From: clipper@csrc.ncsl.nist.gov (Clipper Chip Announcement)
Subject: Re: The [secret] source of that announcement
Organization: National Institute of Standards & Technology
Lines: 65

In article <C5uxGv.Dv7@panix.com> habs@panix.com (Harry Shapiro) writes:
>In <1r1om5$c5m@slab.mtholyoke.edu> jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz)
>writes:
>
>>Even more interesting: the SMTP server at csrc.ncsl.nist.gov no longer
>>recognizes the 'expn' and 'vrfy' commands...
>
>>   telnet csrc.ncsl.nist.gov smtp
>>   Trying 129.6.54.11...
>>   Connected to csrc.ncsl.nist.gov.
>>   Escape character is '^]'.
>>   220 first.org sendmail 4.1/NIST ready at Tue, 20 Apr 93 17:01:34 EDT
>>   expn clipper
>>   500 Command unrecognized
>
>>Seems like sombody didn't like your snooping around, Marc.
>
>Then it is a good thing we already have this:
>
>The csspub mailing list: csspab@mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov, and address on
> [rest of names deleted]

Sigh... my version of 'rn' asked me whether I really want to send this
posting!

You may as well know that all this stuff about the secret source of the
Clipper announcement is because of a silly mistake.  I am the administrator
of csrc.ncsl.nist.gov, alias first.org.  It's a system set up to help out
the needs of FIRST, a Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, which 
includes a number of world-wide incident response teams such as CERT/CC and
other places in Europe.  As to the VRFY and EXPN commands, they are normally
disabled, since early on we didn't want crackers to find out the names of
incident response folks on our mailing lists.  We had a disk crash several
months ago which required completely rebuilding the O/S files - same old
story, our backups weren't especially helpful.  As you can guess, I didn't
remember to re-disable VRFY and EXPN until I saw people on the net trying to
find out who was behind clipper@csrc...  When I saw people's names posted
here, I felt it was time to clear things up.  So, EXPN and VRFY on csrc have
always been disabled in the past for reasons having nothing to do with 
Clipper.

I posted the White House announcements at the request of policy folks here
because csrc also provides Usenet service.  I posted them from an account
called 'clipper.'  I also created an alias called 'clipper' that contains
the addresses of members of the NIST Computer Security Privacy and Advisory
Board, set up under law of the Computer Security Act of 1987, and addresses
of other individuals not affiliated with NIST but involved in cryptography,
security, and privacy - I believe that these individuals were included on
this list because NIST felt it important to get them the Clipper information
first-hand.

The 'clipper' alias is there for the benefit of those named above.  It is 
not a source for information, it was set up solely to monitor any initial
traffic.  Individuals on the list have requested that they continue to get
traffic that is not already duplicated on Usenet.

While you can rightfully say we were a bit disorganized in handling this,
I would ask that people stop speculating about any hidden agendas or motives
of the individuals on the 'clipper' alias - I've already apologized to them
for what's happened.  Disabling EXPN and VRFY is an increasingly common
practice (albeit unfriendly to some), and any effect of disabling it again
was unintentional.

-John Wack
  
