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Sauron
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The good news is that there's really no need to be concerned because the COMINT people really don't give a toss about any of us, we are not who they
are in the business of watching/listening to. We are part of the baseline noise. You are not the Cali cartel. You are not the Medellin cartel. You are
not the South Asian smack lords, nor the successoris to Khun Sa in the Shan States of Burma. You are not political. You are not terrorists (who are by
definition political). So go about your routines and rest assured, THOSE guys don't care. The low level authorities might but they don't have Keyhole
satellites and Crays. (neither especially up to date.)
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Polverone
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Sauron
I say nothing of the sort. I say NSA does not let any cryptographic technology go public unless and until they have a way into it. They watch the
academic cryptographic community like a hawk, and use a combination of carrot and stick to maintain their hegemony. A similar situation prevails in
Europe.
Cryptography available to the public is fine for keeping your wife from reading your emails to your GF but don't kid yourself that you are hiding
anything from THOSE guys. NSA has a much larger budget than CIA, and answers to the SecDef. All you are doing when you use crypto on the Internet is
red flagging yourself which is why I never use it. As I have nothing to hide (not even from my wife) it is not a problem. |
The majority of the world's mathematicians, computer programmers, and cryptographers live outside of the US and the UK. The NSA has no way to maintain
a global hegemony on encryption technologies, and they have failed in the past to persuade people not to publish powerful advances (e.g. early
academic work on public key cryptography). Unless the NSA has the power to grant tenure, I doubt that most academics could be persuaded either by
carrot or stick to refrain from publishing significant cryptologic advances.
A decade ago, the CIA had a budget of $3.1 billion, NSA budget $3.6 billion. Do you have a source to support a much larger NSA budget?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and the claim that the NSA can defeat any cryptosystem is very extraordinary. Enigmatically worded
anecdotes about a guy you knew who was persuaded not to auction technology developed by Crypto AG don't even come close to the needed extraordinary
proof.
My favorite story about Crypto AG is that they collaborated with the NSA to build backdoors into products that would then be used by 3rd world
governments. Luckily, all your encrypted email/web browsing needs can today be served by free software with documented, scrutinized algorithms and
full source code availability.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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Sauron
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You want to believe in what you believe, fine, have at it.
The Thais used to believe that Buddhist amulets would protect them from guns and knives. They were of course, mistaken.
I put no stock in those things you hold to be effective.
But hang on to your illusions if you like. No skin off my nose.
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Polverone
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I think that people who believe government agencies can do anything are the ones who believe in magic.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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Sauron
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And you keep insisting on telling me what I believe. That is the second time you have put words in my mouth. And this is second time I spit them back
at you.
I did not say "Government agencies can do everything."
Most government agencies are good for nothing but passing out green checks to arrogant undereducated bureaucrats named Twana. A GS-12 who in the
private sector would perhaps be able to find employement in the food service or janitorial engineering fields. If she was lucky.
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chromium
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In my opinion strength of password based cryptography is largely overestimated. Human choosen passwords are never random enough to make brute force
attacks as useless as they are said to be.
The set of possible passwords can be narrowed a lot if one has some data about habits of word usage of person who choose password.
If password is generated randomly then only very few are able to memorise it. It gets writen down (directly or somewhat coded) and this is security
hole again.
I suppose, governemnt agencies invest a lot to find ways for effective attacs (for example man-in-the-middle type attacks) and they probably are able
to break most of cryptography just using weaknesses of human factor or other not directly cryptography related weknesses in institutions, computer
networks or communication systems.
[Edited on 4-1-2007 by chromium]
[Edited on 4-1-2007 by chromium]
When all think alike, then no one is thinking. - Walter Lippmann
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pantone159
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The way to get a strong, memorizable password, is to use a longish pass phrase, which is then hashed into the actual key.
If your phrase is long/good enough, the hash is indistinguishable from a random key.
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JohnWW
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Polverone
The majority of the world's mathematicians, computer programmers, and cryptographers live outside of the US and the UK. The NSA has no way to maintain
a global hegemony on encryption technologies, and they have failed in the past to persuade people not to publish powerful advances (e.g. early
academic work on public key cryptography). Unless the NSA has the power to grant tenure, I doubt that most academics could be persuaded either by
carrot or stick to refrain from publishing significant cryptologic advances.
[ http://www.fas.org/irp/commission/budget.htm ]. A decade ago, the CIA had a budget of $3.1 billion, NSA budget $3.6 billion. Do you have a source
to support a much larger NSA budget? |
The CIA gets a lot of money for "off-budget" activities, i.e. "black" projects, by drug-running heroin and cocaine by air (to secured USAF airfields)
and submarine from countries like Colombia, Panama, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan (and formerly Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and
Iran, before the changes of régime there to less compliant left-leaning ones). With the acquiescence of the FBI, the stuff is secretly sold to
wholesalers in the form of the Mafia crime syndicates, and finds its way onto the streets of U.S. cities - only these final retailers ever get caught
by local cops. This way, the illicit funding escapes the attention of the auditors of the GAO, because it is not taxpayer's money, and there is no way
of telling anywhere near how much money the CIA makes from drugs.
Noriega of Panama was one of the CIA-sponsored dictators whose cooperation for drug-smuggling the CIA got as part of their price for putting him in
power, but he had to be removed by the U.S. military and framed for alleged drug-smuggling himself when he wanted to throw off the U.S. "yoke" and go
his own independent way. Cooperation in secret CIA drug-smuggling was probably a major part of the price that the Latin American Fascist dictators
like Pinochet, Somoza, Trujillo, Fujimori, Battista, etc. agreed to, in order to have the CIA finance and organize the overthrow of their mostly
democratically-elected predecessors. The so-called "war/whore on drugs" is a total sham, to cover this up, and to eliminate non-CIA rival smugglers.
There have been several incidents in which CIA pilots have been caught in possession of tonnes of the stuff in CIA-registered planes, which made
unscheduled forced landings on civilian airfields (particularly in México) due to mechanical faults. Naturally, the CIA denied all knowledge of the
flights.
About the other point: that the "majority of the world's mathematicians, computer programmers, and cryptographers live outside of the US and the UK"
shows how "dumbed-down" the education systems are becoming there, especially in the USA. This is due to massive tax cuts for the rich (in return for
campaign financing) and "user-pays" (meaning that higher education is increasingly the privilege of "silver-spooners"). But, in view of the
imperiousness and paranoia of the NSA, and its use for party political purposes by the Bu$h régime (Bu$h recently reckoned that he has the right to
read other citizen's mail, for any reason he chooses and without any judicial oversight), this is perhaps just as well.
[Edited on 5-1-2007 by JohnWW]
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Polverone
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| Quote: | Originally posted by JohnWW
About the other point: that the "majority of the world's mathematicians, computer programmers, and cryptographers live outside of the US and the UK"
shows how "dumbed-down" the education systems are becoming there, especially in the USA. This is due to massive tax cuts for the rich (in return for
campaign financing) and "user-pays" (meaning that higher education is increasingly the privilege of "silver-spooners").
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No, the reason is population, not funding. The USA/UK have less than 6% of the world's people living in them.
To the extent that is happening, the "dumbing down" of higher education is correlated with increasing access to it, not
decreasing. Both in absolute terms and percentagewise, the number of Americans attending higher education has increased for decades.
The US has a fine (if expensive) system of higher education. It has an excellent and well-funded system for people seeking advanced degrees, at least
in science/math/engineering. I finished my master's at a state school just a year ago, and it cost me nothing. In fact I had a few thousand dollars
saved up from my research assistant stipend by the time I graduated.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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Sauron
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What you are spouting, @JohnWW, is a popular myth promoted by Hollywood. The fact is: the only documented evidence of intelligence involvement in
cocaine smuggling was when the DEA turned a Pablo Escobar pilot (veteran of 50 flights before he was caught) names Bobby Seal from Baton Rouge, La.
and rigged his plane with cameras. Seal filmed Cuban DGI agents loading cocaine -- not CIA, Cuban communist spies -- and brought the film back to the
US government. For his efforts Bobby Seal was murdered by hitmen from the Medellin cartel. That cartel was organized with the advice of fugitive
financier Robert Vesco, and his accountant Norman Augustine, who were then residing in Costa Rica. Where's Vesco today? Why, he's in CUBA my friend.
In Afghanistan we are fighting and NATO is fighting to destroy the Taliban and their AQ allies who are the ones who control the South Asian heroin
trade, not the CIA. The South East Asian heroin trade is controlled by the communist government of Laos and the anti-American dictatorship in Myanmar
(Burma).
I live next door to both those countries. So who do you think you are kidding?
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JohnWW
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Except for the population-related matter pointed out by Polverone, I stand by what I wrote above, concerning the CIA, Sauron. The FBI and DEA "turn a
blind eye" to illegal CIA activities, except where the CIA wants "rogue" agents, and agents of rivals such as the Cuban Secret Cops (the DGI) who
threaten to "spill the beans" neutralized, to protect their lucrative source of secret income. As regards the drug-smuggling into the USA, what you
said merely shows that the Cuban Secret Police (who must also have connections among Mafia crime syndicates, to sell to) is trying to "muscle in on
the action", and get a "cut" of the money (desperately needed foreign currency) by allowing Cuba to be used as a trans-shipment area for the Colombian
Medellin Cartel's cocaine. Regardless of political creed, money sure talks.
What you have overlooked is that very large rural areas of Afghanistan, Laos (and Thailand and Cambodia), and Burma (Myanmar), are completely out of
the control of either NATO troops and the Afghan Government (Karzai is effectively just the Mayor of Kabul), the Taliban/AlQaeda, the Laotian and
Cambodian and Thai governments, and the military dictatorship in Burma, due to the weakness of their governments and local insurrections. The CIA
therefore can (and does) do "deals" with local war-lords and tribal chiefs for the purchase of their locally-grown raw opium and/or heroin, which are
flown out in secret flights. During the Vietnam War/Whore, with a compliant South Vietnamese Government, the CIA had it even easier, especially due to
Vietnam's long coastline, and many stories have come to light about how the CIA smuggled heroin out of South Vietnam in coffins or body-bags, even
inside the pre-embalmed bodies of slain U.S. soldiers.
If you still subscribe to the hoary old myth that Uncle Sam does not tell lies to U.S. citizens or the rest of the world, or does not withhold
politically sensitive information that would have U.S. citizens calling for the blood of Bu$h and indeed for the blood of the entire U.S. Government's
military-industrial-intelligence-scientific establishment, you are sadly mistaken. Whistle-blowers who are coming forward in increasing numbers, about
9/11 and the illegal activities of the CIA and NSA and other conspiracies, must militate otherwise.
[Edited on 6-1-2007 by JohnWW]
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Sauron
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Why are you spewing tired, phony old anti-American propaganda on a CHEMISTRY forum?
The same old lies have been in circulation since the sixties. They weren't true then and they aren't true now. Get real.
I suggest you get back to talking about chemistry. You were better at it.
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JohnWW
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Sauron
Why are you spewing tired, phony old anti-American propaganda on a CHEMISTRY forum? The same old lies have been in circulation since the sixties. They
weren't true then and they aren't true now. Get real. I suggest you get back to talking about chemistry. You were better at it.
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This is relevant to chemistry, as to how a large part of the heroin and cocaine eventually sold on the streets gets into the USA, essentially
unhindered. The CIA probably have their own opium-refining labs. I pity you, Sauron - you are clearly a victim of U.S. Government "official"
propaganda, much of the both style and substance of which has been plagiarized from Goebbels. There is now simply too much corroboration from many
sources for what I wrote above not to be true. Were you even alive in the 1960s, like me?
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MargaretThatcher
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The international drug trade is just too large for state agencies not to be complicit in some way or other. If Ronnie is going to do stuff like sell
arms to Iran to fund the Contras, then what sort of shenanigans the CIA gets up to with narcotics is anyone's guess.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses. - Bertrand Russell
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Polverone
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| Quote: | Originally posted by JohnWW
This is relevant to chemistry, as to how a large part of the heroin and cocaine eventually sold on the streets gets into the USA, essentially
unhindered. The CIA probably have their own opium-refining labs. I pity you, Sauron - you are clearly a victim of U.S. Government "official"
propaganda, much of the both style and substance of which has been plagiarized from Goebbels. There is now simply too much corroboration from many
sources for what I wrote above not to be true. Were you even alive in the 1960s, like me? |
What are your sources? There are many historians and other academics who have written about dirty dealings of the US government, so
if there's substance to your accusations, I'd expect to see some credible (scholarly) writing about them.
I have little love for many aspects of my government, but I also expect to see proof before leaping to conclusions about (say) the NSA's
anti-encryption magic, the CIA's opium labs, or NASA's hidden Martian bases. There have been some apparently credible accusations that drug-smuggling
criminals who worked with the CIA were deliberately shielded from prosecution. You take that substantiated kernel and build a huge, unsubstantiated
edifice around it.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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Sauron
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There are some real fruitcakes in the academic world and always have been. I recommend the book "Academia Nuts" which is simply hilarious.
As to historians, there are historians (like the late Dr Stepheh Ambrose,, one of my teachers) and then there are the soi-dissant "historians"who are
an embarassment. Like the ones who sued Dan Brown, or the Brit who just got out of jail in Austria for Holocaust denial. How about Robert Anton
Wilson, the "historian" of the Illuminati (more myth). Or Erich van Daniken. The media calls them historians. They are hackneyed polemicists.
I suspect the "historian" that lies behind JohnWW's puffery is Alfred McCoy, author of "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia"/
That book made about a big splash in the late 60s/early 70s but, it has long since been discredited as a tissue of lies, half truths and distortions.
As a professional and very senior journalist in South East Asia specializing in politico-military affairs for the last 20 years, this is something I
know about. It's my job to know about it. Chemistry is my hobby. Journalism is my occupation, offivially. NowI am semi-retired.
The following well worn little green book is my Thai government ID card issued by the Foreign Press division of the Public Relations Dept, office of
the Prime Minister. Since 1990. The title inside is Bureau Chief.
Edit: Sauron, I removed your attachment and replaced it with this smaller image because the old one was huge. Please don't attach large images; they
are set to display inline automatically and will stretch the page so it becomes hard to read.
[Edited on 1-6-2007 by Polverone]
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JohnWW
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What I have seen, in support of what I wrote are various news items over about the last 35 years, in which various whistle-blowers have dared to speak
up about the ways in which the CIA runs drugs for extra money, finances and organizes right-wing coups to overthrow left-leaning
democratically-elected governments, finances and disseminates right-wing propaganda e.g. the so-called Voice Of America radio in eastern Europe, runs
and teaches how to run torture ("interrogation") chambers, etc.. Some of the whistle-blowers were killed for their trouble, including and especially
journalists. One such journalist was Danny Casolaro a few years ago, murdered in an hotel room in West Virginia in circumstances strongly implying the
CIA was behind it, because only the CIA had the motive to want him dead to stop him from talking. These incidents have culminated in a number of
well-researched magazine articles in recent years - nearly all published outside the USA, of necessity, because the mainstream media and publishers
there are all "in the pockets of" the CIA and the ruling plutocracy - linking them together. I will look through my archives and copy some of these
articles for you.
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Sauron
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Don't bother. What you are talking about are misc gangsters and drug dealers playing the tired old "CIA defense" in court. It doesn't work and never
has.
A few left wing radical publications like the Socialist Workers Party (trotskyite) newspaper like to keep these urban myths alive. No one else even
cares.
Or traitors like Philip Agee turned by the DGI and now running a travel agency in Havana. One of these days Phil will get a fatal does of lead
poisoning. Two in the medulla oblongata. Adios, puto!
Give it a rest, this is BORING.
And off topic.
Talk about chemistry. Not old wives tales. Not recycled old clippings from dubious perioducals.
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Organikum
resurrected
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You sound like Polythene Sam on medication.
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Sauron
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Don't know the gentleman and the only meds I am on are for diabetes and hypertension.
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FANTOMAS
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Can I post Here a pic of my "member"?
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Magpie
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I smell carrion. Where's vulture?
[Edited on 25-1-2007 by Magpie]
The single most important condition for a successful synthesis is good mixing - Nicodem
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Beatnik
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I know this subject is relatively dead but having just re-read a large chunk of the thread i wanted to chime in.
I miss the hive. I miss the people. I miss the atmosphere. However, with it gone i did gain a life aswell and learnt some real chem. While there was
some great stuff on there the discussion was mostly crap. A lot of people talking out of their arses, wasting their time. Lots of people since then
have sat down with an art pad, their organic chem texts, scifinder, and their uni library and made more progress then some of the people learning by
rote there.
THIS is the new hive. It grew up, cut its hair, got a job, put down the pipe and got responsibilies then moved out into the real world. Still has an
appreciation for the ghetto procedures, better sources of information.... you guys just dont know it. Rhodium will hang around as a usefull source of
info for newbs (like me), a unique historical site. But it will be replaced when you guys get that damned text book on amateur chem of the fucking
ground.
The hive was a gathering ground, now that the wheat has been seperated from the chaff.... world domination?
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mono
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probably posted before but just to complete this topic, a link to the hive backup:
http://www.telegenetic.net/hiveboard/
Liberty
1a. The condition of being free from restriction or control.
b. The right and power to act, believe, or express oneself in a manner of one\'s own choosing.
c. The condition of being physically and legally free from confinement, servitude, or forced labor.
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gambler
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Above link does not work..
I have my hive backup backed up safely 
I believe synthetikal.org still has a link to what was recaptured of the message board
Peace
tat tvam asi
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