Reply-To: Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain From: cocot@osc.versant.com (Doctor COCOT) To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (SURFPUNK Technical Journal) Subject: [surfpunk-0002] CRYPT: John Gilmore sues the NSA Keywords: surfpunk, Military Cryptanalysis, cryptography, NSA, FOIA John Gilmore was the first software engineer at Sun Microsystems. Or that's what I was once told. This is in response to a question on the "pem-dev@TIS.COM" mailing list, a list about privacy-enhanced mail standards, which is supporting RSA public key encryption. Those who claim to hold patents on the art of public key encryption now allow free lisences for any academic, personal, or noncommercial use of RSA. I'm thinking of using it in the SURFPUNK project at some point, as we move into cyberspace. -- Dr Cocot ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ From: gnu@toad.com Subject: Re: John Gilmore vs. NSA Date: Sat, 28 Nov 92 23:23:24 -0800 To: shirey@mitre.org Cc: pem-dev@TIS.COM, saag@TIS.COM, gnu@toad.com Sender: pem-dev-relay@TIS.COM In-Reply-To: <9211271355.AA29657@smiley.mitre.org.sit> Message-Id: <9211290723.AA13480@toad.com> I'm still on PEM-DEV, just pretty busy and backed-up on email. The FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) case that the newspapers have been reporting revolves around three documents authored or co-authored by William F. Friedman. Two have been declassified, probably because we found copies of them in public libraries. They are: Military Cryptanalysis, Volume 3 Military Cryptanalysis, Volume 4 The third remains classified at this time, but NSA has said that they will do a line-by-line classification review of it, because parts of it are known (and admitted by NSA) to duplicate existing declassified material: Military Cryptanalytics, Volume 3 Lambros D. Callimahos and William F. Friedman We are looking for a copy of this document (or any other cryptography document that was lawfully obtained and which the government will not release to the public). If you know of someone who might have a copy of this document, please forward this message to them. Don't tell me or my lawyer (Lee Tien, tien@toad.com) about it -- let the document holder do that. I suspect that there are copies in existence, but probably most of them were not obtained lawfully. If their existence was made known to us, NSA might demand this information in court and we might be compelled to provide it. This would then allow the NSA and Justice Department to contact the holders and demand that the copies be returned, with a 10-year "espionage" sentence as club. So, please contact us if you have a copy that was *lawfully* obtained, otherwise we'll muddle on through without putting you in jeopardy. By lawful I mean that you got a copy without violating any law. If you secretly copied it when you worked for the Army, you don't qualify. If you saw it in a library and copied it, you qualify. If your Dad left it to you when he died, you qualify if *he* got it lawfully. If the Army explicitly let you keep a copy when you left, without putting any constraints on what you did with it, you qualify. But be prepared to prove it. Even if we can't find public copies of this third document, we are looking for expert witnesses in cryptography *and* national security. Traditionally NSA provides its own "experts" who tell tales of woe about how the sky will fall if the documents are released. They were well along in that process when they declassified the first two, giving them a somewhat egg-faced demeanor. If you have a SECRET clearance and the right experience to convince a judge that you can evaluate the damage to the US national security that would be caused by releasing portions of this cryptography textbook, please get in touch. Two issues that arose in the FOIA case remain unresolved. The first is whether NSA has a pattern and practice of violating the Freedom of Information Act by not responding to requesters within the time limits specified in the law. If I file my taxes one day late, I get penalized. But if the law says NSA has 10 days to respond, and they take 10 months, they shrug it off and say "so sue us". I'm doing just that. The second issue is whether the espionage laws, which make it a Federal crime to distribute a classified document, are unconstitutional on their face, because they limit citizens' freedom of the press. If the laws had been written to only apply to government employees, or to people who obtained documents unlawfully, they might have a leg to stand on. But the Supreme Court has long held that limitations on the right to publish must satisfy very tight constraints -- and this law is very vague and all-encompassing. It certainly appeared to encompass me, who got the docs from a library, and I did not redistribute them for fear of prosecution. Creating such fear has been held a violation of the First Amendment in several cases. My suspicion is that NSA declassified the documents *so that* it would be harder for us to press this issue. (Courts like to decide the smallest set of issues they can get away with; if the espionage law is now "moot" in our case, they may claim that the court should ignore the potentially unconstitutional law because they backed off. But that would leave them free to unconstitutionally threaten the next victim.) We'll see what the judge thinks. John Gilmore gnu@toad.com +1 415 903 1418 voicemail _______________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ The SURFPUNK Technical Journal is a dangerous multinational hacker zine originating near BARRNET in the fashionable western arm of the northern California matrix. Quantum Californians appear in one of two states, spin surf or spin punk. Undetected, we are both, or might be neither. ________________________________________________________________________ Send postings to , subscription requests to . MIME encouraged. Xanalogical archive access soon. Confusion to our enemies. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________