| Vol. VIII, No. 9 | Editor: Robert Giedt | November 1998 |
Harry Browne, the 1996 Libertarian candidate for President of the United States and hopeful candidate for the year 2000, will visit the San Mateo Region on Friday, November 20. All interested Libertarians are welcome to come and meet him at the Clarion Hotel in Millbrae(near the San Francisco Airport) from 79:30pm. Harry's campaign will be hosting light hors d'oeuvres and there will be a cash bar.
Harry Browne made history in 1996 when he became the first presidential candidate in American history to turn down matching federal funds that he had qualified for. In this way, Harry put principle ahead of politics, showing that his campaign will not put its own interests ahead of the interests of the American people.
Harry Browne is a gifted speaker, a noted author, and is the leading force in the Libertarian Party today. Please join us in welcoming him to our region. We hope that those Libertarians from the San Francisco Region who are interested will also join us.
This is a fundraising event for Harry's campaign, so be prepared to listen to appeals for your financial support. Many are moved to help Harry at such events, so bringing your checkbook for such an eventuality might be wise!
We are honored to have Harry visit us and as Region Chair, I hope as you will join me in attending the event at the Clarion. If you need directions to the Clarion Hotel, please call 650/692-6363.
Well, I finally attended a political rally. I haven't done that sort of thing before, but I decided to go the extra mile as Mike Moloney's sidekick. It was fun, exciting, and eye-opening.
Mike and I were among 200 to 300 people who traveled Friday, September 25 to the San Francisco Hilton, a monument to poshness just across the street from the squalid Tenderloin district. Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak that evening at a fundraiser for Barbara Boxer, and KSFO talk show host Melanie Morgan had seized the opportunity to summon listeners for a display of disapproval.
We arrived around 4pm and were among the first handful of people to show up. We watched with wry amusement as personnel in bright yellow jackets booted panhandlers off the block in preparation for the event. I guess when you're a compassionate left-winger, you can't let pathetic needy losers get in the way of helping the needy. Eventually, protesters carrying signs with such sayings as "Resign, pervert" gathered near the rear entrance to the parking garage, some wearing "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Member" sweatshirts. We were ideally poised to annoy the First Lady, if her luxurious limousine chose the rear entrance. Reverse psychology, of course, dictated that she would stay away from the front entrance, or at least that's how I interpreted it.
Somewhat before 5pm, when Hillary was to arrive, the San Francisco police politely moved us away from our spot, across the street and into the corner. They told us the Secret Service had ordered the rear entrance "shut down." We stood in the boonies behind some barricades, knowing that Hillary would never see us but not caring much. After all, someone was beating a drum, and there was chanting to be done. Our relocation turned out to be moot, anyway, because the feds used reverse-reverse psychology, sending Hillary in the front way. And, of course, the measly fewer-than-20 supporters with their "We love you Hillary" signs had been stationed front and center.
By 6pm, we had discovered that the cops would let us go just about anywhere if we kept moving, so we marched around the block. The bystanders were more enthusiastic than I had expected for San Francisco, giving us quite a few thumbs-up signs and shouting approval. We stopped our marching by settling next to the pro-Hillary people and drowning them out. Mike displayed his "Moloney for Congress" sign to great advantage throughout, and we left the scene at 6:30.
I arrived home tired, but satisfied and entertained. I would do it again.
Do you care about privacy? Do you own a computer? The Libertarians for Privacy RC5-64 Team is in a heated race, and you can help! Using special software, you can donate your unused CPU cycles to a distributed computing project which seeks to demonstrate the relative vulnerability of encryption keys that the government maintains are "good enough."
Your computerized records, e-mail, and hard disk are all vulnerable to snooping (by your competitors, your ex-spouse, your employer, and governments foreign and domestic) in ways that were never possible with paper records. You can't "throw away" e-mail, for example. Copies of a given message may exist for decades in places you may not suspect--e.g., in disused sectors of your hard disk or on the backup tapes of your Internet service provider. (Monica Lewinsky's old email was uncovered the former way.) The only good means of achieving even minimal privacy is to encrypt (scramble) your data.
One aspect of the security of encryption is the size of a "key" in bits--similar to the number of cylinders in a door lock. For example, there are over a million different keys with a length of 20 bits. Sound secure? My year-old Power Mac can try all of them in 1.7 seconds. In half an hour it can test over a billion keys (i.e., all the 30 bit keys). In three weeks it could test all the 40 bit keys--the largest size the federal governments permits use of in software for export, and the most common size used for "secure" connections on the Web.
RSA Labs, a world leader in encryption technology and products (located in Redwood City), regularly holds public challenges: They post messages on their Web site encrypted with different products and key sizes, offering a $10,000 prize to the first person who cracks a given message. They offer products which use 40, 56, and 64 bits (the maximum sizes allowed by various laws or pending legislation) and products which use hundreds or thousands of bits (which the FBI and others with the "Big Brother" mind set seek to outlaw). The challenges seek to illustrate the mathematical strength of various algorithms and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different key sizes.
One of the groups working to crack the RSA Labs' RC5-64 challenge is Distributed.net. Their goal is to demonstrate the mind-boggling computational power that is latent in all the computers that are idle at any given time and to illustrate the flaw in the notion that a message is secure if it would take one computer 1,000 years to try all the keys. They distribute the free "Bovine RC5" software that allows thousands of computers to work on different parts of the same challenge.
To date, Distributed.net has won two of the challenges--cracking messages encrypted with 56 bit keys using two different algorithms (DES-II and RC5). (To show how fast technology moves, RSA Labs issued a second DES-II challenge six months later and it took all of 4 days instead of 4 months to crack. The Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco won that one with a quarter-million dollar computer. Cf. The FBI was allocated $50 million for digital snooping in the Telecommunications Reform Act.)
To motivate the tens of thousands ofvolunteers, Distributed.net encourages the forming of teams. The counts of keys tested by team members are summed and reported daily. Some teams have a political agenda to promote; others a particular computing platform (silly, since Distributed.net collects that info automatically). One even promotes American understanding of Japanese candy!
Team 1661 is Libertarians for Privacy. We now have 568 members, but we always want more As we move up in the rankings, more contest participants visit our Web site to find out who we are. Here's the history:
To learn how to participate in the program, visit the Libertarians for Privacy Web site. Keys are counted by associating them with an e-mail address, which, in turn, is associated with a team. You can use your own address, or, if you prefer anonymity, use LPSM@California.com (but let me know if you want progress reports).
Get that idle computer to work!
Steve Marsland opened the meeting by announcing that he has 175 campaign signs and asked for volunteers to display them. If you live in the 19th Assembly District (San Mateo County, north of Redwood City) and have interest in displaying a Marsland sign, please call Steve at 650/738-5926. Get an early start on the Marsland 2000 campaign!
Next, we discussed finding a new place for our monthly business meetings. Our agreement to use the current room at Prime Time athletic club runs out at the end of 1998. Barbara Less has been phoning libraries and other public buildings but reported no luck so far. (We do have a right to one monthly meeting in a public building, but we would have to pay extra security costs.) We agreed that restaurants with a separate meeting room are a good option (such as RoundTable Pizza). Barbara will call Round Table Pizzas in Burlingame and explore options at the College of San Mateo.
Mike Moloney suggested that we formulate a plan to start our 2000 campaigns as quickly as possible after the November 1998 elections. Steve Marsland agreed and explained his ideas for orchestrating our region's candidates and building momentum. Steve had identified volunteers to host meet-the-candidate "coffees" and one was scheduled to occur a few days after the meeting. He hopes he and Mike and any other regional candidates can make joint appearances at such coffees next year. Joint appearances would make the event a party function, allowing us to conduct party fund-raising and use those funds for mailings to promote the party and the coffees. Steve hopes to speak in every precinct before the 2000 election by visiting three precincts per week.
We then evaluated our recent social events. The turnout has generally been disappointing, and we considered several ideas to attract more people: avoid Sunday afternoons, team up with neighboring LP regions, invite topical speakers, hold round table issue discussions. We settled on round table issue discussions, possibly inviting members of the San Francisco party. As Barbara Less is looking for new meeting room options, she will also look for a place to hold these events.
Robert Giedt reported on the East Bay Libertarians' barbecue at Garin Park which took place October 10. The statewide candidates gave good speeches--particularly Steve Kubby and Joe Farina.
Wednesday, November 18
Prime Time Athletic Club
1730 Rollins Road, Burlingame (between Broadway and Millbrae Avenue)
Informal
chat/dinner: 6:30--7:30pm in the café
Business meeting: 7:30--9:00pm in the multipurpose room.
| Election results and commentary will be covered in the December newsletter. |