposedly being trained for don't even exist here anymore. Economic globalization has completely altered the relationship between capital and labor that existed within the economy of this capitalist nation-state, where massive increases in incarceration directed at working-class communities and communities of color would formerly have interfered with the interest of many corporations by diminishing the labor pool. The hypermobility of capital has created an economic setting that allows for mass incarceration, because there is no longer a strong economic need for a large, free, unskilled, unemployed population of workers in this country. [27] Capital can easily expand its supply of labor to include any exploitable population of workers throughout the world, including incarcerated workers.
Given the fact that America is a nation of criminals as elucidated in the Wall Street Journal article, social conflict is inevitable. It then becomes a matter of identifying the real culprits of crime, and seeking the means to have them become accountable for their criminal behavior. This may very well include the redistribution of their wealth, and the reorganization of the social contract between the government and the governed.
In response to the stratification outlined above, it requires revolutionary nationalist and socialist efforts to formulate a national political agenda and policy that will challenge the prevailing social contract between the oppressed and the oppressor nation. This means revolutionary nationalists and socialists must have a clear and concise mass-line and political program that identifies and explains the nature of poor peoples' oppression, and how they are to be organized to confront their oppression.
"There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing
number of laws.
Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: 'Death to
Tyrants!'"
-Timothy C. May
[Estevan Mercury,
Oct 22, 1997] It's just like advancing to the NHL of the computer
world.
That was the comparison used by Jeff Sandquist
to describe his new job with Microsoft, one of the giants of the
computer industry, right in their Redmond, Washington campus headquarters.
Sandquist will be leaving his position at SRI Homes (Shelter-Regent Industries) where he has been a design technologist for the past four years, and will hook up with like-minded individuals in Redmond to serve big industry.
"I guess I am now a developer support engineer,"
he said with a chuckle.
"I wanted this job because I get to work with cool stuff
a year before the public gets to see it." Sandquist said
with another laugh.
He said one of his teammates is the author of the Inside Active
Server Pages, one of the more recent bibles of computerdom. Sandquist
explained that active server technology is relatively new to industry
and the public.
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.
Sandquist starts work at Microsoft on November 3. He'll believe it then.
CJ brought Shelter into the 'Wonderful World of Computers'
but he did it in Xenix, not in DOS. DOS is a nice, simple computer
operating system that will work fairly well for the uninitiated
without giving them a lot of grief. It's fairly primitive, but
one can do a tolerably decent job of conducting their affairs
in bits and bytes without having to worry about the dark side
of their new hi-tech/toy-nology.
-Excerpt from "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre"
Subject: Sloppy Chips from Intel
From: Eric Cordian <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
By now everyone has probably heard that Intel Pentium and Pentium MMX chips hang when executing the instruction sequence F00FC7C8 even when in an outer ring of privilege or in V86 mode.
With numerous small Linux-based ISPs out there, often providing
shell services to anonymous customers, or serving customer-provided
CGI programs, the existence and public disclosure such an easily
exploitable flaw in their CPU's hardware protection mechanism
is catastrophic.
…
While today's problem does not permit clandestine entry into
a system, since it kills the system when it is exercised, it does
raise the question of whether there are other more subtle problems
in the hardware protection mechanism, which might enable knowledgeable
users to execute an occasional instruction at the wrong privilege
level, or otherwise do things which should be prohibited according
to the published hardware specifications.
…
Buggy microprocessor microcode can produce very subtle exploitable
faults in a chip, which are almost impossible to notice when running
ordinary applications and operating systems. Instructions may
do the wrong thing only when they follow certain other instructions.
There may be rare times when the processor is wrongly interruptible,
or when a restricted instruction is not forbidden, or is given
access at the wrong privilege level, or with incorrect address
translation.
Were such features to be deliberately introduced into a chip, in order to permit a backdoor for undetected entry, they could be made completely undetectable, and could depend upon any number of unlikely conditions, or even specific hidden register values, in order to be made manifest. Every microprocessor could even have its own "key" for the activation of such "special features."
Unlike UNIX, for which complete compileable source code is available, we know little about what microcode is run through the several million transistors on a typical microprocessor. If sloppy engineering alone produces such dangerous faults, imagine what could happen should industry decide to deliberately cooperate with various LEAs and TLAs. (In the national interest, of course.)
The possibilities are truly mind-boggling. Perhaps exploits like tapping Aldrich Ames' PC and crashing Saddam Hussein's PCs en masse were not done by black bag jobs and viri, but by the activation of "National Security" backdoors present in all complex modern microprocessors.
"I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive., and tell you that you are free"
-Eris, Goddess Of Chaos, Discord & Confusion
Subject:
From: Anonymous <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
In the grand tradition of RSA-in-3-lines-of-perl, we present
Crash-A-Pentium-in-44-characters:
main(){int i=0xc8c70ff0;void (*f)()=&i;f();}
-f00fie
Subject: pentium bug/microprocessor design
From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
For those of you who don't know, there's actually a minor crisis brewing in chip design.
The crisis is that because of the enormous increasing complexity of individual chips, it's becoming statistically impossible to completely test them.
There are new schemes in the works by which Intel etc. are trying to deal with this, including a remarkable scheme in which new microcode can be downloaded to the chip. it also involves encryption in which one needs to know the encryption mechanism for the chip to accept the new instructions. apparently it's done in such a way that no one except those who know the encryption can successfully alter the chip.
But this does raise a lot of cypherpunks issues such as about reverse engineering etc.
Subject: A.Word.A.Day
- vomitorium
From: Wordsmith <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
vo.mi.to.ri.um n. A passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre
or
theatre, leading to or from the seats. Usu. pl.
1754 Dictionary of Arts & Sciences. I. 129/2
"They were entered by avenues, at the end of which
were gates, called vomitoria."
"Programmers are the unifying force that supply the energy enabling two separate and unique components, hardware and software, to have a relationship that is capable of productivity and growth. A marriage of matter that could spawn and produce a multitude of children to go forth and do many new things in the world, for better or worse, for good or for evil."
"You are society's last hope for thwarting the Forces of Evil gearing up for the final battle, readying themselves to wreak grievous havoc upon the world, such that it has never known. It is up to you to 'raise the torch,' and let the 'light of knowledge' spread throughout the civilized world, in the thread of 'clues' scattered throughout the UNIX operating system, and throughout your programming and your instructions."
"You must band together, man and woman, young and old,
into a 'Magic Circle' for your own protection from the Forces
of Darkness! You must develop your own secret codes and rituals
to deal with the Evil Forces which will beset you daily once you
set foot on the Path of Righteousness."
-Bubba Rom Dos
[Not-News NetWork-- Mohave Desert] Aug 4/97
WHAT DOES A FIVE HUNDRED POUND GORILLA READ AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE? - sog
The "Not-News Gorilla NutWork" was rocket-launched in
the Mohave Desert
early yesterday morning by a rag-tag bunch of paramilitarist computer
gurus who unveiled an InterNet Bill of Bytes that included the
words,
"MicroSoft shall make no laws..."
Angered by a self-appointed council of computer industry magnates
who
have announced their intention to seize fascist control of the
quickly
burgeoning Information Highway by controlling the definition of
all
information, the rebels set up a shooting range which contained
a wide
variety of targets ranging from copies of the Wall Street Journal
to
life-sized cardboard cut-outs of a hooded figure referred to only
as,
"a billionaire to be named later."
…
"We have decided on two classes of ratings." explained
a tassel-
haired young woman as she slid shells into a Winchester Defender
sitting on her lap. "On..." she said, lifting the shotgun
with one
hand, then liberating the hooded head from a nearby cardboard
cut-out,
before turning back to say, with a Cheshire grin, "...and
off."
[Estevan Mercury, Oct 22, 1997] …
Sandquist will be leaving his position at SRI Homes (Shelter-Regent
Industries) where he has been a design technologist for the past
four years, and will hook up with like-minded individuals
in Redmond to serve big industry.
…
He said one of his teammates is the author of the Inside Active Server Pages, one of the more recent bibles of computerdom. Sandquist explained that active server technology is relatively new to industry and the public.
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot," he said.
…
"I can't believe I'm getting this shot,"
he said.
…
"I can't believe I'm getting this SHOT," he
said.
Subject: A.Word.A.Day
- vomitorium
From: Wordsmith <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
vo.mi.to.ri.um n. A passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre
or
theatre, leading to or from the seats. Usu. pl.
1754 Dictionary of Arts & Sciences. I. 129/2
"They were entered by avenues, at the end of which
were GATES, called vomitoria."
Once again the Forces of Good have been forced underground,
faced with incredulity and disbelief when they try to reveal to
mankind that the Evil One is once again afoot in the land, making
His plans for the Final Battle. The 'Circle of Eunuchs' find themselves
working feverishly to rebuild a silent underground dedicated to
enlightening those few that are willing to listen to the Whisper
of Light that is being overwhelmed by the Roar of Darkness.
~son of gomez
"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely
potent, for good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct,
an idea, which by its nature will resist efforts to restrict it
to bureaucrats and others who deem only themselves worthy of such
Privilege."
A thinking man's Creed for Crypto/ vbm.
Now the Circle of Eunuchs discover themselves locked in a covert battle with Forces that have railed against mankind for Millenniums, facing the disbelief and terror of others in their efforts to enlighten mankind about the Evil Forces once again massing throughout the world in a chilling endeavor to bring us to our ultimate destruction.
While we sleep our way through our daily lives, in unawareness,
the Movement is spreading through Secret Circles spanning the
face of the globe, helping to prepare mankind for the Final Battle.
~son of gomez