-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Year 2000 US Cities Building Secret Y2K Bunkers Gotta protect government officials AMERICA'S major cities are preparing secret command centres and making plans to mobilise armed troops in the event of a possible breakdown of social order if there is widespread computer failure on the eve of 2000. City fathers are known to be concerned that the so-called Y2K bug could cause widespread power failures, the breakdown of traffic management and difficulties in running everything from airports to ambulances. The result is a revival of the bunker mentality not seen since the end of the Cold War. Last week New York revealed that its new $12 million emergency command centre was: "Ninety per cent complete but fully operational." The 23rd-floor, 46,000 sq ft complex, near the World Trade Centre in Manhattan, can house up to 100 of the city's most senior employees and is protected behind a wall of bullet-proof glass. It was built above ground because of the risk of flooding from broken water mains. Mayor Rudi Giuliani ordered the construction of the new control room only last year. While it is designed to deal with any emergency from a terrorist attack to a hurricane, the speed of its construction suggests that New York's planning for possible Y2K chaos is at an advanced stage. It was used for the first time during a snow storm in February. Other areas are taking similar precaution. State officials in Ohio announced last month that they were ready to move government operations into a $13-million bunker eight miles outside downtown Columbus on Dec 29. The command centre will be manned 24 hours a day from New Year's Eve until it is no longer needed. It is surrounded by barbed wire, with underground dormitories, a filtered air supply, food and water. The Ohio state officials say that it will be used to co-ordinate relief efforts if there is a major failure of public utilities. The centre's director of operations is James Williams, a retired Army National Guard general who insists that the decision to man the centre for the end of the Millennium is "not a panic situation. If nothing happens, we can go home and watch football." Los Angeles, which experienced serious rioting following the Rodney King trial in 1992, is understood to be preparing an operations centre five floors beneath a federal building in the centre of the city. The Automated Traffic Signal and Control Centre (ATSAC) is normally used to manage traffic in the notoriously congested Los Angeles area but has the advantage of dozens of remote-control cameras at strategic road junctions which could become the eyes and ears of emergency planners. The ATSAC command centre is also designed to be proof against earthquakes and nuclear explosions, and is protected by four vault doors similar to those used in banks. It has its own power system and can be reached only by a secret lift. American government officials have admitted that they have no idea of the possible disruption that the Y2K bug could potentially cause on the most technologically dependent nation in the world. As in Britain, government bodies as well as private companies have been racing against time to ensure that the computers which run everything from nuclear missiles to air traffic control are reprogrammed to work normally from January 1. The Y2K computer problem is caused by some computer chips reading the year 2000 as 1900 because they only recognise the last two digits, and therefore either malfunctioning or shutting off the system they are controlling. Washington has been playing down fears of disruption caused by Y2K computer crashes. Tens of thousands of Americans are less confident, however, and are actively preparing for the worst. Stocks of oil lamps and wood stoves are almost exhausted in many areas, along with supplies of dried foods in quantities which would allow a family to survive for a year. The US Treasury is also preparing to print hundreds of millions of extra dollars because it believes huge numbers of people will take out extra cash before the New Year as a precaution against cash machines failing to work. The question of civil disorder is more sensitive. Responsibility for keeping law and order will rest with the National Guard, a part-time force which has access to guns, tanks and even fighter aircraft. Secret discussions are understood to have taken place at the Army Readiness Centre in Washington last summer to prepare for Y2K-related problems. National Guard units are organised by state but are said to be co-ordinating with Federal agencies on a new command and control system with high-frequency radios, emergency power backup and command centres to be ready by the end of the year. A full recall of all 370,000 and 110,000 army and air National Guard members can only be authorised by Congress and has not taken place since 1940. An initial step would be the cancellation of all armed forces leave on Dec 31. Canada, which has created a task force of 14,500 military personnel to be mobilised from January 1, as part of Operation Abacus, is a step ahead. It has already put all its 60,000 troops and reservists, with the exception of those on overseas duty, on alert for the Millennium. The London Telegraph, April 18, 1999 Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia British & American Special Forces Help Drug-Dealing Maoists SAS teams will help KLA "rise from the ashes" BRITISH and American special forces teams are working undercover in Kosovo with the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army to identify Serbian targets for Nato bombing raids. SAS soldiers fluent in Albanian and Serbian have dodged minefields and Serbian patrols around the torched villages along Kosovo's border with Albania and Macedonia to enter the war-battered province on surveillance missions. One of their priorities is to pinpoint the location of Serbian tanks and weapons which - as The Telegraph revealed last week - have been hidden in garages, buildings and even mosques in villages "ethnically cleansed" of their Albanian populations. Nato later admitted that it was frustrated by the success of the Serbian tactics. The SAS is also advising the rebels at their strongholds in northern Albania, where the KLA has launched a major recruitment and training operation. According to high-ranking KLA officials, the SAS is using two camps near Tirana, the Albanian capital, and another on the Kosovan border to teach KLA officers how to conduct intelligence-gathering operations on Serbian positions. In a major coup for the KLA, the rebels captured a Yugoslav army officer during skirmishes inside Kosovo near the Albanian border and handed him over to Nato. The alliance is holding the man in Albania as a prisoner of war. It is the latest evidence of the growing co-operation between Nato and the KLA, a movement once denounced by the West's leaders as "terrorists" and dismissed by its military strategists as a ragtag force. In the clearest indication that Nato has reassessed the role and value of the once-derided force, the alliance spokesman James Shea enthusiastically predicted that the KLA would "rise from the ashes" and play an increasingly important role in the current campaign. The alliance is now quietly drafting the KLA into its war against Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader. It is even considering plans to train them and ease the arms embargo on Yugoslavia to supply them with weapons such as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. KLA commanders who gained their military experience as officers in the old and once-respected Yugoslav People's Army know that training is a priority if they are to convert their enthusiastic but raw recruits - many of them young Kosovars who have returned from western Europe - into a strong fighting force. The rebels have been contacted by several private military consultants but fear they may have links with the Serbian secret services, a senior KLA figure told The Sunday Telegraph. They are negotiating for a long-term training deal with Military and Professional Resources International, a mercenary company run by former American officers who operate with semi-official approval from the Pentagon and played a key role in building up Croatia's armed forces. >From their remaining enclaves within Kosovo and reconnaissance missions staged from Albania, the rebels already use satellite and cellular telephones to provide Nato with details on Serbian targets. Their information supplements the surveillance picture constructed from satellite photography and Awacs aircraft. The KLA has no shortage of Kalashnikovs after the Albanian army's arsenal was looted in the 1997 uprising. But Western assistance would be limited and there seems little prospect of the KLA receiving the sort of heavy weapons, such as artillery and tanks, for which it has been lobbying. Nato remains wary of the KLA's politics - which has its roots in the hard Left - its discipline and its military potential. At the headquarters in the northern Albanian town of Krume, Gani Syla, a KLA spokesman, said: "We think it would be a very good idea if Nato provided us with arms. If they had done it earlier, our people would not have had to flee our land as we could have protected them inside Kosovo." Just as important as weapons, however, would be the training that Nato could provide. Although the KLA has been doing its best to look professional as it prepares for war at its bases dotted around northern Albania, the reality is very different. "The KLA is a mixture of good officers and ill-trained volunteers," said a Western defence analyst. "But a big plus is that they have the popular sentiment of the population on their side. That is an important start. The Croats and Bosnian Muslims did not start off in much better shape and look at them now." In Krume, Kukes and Bajram Curri, which resemble KLA garrison towns, there is no resentment from local people as rebel soldiers and military policemen wander openly through the streets. Outside the KLA office in Krume, nine-year-old Ardi wears a rebel cap and carries a bullet. It is, he says unprompted, "for Slobodan Milosevic". The London Telegraph, April 18, 1999 Privacy on the Internet Anonymity NOT by Peter H. Lewis Last week in this column, I described the promise of anonymity on the Net, and some services and products that provide it. But skepticism and the impetus to challenge any product or program reign in cyberspace. So when Richard M. Smith, president of Phar Lap Software of Cambridge, Mass., read the column and saw the claims of the service providers, he could not resist seeing just how good the anonymity provided was. Smith reports that he attacked and easily defeated several of the services. The flaws he reports finding could enable a Web site operator to disable the privacy protections used by the services offering anonymity or trick the operator into passing along information that could be used to identify visitors to the site. Smith is the programmer and amateur sleuth who last month came across a previously obscure identifying code in Microsoft Office documents that investigators used to help link the Melissa computer virus to a computer in New Jersey. The operators of the compromised anonymity services -- Anonymizer.com, the Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Router, the Lucent Personalized Web Assistant service and a fourth service not mentioned in the article, Aixs.Net -- were scrambling this week to patch the security holes. While many of their customers use the anonymity services as a shield against being pestered by marketers and bombarded with unsolicited e-mail, others, like political dissidents, could face much graver consequences if their identities were divulged. The revelation of the anonymity services' bugs is the latest blow in what has already been a dismal year for Internet privacy, a year in which it was learned that Intel had embedded a trackable serial number in its Pentium III chips and Microsoft had put a sneaky "globally unique identifier," or G.U.I.D., in the registration software for Windows 98 and in every document created with Microsoft Office. Both companies say they have backed off, but doubts linger. According to a report last week in The Seattle Weekly, Microsoft has also embedded the G.U.I.D. into its Windows Media Player, which in theory would allow Web site operators to track everyone who downloads a streaming audio or video file. The newspaper also disclosed that Real Networks, whose Real Player software is the main rival to Windows' Media Player, also packs a G.U.I.D. (Real Networks did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) A Bulgarian bug sleuth, Georgi Guninski, reported on his Web site that Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 5.0 had some unpatched holes that might allow an unscrupulous hacker to rig Web pages so they could snatch files from a visitor's hard disk through the Internet Explorer 5.0 Web browser. A computer security consultant in Spain, Juan Carlos García Cuartango, found an array of similar holes in Internet Explorer 4.0, holes that Microsoft says have been patched. Smith's attacks on the services promising anonymity were conducted using Netscape Communicator 4.5, which also has a long history of security bugs and patches. In general, the attacks exploited some relatively obscure features of Java and Javascript, which, along with Microsoft's ActiveX, are increasingly popular software tools that Web site operators employ to create features like updated stock quotes that crawl across the browser screen. If Java, Javascript or ActiveX are running inside a user's Web-browsing software, the Web site can actually load small programs into the visitor's computer. In the case of the privacy services, a booby-trapped Web page could stealthily invoke Javascript to redirect the browser automatically to an unsecured Web page, bypassing a service's protections and allowing the site to grab the visiting computer's Internet, or I.P., address and its cookies -- programs that keep detailed records of a computer's visits to a particular site. Or the booby-trapped site could exploit another bug in the Netscape browser, also through Javascript, to cough up the visitor's hidden Internet address. "That these systems were so easy to break is a little surprising to me," Smith said. He said it had taken him less than an hour to find and exploit the services' bugs. "If you are a user of any of these services," Smith said, "I highly recommend that you turn off Javascript, Java and ActiveX controls in your browser before surfing the Web. This simple precaution will prevent any leaks of your I.P. address or cookies." Lance Cottrell, president of Anonymizer.com, said the success of his popular service depended in part on its ability to disable Java and Javascript. But today's software is so complex, he said, that it is extremely difficult to find every vulnerability. The important thing, he said, is to hope that the person who discovers a bug reports it responsibly and that software makers patch the holes. "There is no such thing as a perfectly secure system, unless it is welded shut in a box and not connected to a network," Cottrell said. The security holes exploited by Smith were first described in a technical paper last year by Aviel D. Rubin, the principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research in New Jersey, and Mike Reiter. Rubin and Reiter developed the Crowds anonymity service. Smith said he had not tried to find potential vulnerabilities in Crowds. Rubin, a co-author of "The Web Security Sourcebook" (Wiley Computer Publishing, 1997), said he believed that Crowds was not vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. "Hmm, sounds like a challenge," Smith said when informed of Rubin's comment. Lorrie Faith Cranor, a privacy expert at AT&T Labs-Research, said the discovery of security holes in the privacy services did not mean that anyone's privacy had been compromised. "I would say someone should feel reasonably secure using these services anyway, especially if the developers are prompt in patching holes when they emerge," she said. Microsoft promises that the notorious G.U.I.D. is not included in the Office 2000 upgrade that it began shipping last week to its largest corporate customers. Hackers will have eight weeks to verify the claim before retail versions of the popular application suite go on sale on June 10. Office 2000 will come in four versions. The Standard version (the upgrade price will be $209 after a rebate for registered Office users) consists of Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint. The Small Business version (also $209) has those four applications plus the Publisher desktop publishing program and some small business tools. The Professional version (a $309 upgrade) has all those and the Access database program. The Premium version (a $399 upgrade) tosses in Frontpage for Web page design and Photodraw for photo editing and graphics. Woe unto those who are not upgrading from Office 97 or a competing suite because the price of Office 2000 for new users ranges from a low of $499 for the Standard version to (choke!) $799 for the full version. I've been playing around with the final code of Office 2000 for the past week, and it has lots of nice new features for both corporate users and individuals. Microsoft's main goal in this upgrade appears to have been to make it easier to create and share documents on the World Wide Web. Also, all of the toolbar and command menus have been simplified and made smarter. Beginning users who need just a few commands can hide all the extra junk, which is nice. My favorite new feature, however -- besides the absence of the spooky G.U.I.D. -- is the "Die, Clippy, Die" command (what it ought to be called), which lets the user permanently get rid of the rude and obnoxious little animated paper clip character from Office 97 who butts his way onto the screen in what is usually a misguided effort to offer help or advice. That in itself is worth a few bucks. Whether the entire package is worth $209 to $399 for an upgrade depends on how important Web publishing is to you or how unhappy you are with Office 97. I'm tempted to wait and just get Office 2000 installed when I buy my next computer. The New York Times, April 17, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
