Letters: all kinds of letters

Dear 2600: When will it almost be impossible to use Long Distance Services?  It is so easy to Phreak off them and they never catch the majority of us, but when will it stop?       Puzzled Only when the world is a burnt out cinder will it stop completely.  As technology changes, so do phone phreaks.  Blue Boxes used to be the only way a phreak made free phone calls.  Now there are extenders and alternate carriers.  We don't think extenders are going to die out anytime soon.  Alternate carriers (Sprint, MCI, etc.) will get harder to abuse as Equal Access moves in, but there will always be away.  We love to hear about new methods.

Dear 2600: Pursuant to a telephone discussion with Reginald Dunn, head of the criminal division of the Los Angeles City Attorney's office, I was informed that the prosecution believes it has insufficient evidence to continue the prosecution of Tom Tcimpidis, sysop of MOG-UR.  This determination was made after I requested a review of the case on 1/11/85 after the departure of City Attorney Ira Reiner to become D.A. and while the City Attorney's office is being run by the civil service staff pending election of a new city attorney.  Mr. Dunn has given me his word that the people will seek dismissal of the charges against Tom under California Penal Code Section 1385, i.e., 'Dismissal in the interests of justice.'  Under California law, such a dismissal is 'with prejudice' and the people can not refile the case subsequently.  To put it succinctly, a dismissal will terminate the prosecution permanently. As [many of you] know, the City Attorney's office has previously reneged on representations made to me regarding dismissal of the charges.  I wish to assure everyone that I have known Mr. Dunn for 10 years, and I trust his word completely.  If he says the case will be dismissed, I am satisfied that such an action will occur. We win.  Win...win...win...win...win.  My thanks to everyone who contributed to supporting Tom and me in the defense of this matter.  I consider this to be a major victory for the rights of free speech over the 'big brother' machinations of the phone company. I would be grateful if you would download this message and place it on other systems throughout the country.  This is a very big victory, and the BBS and modem communities should know about it. Again thanks for the support. Chuck Lindner, attorney for sysop Tom Tcimpidis. 02/07/85: The case of People vs. Tcimpidis - a.k.a. use a modem, go to jail - was dismissed in the `interests of justice' this morning, 2/7/85.  As noted earlier, this dismissal is with prejudice, and Tom is now free of the PacTel scourge.  Another small step for something resembling justice.       Chuck Thrilled we are for Tom, but charges dropped means laws remain.  In this case Tom got away with what he did or the law just realized that there was just not enough evidence to prove anything.  But California still has horrible tough laws that do not permit printing magazines like 2600!  You cannot even disclose a phone number or a password format let alone a whole password there.  We are glad he got his machine back, which is always a pleasant surprise.  We encourage our readers to spread this news wherever they go as it is a very important development.  (For those who don't know, Tom Tcimpidis was the sysop of a computer bulletin board that someone posted a credit card number on.  The phone company decided to press charges against him even though he claims never to have seen the number in question.  They took his computer and got him a lot of national attention.)

Dear 2600: Have you been reading about those new high tech secure telephones?  I've been thinking about what must be inside them.  The closest thing I've heard to that kind of technology would be DVP - Digital Voice Processing.  It's like digital audio processing, but after the voice is turned into bits, dsfdsfkskfgsjkfggreegfds, they scramble them up and then send them off.  The other side then decrypts the bits and transforms the decrypted signal back into voice.  The stuff I've read (in Popular Communications, around a year ago) said that a lot of law enforcement agencies use it to scramble their radio transmissions.  (I believe the ones mentioned were the DEA and the Treasury police, maybe the Secret Service, but not, interestingly enough, the FBI).  The only problem is that it didn't work too well - many people reported hearing the agents switching the DVP off and transmitting a normal, unscrambled signal because they couldn't get it working right.  However, over a land line it would probably work a lot better.  And the nice thing about DVP is that it really is secure, as long as no one knows your scrambling algorithm - however, I imagine the Russians already have the plans for one of those phones, given that very few military secrets ever remain secrets for long.  Besides, if the government orders several thousand of them, it stands to reason that at least one would end up in the wrong hands. Anyway, I'm not sure that knowing the innards of those phones would help you unscramble the traffic, since that might only cut down the number of possibilities to a few billion instead of a few quadrillion.  The whole point of encoding something is so that your enemy does not unscramble it while the information is still useful to either of you. I've often thought about how to do something like that with our little micros.  Two people talking on the phone via a scrambled modem link have a remarkably secure connection, provided they are using the right software for mixing up the bits.  I seem to remember that ESSes these days are configured to automatically detect any kind of scrambling going on, and alert security folks whenever a scrambled conversation is noticed.  The rationale is that someone scrambling a conversation has something to hide, and the big government boys are interested in people who have things to hide. However, the aforementioned pair on the phone would not be noticed by an ESS, since all they would be doing is setting up a normal modem conversation, and if they didn't mind slow communication they could be even more secure with an encryption scheme that sent two or three lines of "noise" for every character of genuine information being transferred.  The noise could look very innocuous, say the transactions on a "legal" bulletin board, and thus not even appear to be hiding anything. By the way, those are the best possible secret codes, the kind that do not appear to be anything out of the ordinary and thus are not even thought to be codes at all!  Another possibility is to send information in the form of the time delays between each character transmitted.  That means that someone "listening in" on a digital conversation by having the data printed out would miss out on the entire message, since his printer would only record the characters sent, which in this instance are utterly unimportant. By the way, monitoring of a computer conversation may not be considered wiretapping since the statutes concerned can be narrowly interpreted to cover only audio taping of a conversation, not digital eavesdropping.       Informed as Hell Many parts of The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford go into detail about the forms of cryptography used today by the National Security Agency, which incidentally has expressed a strong interest in subscribing to us.  We hope they will contribute many fine articles.

Dear 2600: Does 2400 baud work on standard Bell lines? Yes, 2400 baud is actually 4 bits at a time at 600 baud, and Bell lines can handle that.

Dear 2600: If I want to go trashing, am I forced to just attack my Central Office? There are lots of good places to trash besides phone companies.  Look in the phone book under software companies, phone equipment, computer equipment, electronic equipment, or look at RadioShack, or GTE, MCI, or your local cable company.  You will find loads of things, like free telephones, floppies, etc.