Computer underground Digest Thu Mar 11, 1997 Volume 9 : Issue 19 ISSN 1004-042X Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu) News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu) Archivist: Brendan Kehoe Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala Ian Dickinson Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest CONTENTS, #9.19 (Thu, Mar 11, 1997) File 1--SUPREMES: The Countdown Begins File 2--Junk Mail File 3--Book Review - The Secret Museum File 4--** >= Ascend 5.0A SECURITY ALERT ** (fwd) File 5--Pedophiles on the Net (fwd) File 6--Response to CyberAngels FACE Project File 7--CyberAngels' Noble Activity File 8--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 13 Dec, 1996) CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 5 Mar 1997 10:13:12 -0800 From: --Todd Lappin-- Subject: File 1--SUPREMES: The Countdown Begins THE CDA DISASTER NETWORK March 5, 1997 Believe it or not, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments regarding the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act in just two short weeks. In the meantime, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Voters Telecommunications Watch have launched a COUNTDOWN TO THE SUPREME COURT campaign to help spread the news about the case and provide an opportunity for Internet users to join the fight. Read on for more details, and as always... Work the Network! --Todd Lappin--> Section Editor WIRED Magazine The Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition -- http://www.ciec.org ______________________________________________________________ THE FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH ONLINE LANDS IN THE SUPREME COURT IN 15 DAYS JOIN THOUSANDS OF YOUR FELLOW INTERNET USERS IN A HISTORIC COUNTDOWN March 4, 1996 Please distribute widely with this banner in tact. Please post only in appropriate forums. Do not distribute after March 19, 1997 ___________________________________________________________________ NEWS - COUNTDOWN TO THE SUPREME COURT ARGUMENTS OVER FREE SPEECH ONLINE The fate of the Internet and the future of the First Amendment in the information age hang in the balance. In just two weeks, on March 19th, 1997 at 10:00 am, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a legal battle over the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), a law which imposes broadcast-style content regulations on the Internet. A decision is expected in June of 1997. Will the Supreme Court agree with 2 federal courts that found the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional, ruling that the Internet is a unique communications technology that deserves the same First Amendment protections enjoyed by the print media? Or will the Court side with Senator Exon, the Justice Department, and the Christian Coalition, who have argued that the government is the best judge of what material is appropriate online? The outcome of this case will have a profound impact on the future of the Internet as a viable means of free expression, education, and commerce. JOIN TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YOUR FELLOW NET USERS IN A HISTORIC COUNTDOWN With your help and support, the entire Internet community will have an opportunity to join together in the fight for the future of the Net. ______________________________________________________________ INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PARTICIPATE In anticipation of this historic event, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Voters Telecommunications Watch (VTW) have launched a COUNTDOWN TO THE SUPREME COURT campaign to help spread the news about the case and provide an opportunity for Internet users to join the fight. If You Maintain A World Wide Web Page: 1. Add the following link *TODAY* in a prominent location on your site: Countdown to Supreme Court

2. IMPORTANT -> Let us know you have joined the campaign: Drop us a note at and let us know you have added the link to your site. We will keep a running tally of the number of participating sites. If You Don't Maintain A World Wide Web Page: 1. Forward this Alert to your friends 2. Visit the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition page (http://www.ciec.org) to keep up to date on the latest news about the case and information on how you can join the fight to preserve the future of the Internet as a viable means of free expression, education and commerce. ________________________________________________________________ HOW WILL THIS CAMPAIGN WORK? After you have added the link (above) to your page, an animated image counting down the days until the Supreme Court argument will be displayed on your site. The image will be updated daily (the update will occur at our server -- you will not have to do anything). By clicking on the icon, visitors to your page will jump directly to the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition site which contains the latest news and information on the case, court documents, along with information on how they can join the fight. The "Countdown to the Supreme Court" campaign is similar to the "question mark/fireworks" campaign last June announcing the decision in the Philadelphia case. Both campaigns were organized by the Center for Democracy and Technology http://www.cdt.org and the Voters Telecommunications Watch http://www.vtw.org. _________________________________________________________________ BACKGROUND ON THE COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was enacted in February of 1996 as part of the Telecommunications Reform Act. The law seeks to protect minors from objectionable or sexually explicit material on the Internet by imposing broad content regulations and stiff criminal penalties on the "display" of "indecent" or "patently offensive" material on the Internet. While supporters of the CDA argue that the law is designed to protect children from so-called "pornography" on the Internet, two separate Federal Courts have agreed that the law goes far beyond that and would ban otherwise constitutionally protected materials. It is important to note that the CDA is not about obscenity, child pornography, or using the Internet to stalk or prey on children. These activities are already illegal under current law and are not at issue in this case. Opponents to the new law argue that while well intentioned, the CDA fails to account for the unique nature of the Internet, and that it will have a far-reaching chilling effect on constitutionally protected speech online. On a global, decentralized communications medium like the Internet, the only effective and constitutional means of controlling access to objectionable material is to rely on users and parents, not the government, to decide what material is or is not appropriate. On the Internet, every single user is a publisher with the capacity to reach millions of people. As a result, all of us have a stake in the outcome of this case. Two lawsuits were filed to challenge the constitutionality of the CDA in a Philadelphia federal court in February 1996. The cases have been brought, respectively, by The Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition (CIEC), comprised of the American Library Association. civil Liberties groups, Internet Service Providers, Commercial Online Service Providers, Newspaper, Magazine and Book Publishers, and over 56,000 individual Internet users. The ACLU, along with a coalition of civil liberties groups, advocacy groups, online content providers, and others filed the initial case on the day the CDA was signed into law. The ACLU and CIEC cases will be argued together before the Supreme Court on March 19, 1997 by CIEC lead attorney Bruce Ennis. A decision is expected in June. Detailed information on the legal challenges, as well as information about the CDA, is available at the following web sites: Legal Challenges To The CDA --------------------------- * The Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition (CIEC) - http://www.ciec.org/ * The ACLU - http://www.aclu.org/ The outcome of this legal battle will have far reaching implications. At stake is nothing less than the future of the First Amendment in the information age. ___________________________________________________________________ FOR MORE INFORMATION For more information on this event, including press inquiries, please contact: Jonah Seiger, +1.202.637.9800 Communications Director, Center for Democracy and Technology/Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition Shabbir Safdar, +1.718.596.2851 co-founder, Voters Telecommunications Watch member, Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition Or Visit http://www.ciec.org/ ___________________________________________________________________ end alert +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+ This transmission was brought to you by.... THE CDA DISASTER NETWORK The CDA Disaster Network is a moderated distribution list providing up-to-the-minute bulletins and background on efforts to overturn the Communications Decency Act. To SUBSCRIBE, send email to with "subscribe cda-bulletin" in the message body. To UNSUBSCRIBE, send email to with "unsubscribe cda-bulletin" in the message body. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 11:09:02 -0400 From: Jeffrey Hinchey Subject: File 2--Junk Mail In reference to Cu-Digest #9.11, in a snippit about Wallace and Cyber Promotions, the following statement was made. I am sure that no one relishes having unsolicited email hitting their mailboxes every few hours, but I do not think that this snippit really highlights the issues involved. > IMHO, such guys like Wallace ought to be thrown in jail for > trespassing. Unlike a letter mailed to my house or business, which > costs me nothing, email DOES cost me. I pay for my online time, and Anyone who thinks that junk mail to our household or business is not costing us money is completely ignorant of many issues in our society. How about the problem finding suitable garbage dumps, or should I say "Sanitary Disposing System", escallated by the production of junk mail? How about the decimation of our current lumber resources in many parts of the world, including the rain forest? How about the environmental impact during the logging process itself? What the heck, what is that rain forest thing anyway? Just wear your oxygen mask while you sit home and tend to your nice private and secure mailbox. Some people pollute the environment by taking that large box of junk mail that is saved for the recycle depot with their vehicle. If there is a depot that is. Often this material is refused because it is of the wrong paper type. How about all the pollution from cars delivering these flyers, etc. In my particular area it never fails that someone who obviously could use a good walk now and then, is driving house to house with their vehicle to deliver these things. Since I do not read these flyers coming to my home, someone must be paying for it. Someone who has read the flyer must be purchasing a product and paying a little more for the flyer I never read. It might be small but it is still there. Bottom line is, we do not like these things but at least these individuals might escalate the issue to a point that the whole issue is looked at as an environmental issue, as well as a privacy issue. In the old paper way, or the new e-mail way, societies rights are being stepped on. Before anyone writes me stupid and insulting email like last time I tried to raise these points for discussion, please read this whole note, and not just HALF. If you have opinions I would appreciate hearing them by way of this forum and not in personal email, especially when it contains profanity. Please remember I am not supporting spaming! Personally I would outlaw all advertising outside of certain 'Non Impact" advertising systems", like Television, where it is used to subsidize the cost of the television system itself. But in my opinion people who call for the government to step in and put someone in jail because they are spaming is no better than someone who cries that certain sites should be censored because of adult material. They both are inviting government control into our lives in their own way. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 16:47:45 +1100 (EST) From: Danny Yee Subject: File 3--Book Review - The Secret Museum Source -- fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu title: The Secret Museum : Pornography in Modern Culture by: Walter Kendrick publisher: University of California Press 1996 other: 318 pages, references, bibliography, index, US$13.95 The word "pornography" is often used as if it were entirely unproblematic, even by those campaigning against its censorship. In _The Secret Museum_ Kendrick has produced a history of the term which should be mandatory reading for anyone who finds themselves using it regularly. (It is not a history of pornography itself, so those seeking titillation should look elsewhere.) While many analyses and histories of pornography depend on complex critical and psychoanalytical theories or have obviously polemical goals, Kendrick's account is unburdened by such baggage. "Pornography" is barely two centuries old, having its origins in the response to explicit artifacts unearthed at Pompeii (which were stored in the "Secret Museum" from which Kendrick takes his title) and in scientific studies of prostitution from a public hygiene perspective. Having explained this, Kendrick moves on to what he calls the "pre-pornographic era", when the crudities of writers such as Catulus, Horace, Shakespeare, and Chaucer posed knotty problems for the censors. A failure to take into account the _intentions_ of such works, or to make special allowance for their artistic merits, resulted in Bowdlerisation and other responses which seem laughable to us now. Less fuss was made about works, such as those in the tradition that originated with Aretino, which would now be labelled pornographic: they were too obscure to attract attention. Similarly, the collection of erotica by aristocratic bibliomanes was, because of the scarcity of the material and the standing of those involved, not a matter of great concern. Urbanisation and the spread of literacy removed this protection, fanning the spread of affordable and popular sensation novels and other such works. These fell into the hands of those -- the young, women, the lower classes -- considered incapable of coping with them. Here originated the mythological Young Person at risk of corruption, whose presence continues to haunt debates about pornography. Kendrick next surveys some of the early legal landmarks: the 1857 trials of _Madame Bovary_ and _Les Fleur du Mal_ in France; in Britain the 1763 Wilkes trial, Lord Campbell's Act, the Hicklin test, and and the origins of Anglo-Saxon anti-obscenity legislation. Turning to the United States, he covers early legislation there and the career of Comstock. (The first half of _The Secret Museum_ rarely ventures outside Western Europe and the United States; the second deals almost exclusively with the United States.) Two chapters, "Good Intentions" and "Hard at the Core", trace the gradual refinement, in various trials, of "pornography" so as to exclude material of artistic, literary, and scientific value and to take into account the intentions of its creators. This culminated in the 1966 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that redeemed the pornographic classic _Fanny Hill_, on the grounds that "a book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value". After the rejection of the 1970 Report, the nature of the debate changed. With Brownmiller, Dworkin, McKinnon, and the feminist anti-pornography campaign the focus was on "harms" instead of morals. Instead of gentlemen protecting innocent children and women from depravity, women were now preventing brutish young men from becoming rapists: the Young Person had arisen in a new form. The 1986 Meese Report ("an unbelievably fatuous document") took a similar tack. Kendrick saw this as a sign of a "post-pornographic era" and concluded "we have fought ignorant battles... and... we ought not to be so stupid as to believe that we must fight them again". This is where the _The Secret Museum_ (published in 1987) originally concluded. This 1996 paperback edition contains a new chapter written in the aftermath of the Communications Decency Act ("a radically ignorant and atavistic piece of work"). Kendrick now thinks he was too hasty in predicting an end to battles over pornography -- they will be fought over and over again, in the same form they have been for the last two centuries. -- Disclaimer: I requested and received a review copy of _The Secret Museum_ from the University of California Press, but I have no stake, financial or otherwise, in its success. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 19:35:35 -0500 (EST) From: "noah@enabled.com" Subject: File 4--** >= Ascend 5.0A SECURITY ALERT ** (fwd) From -Noah ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date--Wed, 26 Feb 1997 15:18:36 -0800 From--Kit Knox -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ** IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ ********************************************* There exists a new feature in the 5.0A series of releases for the MAX which allow a user to reboot your Ascend MAX at will. This is done via an undocumented login entry point that has been introduced without notice to the public by Ascend. Users can telnet to a max on port 150 and the Max will act as though the call came in via a T1 etc. Using this and another bug a user can cause the max to reboot. The exact sequence to cause the reboot has been reported to Ascend and I am waiting for an official response. After a fix has been made available I will immediatly release the details. In the meantime it is HIGHLY reccomended that you filter access for incoming tcp to port 150. If you are not running 5.0A or above please report back to the list if your max accepts a telnet to port 150 so we can figure out which release this "feature" was introduced silently. The Max's seem to now also answer on port 1723. Anyone know what this is used for? This whole thing smells of the non-zero length tcp offsets bug from awhile back. Sigh. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1997 17:13:03 -0600 (CST) From: Computer underground Digest Subject: File 5--Pedophiles on the Net (fwd) ((MODERATORS' NOTE: TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu * ====== From--TELECOM Digest Thu, 27 Feb 97 09:02:00 EST Volume 17 --Issue 54 Date--Wed, 26 Feb 1997 23:48:39 PST From--tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) By Drake Witham Knight-Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON -- In early February, police say, a man here ended three months of increasingly suggestive on-line chat with a 13-year-old boy in California and flew across the country to arrange a sexual encounter with the child. But when he arrived at a Huntington Beach restaurant for a face-to-face meeting with the boy, he was instead arrested by local vice officers. That reckoning is clearly an exception in the freewheeling world of cyber-chat, where growing numbers of young Americans are spending hours sitting at keyboards talking intimately with strangers. Police efforts to rein in on-line sexual predators face daunting legal, technical and financial challenges. Pursuing them is so difficult, and some critics wonder just how serious the problem is. To be arrested, pedophiles must transmit obscene images of provable minors or step out from behind their keyboards and solicit sex from a child in person. "It takes about 30 seconds to find a hard-core conversation or full-color image and six months to build a case," said Sgt. Nick Battaglia of the San Jose (California) Police Department. "And then you can find out the guy you've been talking to all along lives in Australia." If the predators are elusive, their prey is right at home. Nearly six million kids under 18 regularly use the Internet, up from 1.1 million in 1995, a recent study estimates, and chat rooms are their favorite hangouts. "Children love e-mail and they love chat," said Tom Miller, who conducted the study for the private Emerging Technology Research Group. "The curiosity is such a part of their natural profile." One recent afternoon America Online, the most widely used on-line service, had more than 400 public chat lobbies open, each with more than 20 talkers; more than 50 "member rooms," many with sexually suggestive labels, filled to capacity; and an unknown number of private rooms. Much of the explicit talk kids encounter in those rooms would shock or frighten parents. What's more shocking to some is that it's legal for an adult to write sexually explicit messages to children on line. "It's kind of like a verbal orgy," said Nan McCarthy, who has been hanging around on line for 10 years researching her recently published novel "Chat." "These people in live chat rooms don't spend a lot of time on foreplay." Only a few local police departments across the country routinely conduct on-line sex crime investigations, though some others have worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an ongoing national effort. A successful investigation requires large sums of money for high-tech computer equipment, many man hours and officers who can present themselves as children or pedophiles. To pull off the recent sting in Huntington Beach, an officer had to strain his voice to sound like a 13-year-old and dupe the man into a meeting. The suspect, a 39-year-old employee of the National Academy of Sciences, will be arraigned March 13. Most on-line pedophiles aren't caught. "We think of child victimization as this big monster hiding under the bridge, but it's not like that," said Peter Banks, training director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "They charm kids. They're very good at what they do." "The Internet has got to be the pedophile's dream come true. They can stalk children without any concern of being seen," said Cheryl Kean of Rochester, N.Y. She has not had contact with her 13-year-old daughter since she disappeared in December with a 22-year-old man she met on the Internet. Just how much sex crime is actually perpetrated using the Internet is impossible to estimate. The missing-children center says it has documented more than 50 cases of child abductions by predators who gained the trust of children with sweet talk on the Internet. Most of those children have since been located. Dr. Ira Rosen, a child psychiatrist and physician from Dayton, Ohio, who has worked with abused children for decades, says the new technology clearly has made pedophilia easier. But he believes it's unlikely that the number of people with the problem are growing. "It's certainly more visible," said Dr. Jonathan Freedman, a clinical sociologist in Atlanta and former education director for the Hutchings Psychiatric Center in Syracuse, N.Y. In the unregulated chat section of the Internet called the Internet Relay Chat -- or IRC -- evidence of pedophilia is frighteningly visible. A large array of individuals is almost always there, trading electronic images of nude children -- sometimes engaged in horrifying acts -- across state and national borders. In California last year, two men held a "pedo party" in which they photographed a 10-year-old girl in explicit poses and transmitted, in real time, the images to users in other states and Finland. They even took requests. Authorities in Minnesota discovered last fall that two inmates compiled a list of addresses and physical descriptions for 2,000 children, and sent it beyond prison walls and over the Internet. Inspired by the Internet-related abduction and murder of a Maryland child in 1993, the FBI launched an operation called Innocent Images in 1994. Agents in 52 of the bureau's 56 field offices have since prowled on line, using suggestive log-on decoys like "horny15bi" and racy conversations to identify potential pedophiles in 46 states. Agents have had the most success thus far posing as adults looking for sexually explicit images of children. To date there have been 237 searches, 112 formal charges, 87 arrests and 78 convictions out of Innocent Images, according to Larry Foust, a spokesman in the FBI Baltimore field office. Agents in a branch of that office run the FBI's Internet sex sting operation. Kimberly Kellogg, a criminal defense attorney in Kansas City, Kan., handles about 20 pedophilia cases a year and says on-line law enforcement techniques may be entrapment. "It may not be your true pedophile but someone who is just curious," she said. "If the FBI is setting this up, I would think there is an excellent chance of proving entrapment." Lt. Dan Johnson, a vice squad officer in Huntington Beach, disagrees. "In order to entrap someone you have to put the idea in their head and make it so attractive that a normally law-abiding citizen would want to do it," Johnson said. "How do you make it attractive to have sex with a 13-year old?" Even the most ardent defenders of free speech on the Internet stop short of condoning child exploitation, but are concerned the search for pedophiles could eventually lead police to overstep constitutional boundaries. "For the FBI to go in and entice people, masquerading in this game playing, this is likely to extend into other areas. I could see it very easily with the militia movement," said David Sobel, legal counsel for the Electronic Privacy and Information Center. "I think it's a strange way to use limited law enforcement resources." Even some officers who conduct on-line investigations question the need for such operations. Detective Tom Polhemus of the Fairfax County Police Department in Northern Virginia said Internet investigations put the emphasis in the wrong place. "That's not how kids are being abused," said Polhemus, who handles child exploitation cases. "They're being abused by your best friend, your friendly neighbor, your husband. If the Internet is all we worried about, we'd be sitting here all day eating doughnuts." Just what can or should be done to make the Internet less menacing to children remains a divisive question. Last year Congress made it illegal to transmit any sort of sexually explicit message to children. Critics said the new law violated basic principles of free speech and was so vague that it might shut down sites for Playboy magazine and Planned Parenthood. Last June, a federal appellate court in Philadelphia agreed, striking down the measure on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment right to free speech. The Supreme Court will decide the case this spring. Meanwhile, bills have been introduced in both houses of Congress that would require Internet service providers to offer software that could be used to block sexual and violent images. But Internet experts say such efforts are futile because of the technology's basically open structure. Complicating the problem is the varied nature of the on-line world. The largest numbers of on-line users connect through structured commercial sites like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. America Online offers parental controls to determine which sites, newsgroups and chat rooms their children can use, and offers guidelines for all users on keeping safe on-line. But it also is clear that it is easy and common for libidinous adults to meet children in these services, despite such safeguards. "Parents can control everything from web access to newsgroups to e-mail. Chat rooms generally have a guide in them and guides can be paged 24 hours a day," said Andrew Graziani, a spokesperson for America Online. "But we're not monitoring private messages." The Internet and the Internet Relay Chat are more difficult to police. There is no normal commerce on the IRC and thus no providers to share the burden of protecting children. And dozens of sites selling access to sexual images and chat on the Internet appear and disappear with startling speed. Software with names like Net Nanny and Cybersitter designed to screen kids from such sites is increasingly popular. Since January 1995, Surfwatch has sold three million copies of a program that blocks access to 25,000 adult sites and can be tailored by parents. "It's a nice alternative. There's a value for law enforcement, but we favor a more preventative approach," said Jay Friedland, co-founder of Surfwatch. But Friedland also points out that parents can't rely solely on software, because kids are often more savvy then their parents about computers and can find a way around protective programs. + + + + Related Internet sites include: http://www.yahooligans.com http://www.cyberangels.org/chatsmarts.html, http://www.cyberangels.org/AOLsmarts.html http://www.cyberstalker.org http://www.nvc.org/ddir/info44.htm ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 10:30:39 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt Subject: File 6--Response to CyberAngels FACE Project In all the volume of text on this subject, I still can't find anyone hitting the points that seem most relevant to me. 1. Hatcher says his downloaded pedophilic images will be saved direct to floppy disk and then submitted to "the authorities" in order to protect himself from laws against possession of child pornography. Clearly however federal law states that possession of three or more pieces of child pornography IN ANY FORM (including a floppy disk) is illegal. Also, it seems likely that Hatcher's browser may store the obscene images in a cache file on his hard drive, since that is what browsers do. Therefore, even after he has surrendered his floppy disk, his computer is likely to retain the illicit imagery, leaving him at risk. 2. In view of this, as I suggested in my original letter, Hatcher and his friends will need some kind of official or unofficial exemption from prosecution. There is no other way for them to operate securely. I would guess that if he really has sp