Computer underground Digest Sun Mar 13, 1994 Volume 6 : Issue 24 ISSN 1004-042X Editors: Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer (TK0JUT2@NIU.BITNET) Archivist: Brendan Kehoe (He's Baaaack) Acting Archivist: Stanton McCandlish Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala Ian Dickinson Copita Editor: Sheri O'Nothera CONTENTS, #6.24 (Mar 13, 1994) File 1--Clipping the Wings of Freedom (Reprint, by J.P. Barlow) File 2--Leahy to hold hearings on Clipper Chip! File 3--Survey: communication ethics on the net File 4--Starring Tom Cruise as Kevin Poulsen? Cu-Digest is a weekly electronic journal/newsletter. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically. 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DISCLAIMER: The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the moderators. Digest contributors assume all responsibility for ensuring that articles submitted do not violate copyright protections. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Mar 1994 11:30:17 -0500 From: John Perry Barlow Subject: File 1--Clipping the Wings of Freedom (Reprint, by J.P. Barlow) Clipping the Wings of Freedom page 1 Jackboots on the Infobahn by John Perry Barlow [Note: I wish to reserve to Wired Magazine first paper publication of the following piece. However, given the fairly immediate nature of this issue, I am net-casting it now. Feel free to pass it on electronically as you see fit, but please do not turn it into any sort of hard copy until Wired has done so. I also encourage you to buy the April issue of Wired in which it will appear.] On January 11, I managed to schmooze myself aboard Air Force 2. It was flying out of LA, where its principal passenger had just outlined his vision of the Information Superhighway to a suited mob of television, show biz, and cable types who fervently hoped to own it one day...if they could ever figure out what the hell it was. >From the standpoint of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the speech had been wildly encouraging. The Vice President's announced program incorporated many of the concepts of open competition, universal access, and deregulated common carriage which we'd been pushing for the previous year. But he had said nothing about future of privacy, except to cite among the bounties of the NII its ability to "help law enforcement agencies thwart criminals and terrorists who might use advanced telecommunications to commit crimes." On the plane I asked him what this had meant regarding Administration policy on cryptography. He became non-committal as a cigar store indian. "We'll be making some announcements... I can't tell you anything more." He hurried back to the front of the plane, leaving me to troubled speculation. Despite its fundamental role in assuring privacy, transaction security, and reliable identity within the NII, the Clinton/Gore Administration policies regarding cryptography have not demonstrated an enlightenment to match the rest of their digital visions. The Clipper Chip...which bodes to be either the goofiest waste of federal dollars since Gerald Ford's great Swine Flu program or, if actually deployed, a surveillance technology of profound malignancy...seemed at first an ugly legacy of Reagan/Bush. "This is going to be our Bay of Pigs," one White House official told me at the time Clipper was introduced, referring to the distastrous Cuban invasion plan Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower. (Clipper, in case you're just tuning in, is an encryption chip which the NSA and FBI hope will someday be in every phone and computer in America. It scrambles your communications, making them unintelligible to all but their intended recipient. All, that is, but the government, which would hold the "key" to your chip. The key would separated into two pieces, held in escrow, and joined with the appropriate "legal authority.") Of course, trusting the government with your privacy is trusting a peeping tom to install your window blinds. And, since the folks I've met in this White House seem extremely smart, conscious, and freedom-loving...hell, a lot of them are Deadheads...I was sure that after they felt fully moved in, they'd face down the NSA and FBI, let Clipper die a natural death, and lower the export embargo on reliable encryption products. Furthermore, NIST and the National Security Council have been studying both Clipper and export embargoes since April. Given that the volumes of expert testimony they collected opposed them both almost unanimously , I expected the final report to give the Administration all the support it needed to do the right thing. I was wrong about this. Instead, there would be no report. Apparently, they couldn't draft one which supported, on the evidence, what they had decided to do instead. THE OTHER SHOE DROPS On Friday, February 4, the other jack-boot dropped. A series of announcements from the Administration made it clear that cryptography would become their very own "Bosnia of telecommunications" (as one staffer put it). It wasn't just that the old Serbs in the NSA and the FBI were still making the calls. The alarming new reality was that the invertebrates in the White House were only too happy to abide by them. Anything to avoid appearing soft on drugs or terrorism. So, rather than ditching Clipper, they declared it a Federal Data Processing Standard, backing that up with an immediate government order for 50,000 Clipper devices. They appointed NIST and the Department of Treasury as the "trusted" third parties that would hold the Clipper key pairs. (Treasury, by the way, is also home to such trustworthy agencies as the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.) They re-affirmed the export embargo on robust encryption products, admitting for the first time that its purpose was to stifle competition to Clipper. And they outlined a very porous set of requirements under which the cops might get the keys to your chip. (They would not go into the procedure by which the NSA would get them, though they assured us it was sufficient.) They even signaled the impending return of the dread Digital Telephony, an FBI legislative initiative which would require fundamentally re-engineering the information infrastructure to make provision of wiretapping ability the paramount design priority. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS Actually, by the time the announcements thudded down, I wan't surprised by them. I had spent several days the previous week in and around the White House. I felt like I was in another re-make of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My friends in the Administration had been transformed. They'd been subsumed by the vast mind-field on the other side of the security clearance membrane, where dwell the monstrous bureaucratic organisms which feed themselves on fear. They'd adopted the institutionally paranoid National Security Weltanschauung. They used all the tell-tale phrases. Mike Nelson, the White House point man on NII, told me, "If only I could tell you what I know, you'd feel the same way I do." I told him I'd been inoculated against that argument during Vietnam. (And it does seem to me that if you're going to initiate a process which might end freedom in America, you probably need an argument that isn't classified.) Besides, how does he know what he knows? Where does he get his information? Why the NSA, of course. Which, given its strong interest in the outcome, seems hardly an unimpeachable source. However they reached it, Clinton and Gore have an astonishingly simple bottom line, against which even the future of American liberty and prosperity is secondary: They believe that it is their responsibility to eliminate, by whatever means, the possibility that some terrorist might get a nuke and use it on, say, the World Trade Center. They have been convinced that such plots are more likely to ripen to their hideous fruition behind a shield of encryption. The staffers I talked to were unmoved by the argument that anyone smart enough to steal and detonate a nuclear device is probably smart enough to use PGP or some other uncompromised crypto standard. And never mind that the last people who popped a hooter in the World Trade Center were able to put it there without using any cryptography and while under FBI surveillance. We are dealing with religion here. Though only 10 American lives were lost to terrorism in the last two years, the primacy of this threat has become as much an article of faith with these guys as the Catholic conviction that human life begins at conception or the Mormon belief that the Lost Tribe of Israel crossed the Atlantic in submarines. In the spirit of openness and compromise, they invited EFF to submit other solutions to the "problem" of the nuclear-enabled terrorist besides key escrow devices, but they would not admit into discussion the argument that such a threat might, in fact, be some kind of phantasm created by the spooks to ensure their lavish budgets into the Post-Cold War era. As to the possibility that good old-fashioned investigative techniques might be more valuable in preventing their show-case catastrophe (as it was after the fact in finding the alleged perpetrators of the last attack on the World Trade Center),they just hunkered down and said that when wire-taps were necessary, they were damned well necessary. When I asked about the business that American companies lose to their inability to export good encryption products, one staffer essentially dismissed the market, saying that total world trade in crypto goods was still less than a billion dollars. (Well, right. Thanks more to the diligent efforts of the NSA than lack of sales potential.) I suggested that a more immediate and costly real-world effect of their policies would be reducing national security by isolating American commerce, owing to a lack of international confidence in the security of our data lines. I said that Bruce Sterling's fictional data-enclaves in places like the Turks and Caicos Islands were starting to look real world inevitable. They had a couple of answers to this, one unsatisfying and the other scary. Their first answer was that the international banking community could just go on using DES, which still seemed robust enough to them. [DES is the old federal Data Encryption Standard, thought by most cryptologists to be nearing the end of its credibility.] More troubling was their willingness to counter the data-enclave future with one in which no data channels anywhere would be secure from examination by some government or another. They pointed to unnamed other countries which were developing their own mandatory standards and restrictions regarding cryptography and have said to me on several occasions words to the effect that, "Hey, it's not like you can't outlaw the stuff. Look at France." Of course, they have also said repeatedly...and for now I believe them...that they have absolutely no plans to outlaw non-Clipper crypto in the U.S. But that doesn't mean that such plans couldn't develop in the presence of some pending "emergency." Then there is that White House briefing document, issued at the time Clipper was first announced, which asserts that no U.S. citizen "as a matter of right, is entitled to an unbreakable commercial encryption product." Now why, if it's an ability they have no intention of contesting, do they feel compelled to declare that it's not a right? Could it be that they are preparing us for the laws they'll pass after some bearded fanatic has gotten himself a surplus nuke and used something besides Clipper to conceal his plans for it? If they are thinking about such an eventuality, we should be doing so as well. How will we respond? I believe there is a strong, though currently untested, argument that outlawing unregulated crypto would violate the First Amendment, which surely protects the manner of our speech as clearly as it protects the content. But of course the First Amendment is, like the rest of the Constitution, only as good as the government's willingness of the to uphold it. And they are, as I say, in a mood to protect our safety over our liberty. This is not a mind-frame against which any argument is going to be very effective. And it appeared that they had already heard and rejected every argument I could possibly offer. In fact, when I drew what I thought was an original comparison between their stand against naturally proliferating crypto and the folly of King Canute (who placed his throne on the beach and commanded the tide to leave him dry), my opposition looked pained and said he had heard that one almost as often as jokes about road-kill on the Information Superhighway. I hate to go to war with them. War is always nastier among friends. Furthermore, unless they've decided to let the NSA design the rest of the National Information Infrastructure as well, we need to go on working closely with them on the whole range of issues like access, competition, workplace privacy, common carriage, intellectual property, and such. Besides, the proliferation of strong crypto will probably happen eventually no matter what they do. But then again, it might not. In which case we could shortly find ourselves under a government that would have the automated ability to log the time, origin and recipient of everycall we made, could track our physical whereabouts continuously, could keep better account of our financial transactions than we do, and all without a warrant. Talk about crime prevention! Worse, under some vaguely defined and surely mutable "legal authority," they also would be able to listen to our calls and read our e-mail without having to do any backyard rewiring. (And wouldn't even need that to monitor our overseas calls.) If there's going to be a fight, I'd far rather it be with this government than the one we'd likely face on that hard day. Hey, I've never been a paranoid before. It's always seemed to me that most governments are too incompetent to keep a good plot strung together all the way from coffee break to quitting time. But I am now very nervous about the government of the United States of America. Because Bill 'n' Al, whatever their other new paradigm virtues, have allowed the very old paradigm trogs of the Guardian Class to the define as their highest duty the defense of America against an enemy that exists primarily in the imagination and is therefore capable of anything. To assure absolute safety against such an enemy, there is no limit to the liberties we will eventually be asked to sacrifice. And, with a Clipper chip in every phone, there will certainly be no technical limit on their ability to enforce those sacrifices. WHAT YOU CAN DO GET CONGRESS TO LIFT THE CRYPTO EMBARGO The Administration is trying to impose Clipper on us by manipulating market forces. Purchasing massive numbers of Clipper devices, they intend to produce an economy of scale which will make them cheap while their export embargo renders all competition either expensive or non-existent. We have to use the market to fight back. While it's unlikely that they'll back down on Clipper deployment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that with sufficient public involvement, we can get Congress to eliminate the export embargo. Rep. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has a bill (H.R. 3627) before the Economic Policy, Trade, and Environment Science Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee which would do exactly that. She will need a lot of help from the public. They may not care much about your privacy in DC, but they still care about your vote. Please signal your support of H.R. 3627, either by writing her directly or e-mailing her at cantwell@eff.org. Messages sent to that address will be printed out and delivered to her office. In the Subject header of your message, please include the words "support HR 3627." In the body of your message, express your reasons for supporting the bill. You may also express your sentiments to Rep. Lee Hamilton, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, by e-mailing hamilton@eff.org. Furthermore, since there is nothing quite as powerful as a letter from a constituent, you should check the following list of subcommittee and committee members to see if your congressperson is among them. If so, please copy them your letter to Ms. Cantwell. Economic Policy, Trade, and Environment Science Subcommittee: Democrats: Sam Gejdenson (Chairman), James Oberstar, Cynthia McKinney, Maria Cantwell, Eric Fingerhut, Albert R. Wynn, Harry Johnston, Eliot Engel, Charles Schumer. Republicans: Toby Roth (ranking), Donald Manzullo, Doug Bereuter, Jan Meyers, Cass Ballenger, Dana Rohrabacher. Foreign Affairs Committee: Democrats: Lee Hamilton (Chairman), Tom Lantos, Robert Torricelli, Howard Berman, Gary Ackerman, Eni Faleomavaega, Matthew Martinez, Robert Borski, Donal Payne, Robert Andrews, Robert Menendez, Sherrod Brown, Alcee Hastings, Peter Deutsch, Don Edwards, Frank McCloskey, Thomas Sawyer, Luis Gutierrez. Republicans: Benjamin Gilman (ranking), William Goodling, Jim Leach, Olympia Snowe, Henry Hyde, Christopher Smith, Dan Burton, Elton Gallegly, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, David Levy, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Ed Royce. BOYCOTT CLIPPER DEVICES AND THE COMPANIES WHICH MAKE THEM. Don't buy anything with a Clipper chip in it. Don't buy any product from a company which manufactures devices with "Big Brother Inside." It is likely that the government will ask you to use Clipper for communications with the IRS or when doing business with Federal agencies. They cannot, as yet, require you to do so. Just say no. LEARN ABOUT ENCRYPTION AND EXPLAIN THE ISSUES TO YOUR UNWIRED FRIENDS The administration is banking on the likelihood that this stuff too technically obscure to agitate anyone but nerds like us. You prove them wrong by patiently explaining what's going on to all the people you know who have never touched a computer and glaze over at the mention of words like "cryptography." Maybe you glaze over yourself. Don't. It's not that hard. For some hands-on experience, download a copy of PGP, a shareware encryption engine which uses the robust RSA encryption algorithm. and learn to use it. GET YOUR COMPANY TO THINK ABOUT EMBEDDING REAL CRYPTOGRAPHY IN ITS PRODUCTS If you work for a company which makes software, computer hardware, or any kind of communications device, work from within to get them to incorporate RSA or some other strong encryption scheme into their products. If they say that they are afraid to violate the export embargo, ask them to consider manufacturing such products overseas and importing them back into the United States. There appears to be no law against that. As yet. You might also lobby your company to join the Digital Privacy and Security Working Group, a coalition of companies and public interest groups that includes IBM, Apple, Sun, Microsoft (and, interestingly, Clipper phone manufacturer AT&T) that is working to get the embargo lifted. JOIN EFF, CPSR, OR BOTH Self-serving as it sounds coming from me, I think you can do a lot to help by becoming a member of one of these organizations. In addition to giving you access to the latest information on this subject, every additional member strengthens our credibility with Congress. Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation by writing membership@eff.org. Join Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility by writing [provide e-mail address here.] In his LA speech, Gore called the development of the NII "a revolution." And it is a revolutionary war we are engaged in here. Clipper is a last ditch attempt by the United States, the last great power from the Industrial Era, to establish imperial control over Cyberspace. If they win, the most liberating development in the history of humankind could become, instead, the surveillance system which will monitor our grandchildren's morality. We can be better ancestors than that. John Perry Barlow is co-founder and Vice-Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group which defends liberty, both in Cyberspace and the Physical World. He has three daughters. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Mar 1994 21:12:57 -0500 (EST) From: Stanton McCandlish Subject: File 2--Leahy to hold hearings on Clipper Chip! Dear Friends on the Electronic Frontier: I have some good news to share with you. Senator Leahy just sent me a letter indicating that he *will* be scheduling hearings on the Administration's Clipper Chip proposal. I would like to thank all of you who sent us messages to forward to him urging hearings. I'm sure that stack of messages we printed out made a significant impact on the Senator -- the stack was over seven inches tall! (We look forward to the day when no trees will have to be sacrificed in the furtherance of democracy!) And if you haven't written a message to Rep. Cantwell yet about her proposed amendment to the Export Control Act, please do so and forward it to cantwell@eff.org. This is an address we set up to enable us to collect messages in support of her bill. We have been printing out messages and delivering them each week -- so far we've received over 4500 letters of support. For more information on the Cantwell bill, send a message to cantwell-info@eff.org. Thanks again. We'll let you know as soon as the Clipper hearing gets scheduled. Sincerely, Jerry Berman EFF Executive Director -.-.-.-.-.-.-. forward from Sen. Leahy -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-. United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Washington, DC 20510 March 1, 1994 Mr. Jerry Berman Executive Director Electronic Frontier Foundation 1001 G Street, Suite 950 East Washington, DC 20001 Dear Jerry, Thank you for forwarding to me the many thoughtful and informative messages you received over the Internet regarding the Administration's recent approval of an escrowed encryption standard, known as the Clipper Chip. Many of the messages urge Congress to hold hearings to review the Administration's Clipper Chip standard. In fact, I intend to hold a hearing before the Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology and the Law, which I chair, to consider the important issues raised by the Clipper Chip. I will let you know when a date for the hearing is scheduled. Thank you again. Sincerely, /s/ PATRICK J. LEAHY United States Senator PJL/jud -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-. JOIN EFF!! ========== EFF's work as a civil liberties organization in Washington has been very successful, but the realization of our goals of freedom and privacy online can only come with the active and vocal participation of the entire online community. Now that you have personally experienced both the threat of the loss of your privacy and the power having won the first battle, won't you take that next step and become a member of EFF? By joining EFF, you will help us to expand our reach to educate and involve an even greater number of people in the shaping of these critical issues. Your tax-deductible donation will tie you into the EFF information network and support our public policy and legal work. As a member, you will be guaranteed timely the timely information and mechanism you need to respond on these issues. Our voices in unity *do* make a difference. -------- 8< ------- cut here ------- 8< -------- MEMBERSHIP IN THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION ================================================ Print out in monospaced (non-proportional) font and mail to: Membership Coordinator Electronic Frontier Foundation 1001 G Street, NW, Suite 950 East, Washington, DC 20001 SIGN ME UP! ----------- I wish to become a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I enclose: ___ Regular membership -- $40 ___ Student membership -- $20 * Special Contribution I wish to make an additional tax-deductible donation in the amount of $__________ to further support the activities of EFF and to broaden participation in the organization. PAYMENT METHOD: --------------- ___ Enclosed is a check or money order payable to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ___ Please charge my: ___ MasterCard ___ Visa ___ American Express Card Number: _____________________________________________ Expiration Date: _________________________________________ Signature: _______________________________________________ NOTE: We do not recommend sending credit card information via email! YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION: ------------------------- Name: __________________________________________________________ Organization: __________________________________________________ Address: _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Phone: _____________________ FAX: _____________________ BBS: _____________________ BBS Name: ____________________ E-mail addresses: ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ PREFERRED CONTACT ___ Electronic: Please contact me via the Internet address listed above. I would like to receive the following at that address: ___ EFFector Online - EFF's biweekly electronic newsletter (back issues available from ftp.eff.org, pub/EFF/Newsletters/EFFector). ___ Online Bulletins - bulletins on key developments affecting online communications. NOTE: Traffic may be high. You may wish to browse these publications in the Usenet newsgroup comp.org.eff.news (also available in FidoNet, as EFF-NEWS). ___ Paper: Please contact EFF through the US Mail at the street address listed above. NOTE: Paper documents available upon request. "Networks & Policy" Newsletter automatically sent via US Mail. PRIVACY POLICY -------------- EFF occasionally shares our mailing list with other organizations promoting similar goals. However, we respect an individual's right to privacy and will not distribute your name without explicit permission. ___ I grant permission for the EFF to distribute my name and contact information to organizations sharing similar goals. [This form from eff.org 3/7/94 Cantwell--please leave this line on the form!] The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization supported by contributions from individual members, corporations and private foundations. Donations are tax-deductible. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 6 Mar 94 19:12:56 CST From: susan@UTAFLL.UTA.EDU(Susan Herring) Subject: File 3--Survey: communication ethics on the net The following survey is part of a project I am conducting on communication ethics on the net. I'd appreciate it if everyone who reads this message could take a few minutes to answer and return the survey. All responses will remain strictly confidential. A summary of the results will be made available to respondents upon request. ========================================================================= NETIQUETTE SURVEY The following questions concern behavior on electronic discussion lists and/or newsgroups. Answer on the basis of your personal experience and reactions. Needless to say, there are no correct or incorrect answers. 1. What behaviors bother you most on the net? 2. What net behaviors do you most appreciate when you encounter them? 3. In an ideal world, what one change would you most like to see in the way people participate on the net? SPECIFIC BEHAVIORS For each behavior listed below, place an X under the number that indicates how common the behavior is in your experience on the net, and your typical reaction when you encounter it. (If the behavior reminds you of a particular list or group, feel free to mention the group or otherwise comment.) rare common like dislike 1. Participants post very 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 long messages 2. Participants post short 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 messages 3. The same participant(s) 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 post frequently 4. Requests are posted for 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 obvious or easily- obtained information 5. Requests are posted on 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 FAQs or topic previously discussed rare common like dislike 6. Messages don't contain 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 explicit subject headers 7. Messages contain typos 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 or spelling errors 8. Messages are unclearly 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 worded or otherwise obscure 9. Messages posted on topics 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 not directly related to focus of list/newsgroup 10. Same msg. posted more than 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 once to same list/newsgroup rare common like dislike 11. Message cross-posted to 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 multiple lists/newsgroups 12. Messages sent publicly 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 instead of to listserv or to a private individual 13. Messages quote all of 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 message being responded to 14. Elaborate signature files 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 15. Messages contain personal 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 or intimate information about sender rare common like dislike 16. Messages compliment or 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 thank others for their messages 17. Messages agree with the 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 content of previous msgs. 18. Messages challenge the 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 content of previous msgs. 19. Messages have humorous 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 content 20. Messages are ironic or 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 sarcastic in tone rare common like dislike 21. Messages contain insider 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 references understandable only to members of that group 22. Messages give advice to 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 other participants 23. Messages sympathize with 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 other participants 24. Messages are tentative or 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 overly polite 25. Messages forcefully 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 assert sender's views rare common like dislike 26. Participants boast of own 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 achievements/importance 27. Messages contain profanity 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 28. Messages have racist 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 content 29. Messages have sexist 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 content 30. Participants "flame" or 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 express strong negative emotion OTHER 1. How many screens does a message have to be before you consider it "too long" (i.e. consider deleting it or skipping to the next message)? 2. Would you favor limits on length and/or frequency of posting to public lists/newsgroups? If so, what limits would you propose? 3. Put an X next to the statement that best applies: In my experience on the net, participants behave politely and appropriately a) almost all the time b) most of the time, with some exceptions c) about half of the time d) not very often e) almost never RESPONDENT BACKGROUND INFORMATION (important) 1. Age: under 25; 25-35; 36-45; 46-55; 56-65; over 65 2. Sex: M F 3. Ethnicity: White (non-Hispanic); Asian; African-American; Hispanic; Native American; other 4. Native language if other than English: 5. Academic position: Prof; Assoc. Prof; Assist. Prof; Instructor (non tenure-track); Grad student; Undergrad; academic staff; researcher; not associated with academia 6. Field of specialization: 7. Number of years using computer networks: 8. Number of electronic discussion lists you currently subscribe to: 9. How often, on the average, do you contribute to these lists? 10. Number of newsgroups you read (regularly or occasionally): 11. How often, on the average, do you contribute to these newsgroups? ===================================================================== Thank you for responding. Please send surveys and requests for summary of survey results to susan@utafll.uta.edu or (snail mail): Prof. Susan Herring, Program in Linguistics, University of Texas, Arlington, TX 76019 USA. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 6 Mar 94 02:21:40 PST From: raustin@pro-palmtree.socal.com (Ronald Austin) Subject: File 4--Starring Tom Cruise as Kevin Poulsen? ((The following is reprinted from Telecom Digest (V 14: #115)) Daily Variety March 3, 1994 Thursday SECTION: NEWS; Pg.1 BYLINE: MICHAEL FLEMING PAR'S HACK ATTACK: Though the minds of Paramount execs have surely been on potential whackings, computer hacking was the chief focus of execs Bob Jaffe and John Goldwyn last week. The execs got Par to pay a low six-figure fee against mid-six figures to Jonathan Littman for the rights to make a movie from his Sept. 12 {L.A. Times Magazine} article "The Last Hacker," and major names are lining up to be involved. It's the story of Kevin Lee Poulson, a skilled computer hacker who was so inventive he once disabled the phone system of KIIS-FM so he could be the 102nd caller and win the $50,000 Porsche giveaway. More seriously, he's been charged with using his expertise to breach national security by accessing top secret files and selling the information. He's even suspected of disabling the phone systems of "Unsolved Mysteries" after he was profiled, so that callers couldn't furnish clues to his whereabouts. Poulson was caught and has been in jail for the last three years, facing more than 100 years in prison. ICM agent Kris Dahl got Littman to turn the article into a book for Little, Brown, and ICM's Irene Webb racked up yet another sale for the screen rights to the hacker story. It was a vigorous tug of war between Touchstone, which was trying to purchase it for "City Slickers" director Ron Underwood, and Paramount, chasing it for producer Oren Koules. Littman chose Koules, and now, Dish hears, Underwood wants to join Koules to direct. Littman, meanwhile, has remained tight with the underground community of hackers as he researches his book. That takes its toll. Among other things, the mischief meisters have already changed his voice mail greeting to render an obscene proposal. --------------------- UUCP: hatch!pro-palmtree!raustin The Palmtree BBS Inet: raustin@pro-palmtree.socal.com 310-453-8726 v.32 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks for passing this along. For readers who do not remember/know of Poulsen, we have a file about him in the Telecom Archives. As the article above points out, he will probably be in jail for a long time to come. Articles about other hackerphreaks who have been arrested and their exploits are in the same sub-directory in the Archives. You can reach the Archives using anonymous ftp lcs.mit.edu. PAT] ------------------------------ End of Computer Underground Digest #6.24 ************************************