-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Spy Toys NSA Declares Furbys a Security Threat However, they fall apart under interrogation Move over, Aldrich Ames. The National Security Agency has targeted a new national security threat capable of blabbing secrets to U.S. adversaries: the Furby. As harried parents scrambled in the weeks before Christmas to get their hands on these homely, high-tech cyberpets that supposedly repeat what they hear, the supersecret spy agency put out a "Furby Alert" on its internal intranet in early December and banned the Furby from Fort Meade. "Personally owned photographic, video and audio recording equipment are prohibited items. This includes toys, such as 'Furbys,' with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound to mimic the original signal," the Furby Alert warned NSA workers. "We are prohibited from introducing these items into NSA spaces. Those who have should contact their Staff Security Officer for guidance." What the punishment is for having a Furby on your desk at Fort Meade – or how many Furbys actually are infesting NSA – could not be immediately discerned. But with all transgressors under orders to turn themselves in, former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker speculated that "getting them [the Furbys] out is going to be almost harder than getting them in." "You'd have to take them to the basement," Baker deadpanned, "and sweat them a lot." Equipped with computer chips and the same kind of infrared transmitters and receivers found in TV remote controls, these $29.99 wonders (sometimes going for much more) speak, sleep, make weird noises and supposedly interact with their environment, repeating some of what they hear. It's hard to imagine them divulging state secrets, but who knows more about pulling in what it hears than the NSA, which intercepts electronic communications around the world using satellites and other highly classified means. NSA officials were worried, said one Capitol Hill source monitoring the intelligence community, "that people would take them home and they'd start talking classified." Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy, said he wasn't surprised that the NSA, which is nothing if not bureaucratic and secretive, had drawn the line on Furby. "They can't simply say, 'Be smart, don't do anything to compromise security,' " Aftergood said. "There has to be a page in the security manual that says, 'No dolls with tape recorders.' " The Washington Post, Jan. 13, 1999 Impeached POTUS Clinton Pays Paula Jones $850,000 Hillary's cash balance falls WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Clinton mailed a check for $850,000 to Paula Jones on Tuesday to settle her sexual harassment allegations, officially ending the sensational legal battle that cast his presidency into crisis. In the week his Senate impeachment trial was to resume, the president drew about $375,000 from his and Hillary Rodham Clinton's personal funds and got the rest of the settlement, about $475,000, from an insurance policy, a White House official told The Associated Press. ``This ends it. The check is being Fed-Exed'' to Bill McMillan, one of Mrs. Jones' lawyers, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said the personal funds were drawn from the Clintons' blind trust, which was valued in their financial disclosure statement at between $1 million and about $5 million. None of the money was drawn from his legal defense fund, which raises money from private citizens to defray his legal bills, the official said. Still unclear is how much money from the check will make it into Mrs. Jones' bank account. As the settlement was reached in November, Mrs. Jones still faced an outstanding claim by Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert Davis, the two lawyers who quit her case last year and filed an $800,000 lien against any settlement in order to collect legal fees. ``I don't think it's been decided yet'' how much Mrs. Jones will receive, said her friend and adviser, Susan Carpenter McMillan. ``We did hear they are sending out the check. We hope to receive it soon,'' Carpenter McMillan said. While the check ends the litigation, the fallout from the controversy still haunts the president. Mrs. Jones' lawsuit brought to light the president's affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and set in motion a criminal investigation that resulted in a historic House vote last month to impeach Clinton. The president files his trial brief on Wednesday, and House prosecutors on Thursday will begin presenting to the Senate their case that the president obstructed justice in the Jones lawsuit and lied about it before a federal grand jury. Clinton reached a settlement with Mrs. Jones on Nov. 13 after four years of litigation. Under that settlement, Clinton didn't admit any wrongdoing or apologize and simply agreed to make a cash settlement to Mrs. Jones, a former Arkansas state worker. Mrs. Jones alleged that Clinton, when he was governor of Arkansas, made a crude advance in a room at a Little Rock hotel in 1991. Clinton has steadfastly denied her accusation. Clinton testified in that lawsuit on Jan. 17, 1998, and during questioning about his relationships with other women, denied he had ``sexual relations'' with Ms. Lewinsky. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr got permission to investigate whether Clinton was trying to obstruct the lawsuit. Clinton was forced to acknowledge a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky in testimony before a federal grand jury last August. Starr's investigation led to a referral to the House of Representatives accusing Clinton of several criminal acts. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed the lawsuit last April 1, ruling that Mrs. Jones' allegations, even if true, wouldn't qualify as a case of sexual harassment. An appeal of that dismissal was pending before a federal appeals court when the settlement was reached. The Associated Press, Jan. 13, 1999 Impeached POTUS The Trashing of Clinton's Women by Nat Hentoff The forces of evil, genuine evil, are supporting the impeachment of the president. — Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz Impeachment is all about a coup over a cock. —Feminist scholar Blanche Wiesen Cook He's turned people of color into defenders of a president whose crime and welfare policies hurt us. — Gwendolin Mink, professor of politics, University of California at Santa Cruz The first article of impeachment in the Senate concerns the president's perjury. Except for those who believe the earth is flat, there isn't the slightest doubt that Clinton is a perjurer. His own White House chief counsel, Charles Ruff, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that a reasonable person might well conclude that the president had lied under oath. If you still have doubts, read "The Perjury Precedent" by NYU law professor Stephen Gillers on the Op-Ed page of the December 28 New York Times. The second article charges that Clinton "prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice and has to that end engaged personally, and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or scheme designed to delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence of evidence and testimony." This obstruction of justice charge has been underplayed in the press and in the referral to the Senate by the House Judiciary Committee. It has many dimensions, but the most disgusting and pertinent involves what Clinton and his emissaries have done to threaten his discarded women in order to prevent their testifying against him. It has become brutally clear that any former object of his lust who threatens his presidency should be put into the Witness Protection Program. This series about the trashing of Clinton's women begins with the first to have publicly spoken of their relationship. Gennifer Flowers revealed a long-term affair and had the tapes to prove it. On one of them, Mario Cuomo's name came up. Flowers said she thought Cuomo was "connected" with the Mafia. You can hear Bill's unmistakable sound and cadence answering her: "Well, he acts like one." Clinton and his cover-up team vigorously vilified Flowers as a hustler who invented the story for money. Clinton finally admitted on 60 Minutes that he had slept with her— once. The tapes tell a different erotic story. In an interview with Larry King on CNN, Flowers said that after she went public, her house was broken into three times and ransacked. And her mother was threatened. A San Francisco– based private eye, Jack Palladino, was on the Clinton payroll during the Arkansas years. His job was to intimidate the governor's "bimbos" into silence. Rooting about, he somehow found an allegation that Flowers was tied to a right-wing conspiracy. That was a dog that wouldn't hunt. Palladino was paid $100,000 in 1992 to pile up dossiers on the Clinton women. (New York Daily News reporters Thomas DeFrank and Thomas Galvin in the August 4, 1997, Weekly Standard.) Roger Morris is a highly credible historian (Richard Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician; Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy). In Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America (Henry Holt; an updated paperback is due in early 1999), Morris tells of Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, who got to know Clinton intimately in 1983. She told Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph that in 1992 she was visited by a Democratic Party staffer. "They knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn't guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs." (As further reported in the Wall Street Journal International, October 27, 1998.) On March 15, 1998, Frank Murray reported in the Washington Times that Donovan Campbell, a lawyer for Paula Jones, speaking of Clinton's "vast cover-up enterprise," explained why Jones waited so long to publicly complain about the president's exposing himself to her and telling her to "kiss it." She didn't hurry to use the normal grievance procedures for Arkansas state employees "because she saw others pay the price" for speaking out about Clinton's serial pillaging of women. She was frightened, her lawyer said, by the "vicious attacks" on Flowers and Perdue by Clinton's janissaries. Women were not the only targets of Clinton's expensive secret police. Thomas DeFrank and Thomas Galvin report that when Republican congressman Jim Leach of Iowa began investigating Whitewater, he found a stranger— Jack Palladino— skulking about his home. But Clinton's discarded women were the main objects of the Clinton team both in Arkansas and later in Washington. Next week, we shall follow the White House– directed detectives stalking Dolly Kyle Browning, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Kathleen Willey, and the woman who may yet cause the president to resign— Juanita Broaddrick. But what do the obstructions of justice of Clinton-the-night-crawler in Arkansas have to do with his attempts to suppress evidence in his august role as president of the United States? It's all an addictive whole— pattern and practice, as lawyers say. That's why Monica Lewinsky was subpoenaed to tell her story during the preliminaries to the Paula Jones trial. She wasn't in Arkansas, but he committed perjury about his actions in both Arkansas and Washington. The president's acolytes— such as Alan Dershowitz— continually bray, "Sex lies! It's all sex lies!" They insist that these thrown-away women are making all this up, including the threats and intimidation. But is every one of these women lying? The Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1999 Foreign Exchange Markets Japan Intervenes to Depress Yen's Value Exporters were complaining The Japanese authorities intervened yesterday to support the dollar for the first time since 1995 in an apparent reversal of recent exchange rate policy. The unilateral intervention forced the yen down against the US currency by ¥4 to ¥112.33 in Tokyo trading. It followed vociferous complaints from Japanese industrialists about the damage the sharp appreciation was causing exporters, and signs of unease inside the government. Traders reported that the Bank of Japan had bought around $1bn worth of dollars during the day from a range of Tokyo-based banks, although others later estimated the intervention at between $2bn-$3bn. That was small compared with the $20bn the Bank spent purchasing yen last spring to boost the Japanese currency. However, traders said that in a thin market the currency was more sensitive to signals or rumours of intervention. Derek Halpenny, currency economist at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi in London, said the breach of the ¥110 level had apparently been the spur to intervention. "There was a fear that the yen would have gone on and approached the ¥100 level against the dollar unless some action was taken," he said. Analysts said the Bank of Japan seemed content with the yen in the ¥110-120 range, and it was unlikely to intervene again unless the currency rose once more above ¥110. Last week Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan's vice-finance minister, appeared to endorse a stronger yen with comments that prompted the Japanese currency to jump to ¥108 against the dollar on Monday, its highest level for 28 months. His stance - and the yen's recent rise - caused dismay among senior officials in the Bank of Japan who have argued during the last year that the Japanese economy needed a weaker yen to boost growth. Yesterday Mr Sakakibara - accompanying prime minister Keizo Obuchi on a European tour to bolster the yen's status alongside the dollar and the euro - modified his earlier remarks. He said: "An excessively strong yen is undesirable, as is an excessively weak yen." Hiromu Nonaka, chief cabinet secretary and the leading government spokesman, said after the intervention that "excessive appreciation or depreciation aren't things we want from the standpoint of the economy". Internal economic models used by institutions such as the Economic Planning Agency imply that a 10 per cent sustained rise in the value of the currency could reduce growth more than 0.5 percentage points in a year. This suggests the currency's recent rise would offset most of the impact of the government's huge stimulus package, say officials. In August the yen fell to a year low of ¥147.24. By Monday it had appreciated 26 per cent. Bank officials insist that a stronger yen is unlikely to help the banking sector because the banks have slashed overseas assets as part of their restructuring. Yesterday's intervention came as trade tensions between Japan and the US intensified over steel and other manufactured exports. The Financial Times, Jan. 13, 1999 Chinese Finance The Mystery of China's Missing Billions Surprise: the numbers don't add up China announced yesterday that its foreign exchange reserves increased to $145bn (£88bn) last year, raising the embarrassing question of where most of the $88.9bn in reported trade and investment gains has gone. In the past, the increase in China's forex reserves has mirrored the gains from the country's trade surplus and inward investment. But last year the reserves climbed just $5.1bn from a year earlier despite a trade surplus of $43.6bn and inward investments of $45.3bn. Chinese officials and economists said that there were many reasons for the yawning discrepancy, some of which are widely known and others which have only recently become clear. "The number of illegal activities last year means that both the trade surplus figure and the investment inflow figures are very inaccurate," said one trade official. Another trade official said: "The figure for foreign direct investment in 1998 is exaggerated. A lot of it is money which has been promised but not invested in China." Officials said that another distortion arose from the fact that some foreign currency loans, especially from Hong Kong, appear in China's statistics as direct investment. A significant number of these loans are believed to have gone to Chinese entrepreneurs, mostly in southern China, who have created fake foreign ventures by setting up a shelf company in Hong Kong and then using it as a "joint venture" partner. Other explanations included increased profit repatriations by foreign companies, currency fluctuations affecting the dollar value of the reserves and the fact that from the start of this year, some enterprises have been allowed to keep 15 per cent of their foreign currency export earnings. Export figures may also have been inflated by another scam - the shipment of fake goods, or even virtually empty containers, abroad. In one example, sand was poured into computer casings to replicate the weight of real computers in the hope of avoiding detection by customs officials. Officials said that the volume of fake exports, combined with the notional value of forged export certificates, has been considerable, though no figures were available. Export certificates are useful in China because authorities often require to see them before granting permission to import. Several irregularities have occured to skew import data. The titanic battle that security forces fought last year against smuggling indicates that the volume of smuggled goods has been huge. Gun battles have flared between smugglers and police, accounting for a fair proportion of the official toll of more than 400 murdered police officers last year. Beijing has established a special anti-smuggling security force because customs authorities in some local-ities can no longer be trusted. Import documents have been forged to the tune of "several billions of US dollars", officials said. But once the foreign exchange has been obtained, it has often either been sent abroad to seek investment returns or been used to buy smuggled imports. It is clear that the battle against smuggling and foreign exchange fraud will rage for some time. The Financial Times, Jan. 13, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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