Possible EU Embargo on Pentium III

A reader writes "The brand new and yet unreleased STOA report (European Union Technical Committee) recommends an inquiry of the possible roles of the NSA ^[?] and the FBI ^[?] in the creation of Pentium III serial number. Possible consequences could be an European Union ^[?] -wide embargo against Pentium III-powered equipment. Read the scoop here. The article is in German, use our beloved BabelFish. " Just a note: this potential embargo not in place - it's just a possibility. But given recent Echelon fears, this is interesting news.

Comments

This is fascinating!

[jd]

The Germans are a powerful group, in the EU, and they probably don't like that discussion of Echelon has been squished.

The P3 serial number clearly violates European Law on privacy. Never mind the "free trade" argument someone else gave, if someone breaks the law, they don't deserve absolute freedom of trade.

Also, the P3 serial number disabling software doesn't always work, from what I've heard. And who's to say that Intel don't have some kind of "back door", which would let the NSA or FBI get the serial number anyway? Back doors are easy!

No, this calls for a total ban, though the British will probably take it to the European Courts to try and get any ban overturned. (After all, the British are involved in the SIGINT project, and any loss of intelligence, which could be profitable to them, would not be good.)

The Germans, though, are a force to be reckoned with. They have the most influential bank, one of the strongest economies, and most of the top indstries, without which Europe would not survive. And most of those will be people all too happy to deprive US competitors of vital intelligence, such as contracts under negotiation, trade secrets, confidential reports, etc.

I think it's great if Europe can collectively stand up and tell Intel where to stick the P3, and the US intelligence community what it can do with it's unlawful spy network.

It isn't the numbers, it is the REASON they exist

[FreeUser]

If the NSA/Intel connection does in fact exist, or their is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that it does, then the European Union is only acting to protect their own (inter)national security and economic interests in banning the product. Their concern isn't necessarilly that the numbers exist, but the reason they were put there. Remember, they have already had industrial secrets stolen from their companies and given to their US competitors by the NSA, costing them real money and real jobs. With no sign that the NSA is at all repentant about what they've done, but rather that to all appearances they are pushing forward with even more intrusive and draconian approaches to gathering information, their concern is entirely warrented and their reaction very reasonable, even (one might argue) quite muted.

Why would Intel serailize the CPU, with all these other "unique numbers on hardware" already present in every computer sold? Why on earth create yet another number for no (apparent) reason? The answer is obvious: serializing the CPU makes not just the computer, but the work that has ever been done on it, easilly traceable in ways MMAC addresses and HD serial numbers cannot. A word document written five years in the past can, on a serialized PII/PIII, be traced to a particular computer. It was this misfeature that led to the identification and arrest of the author of Melissa Virus. While I'm glad he was arrested, I must confess I am much more concerned about my own loss of privacy than I am in offsetting the terrible threat the Melissa idiot ever posed to me.

An MMAC address, BIOS or HD serial number, is at most only traceable while the machine is on-line. They do not get embedded into the aforementioned word document the way the intel CPU serialization did. This demonstrates that the "big brother" ramifications of CPU serialization are quite different (and apparently more significant) than those associated with unique MMAC or IP addresses, or BIOS serial numbers. And who is to say future generations of PIII hardware will even allow the OS to disable their serialization functions?

The Europeans are rightly concerned with respect to their privacy and attempts by our secret organizations to subvert it. They are also very lucky, in that, unlike us, they have governments which actively work to protect their rights and liberties.