-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 58 - October, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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Contents:
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--FCC Raids the Father of the Micro Radio Movement
--IndyMedia Int'l Campaign on Behalf of Mbanna Kantako
--Chronicle Gives Short Shrift to NAB Protests
--Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
--Homeless Dying Slowly of AIDS
--New Voluntary Standards Proposed for Experiments on People
--Study: Full Jails Not Lowering Crime
--Someone's Watching: Online, at Work - Everywhere
--Security Problems Plague Federal Accounting System
Linked stories:
*Human Rights Act becomes law
*Web firms still burning through cash
*Disenfranchised
*U.S. Picks New Crypto Standard
*RIAA Chief: Piracy Is Doomed
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Begin stories:
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FCC Raids the Father of the Micro Radio Movement
"Y'all stay on the air out there because I know what they're
doing-they're hoping that by attacking me everybody'll pack up the
tents. But this is the time to tweak them transmitters and get'em
pumping as tough as they can pump, you know what I'm sayin?"
--Mbanna Kantako, in an interview with San Francisco Liberation Radio
Kantako describes the raid as a military invasion. On Friday, Sept. 29
at 5:15 p.m. a gang of approximately 45 flak-jacketed, helmeted officers
entered his home and dismantled Human Rights Radio, as well as a second
radio station he had recently begun to run out of the same facility.
In an interview with SFLR this morning, Mbanna Kantako, the founder of
Human Rights Radio and widely viewed as the father of the micro radio
movement, discussed how he, his wife, children and grandchildren were
ordered to remain in a single room of their Springfield, Illinois home
while officers ransacked the premises and walked away with tape decks, a
mixer, three VCRs, a computer and other items--and also trampled
numerous CDs which had spilled on the floor in the process.
"What the government displayed here in Springfield is what they do
everywhere, but they were as blatant as you can be," Kantako said.
He added that so far not one word of the raid has been mentioned in the
Springfield corporate-owned media-despite the fact that Human Rights
Radio has been on the air in that city for 13 years.
"If what they did was so right, how come they not writing about it?"
The raid was carried out under the pretext that the station was
interfering with air traffic radio frequencies. A federal judge issued a
temporary restraining order against the station last Friday morning, and
a second hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
"They went through our house about a hundred times on these stupid
security sweeps, and we know all this drama is designed to scare people.
They were harassing our neighbors, made our neighbors go in the house,"
Kantako said.
He quoted the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Jenny Scott, as
saying that "you are not to broadcast anywhere within the borders of
this country because of the danger you pose."
Kantako said he feels the real danger Human Rights Radio poses to the
government is not from interference with air traffic but through the
content of the station's programming.
"What we tried to stress in the courtroom-and we made this clear that
Friday morning during that farce of a hearing-is that this is not a
matter of an FCC regulation. This is a human rights concern."
Kantako said the raid has galvanized the community in Springfield.
"If they wanted to intimidate us or our friends and neighbors and stuff,
it had the exact opposite effect."
He said the station plans to return to the airwaves as soon as new
equipment can be obtained.
"We're putting together the pieces."
Persons wishing to make donations to the station can contact Kantako at
217-789-0038. Or send checks to:
Mbanna Kantako
1113 North 5th St.
Springfield, IL 62702
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IndyMedia Int'l Campaign on Behalf of Mbanna Kantako
From: "Sakolsky, Ron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Independent Media Center (IMC) in Seattle (with links to affiliates
throughout the world) will be posting information about the Human Rights
Radio bust shortly. Mbanna was able to record the whole event on cassette
and we soon hope to have it online at: <www.indymedia.org>
In collaboration with Mbanna Kantako, the IMC will also be promoting an
international email campaign directed at the editor of the local
Springfield, IL newspaper, the State Journal Register, protesting the lack
of coverage of the bust.
Please send emails of protest to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
with copies to Ron Sakolsky and Mike Townsend so that we can keep track of
them at: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> & <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
You can reach Ron and Mike at the above email addresses, but the Feds stole
Mbanna's computer so if you need to speak to him, call him at 217-789-0038.
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Chronicle Gives Short Shrift to NAB Protests
From: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting <www.fair.org>
October 2, 2000
In what amounts to a news blackout, the September 21 - 23 demonstrations at
the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in San Francisco
received no coverage in any major mainstream press or broadcast outlets
outside the Bay Area.
Given that the protests were meant to spotlight the undemocratic activities
of the NAB and of corporate media in general, the lack of coverage is
deplorable but perhaps not a surprise. What's more remarkable is that even
the city's major hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, ran no news
stories focusing on the demonstrations.
The Chronicle's coverage consisted of one news article detailing the arrest
of three National Lawyers Guild representatives who were attempting to gain
access to jailed protesters (9/23/00) and one item reporting (incorrectly,
as it turns out) that all charges against the nine arrested protesters had
been dropped (9/26/00). Before the protests, the paper also ran an op-ed
addressing the local impact of the NAB's lobbying (9/18/00).
While the opinion piece was welcome, the Chronicle's news pages have
devoted only half a sentence to activists' political concerns (9/23/00),
noting that the arrests had occurred while protesters were attempting "to
call attention to what they contend is government sanctioning of
monopolization of the airwaves."
In contrast, San Francisco's alternative weekly, the Bay Guardian, featured
extensive coverage of the NAB protests and the issues behind them. The San
Francisco Examiner's coverage was less in-depth, but still outpaced the
Chronicle's, with three news articles about the issues behind the protests
(9/20/00, 9/21/00, 9/24/00), one noting the four earliest arrests (9/22/00)
and one examining the NAB's revocation of the press credentials held by Bay
Guardian reporter Steve Rhodes and other independent journalists (9/26/00).
The NAB's expulsion of Rhodes and other independent media from the Moscone
Center, the site of the convention, is itself newsworthy and should alarm
journalists everywhere. A credentialed reporter for the Bay Guardian,
Rhodes had his press credentials seized while he was photographing four
activists who had locked themselves together in the Moscone Center
entranceway.
When Rhodes requested an explanation, the NAB's Jack Knebel told him "You
are part of the problem." "I told him again that I was a reporter for the
Bay Guardian," writes Rhodes, "and he repeated that I was part of the
problem." Police escorted him out of the building under threat of arrest.
An NAB PR official has since apologized for the incident, as has San
Francisco Police Chief Fred Lau. The Society of Professional Journalists has
spoken out strongly against the NAB's actions (Bay Guardian, 9/27/00),
noting that when a group "whose members control the vast majority of
broadcast news outlets nationwide considers working journalists to be part
of the problem, then the American media has reached a sad and scary state of
affairs indeed." But no mainstream media other than the San Francisco
Examiner have covered the NAB's decision to ban selected members of the
press.
Another underreported story is the fate of those activists arrested during
the demonstrations. FAIR's September 26 update on the protests reported that
all charges against the demonstrators had been dropped; unfortunately, that
information was based on false statements made by the San Francisco district
attorney's office to the Lawyers Guild.
In fact, the DA is pressing misdemeanor vandalism charges against two
activists arrested during the September 22 demonstration outside the
building housing Clear Channel radio stations KYLD and KMEL. The glass pane
of a door to the station was cracked-- it is unclear by whom-- during a
confrontation in which KYLD "Doghouse" morning show crew members Dan "Elvis"
Lay and Joseph "Big Joe" Lopez shoved and verbally abused demonstrators,
apparently broadcasting the incident on their morning radio show. (See
FAIR's September 26 Activism Update.) Lopez and one other crew member have
recently been charged by police for another, unrelated "prank." Charges are
not being pressed, however, against Lay and Lopez for their actions during
the Clear Channel protests.
The Chronicle has not followed up or corrected its September 26 story, "City
Drops Charges Against NAB Protesters."
ACTION: Please contact the San Francisco Chronicle and ask why its news
coverage ignored the substance of the media democracy protests against the
NAB. You might also urge them to follow up continuing stories emerging from
the protests, such as the NAB's press credentials policy and the DA's
prosecution of the activists arrested at Clear Channel.
CONTACT:
Matthew Wilson, Executive Editor
San Francisco Chronicle
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: 415-777-1111
Fax: 415-896-1107
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if
you maintain a polite tone. Please cc your correspondence to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
For more information on the NAB and the protests, see FAIR's NAB resources:
<http://www.fair.org/nab.html>
For more details on the incident at KYLD, see FAIR's open letter to Clear
Channel:
<http://www.fair.org/activism/clear-channel-letter.html>
For non-corporate coverage of the protests, visit the San Francisco
Independent Media Center:
<http://www.sf.indymedia.org>
For Steve Rhodes' full account of his expulsion from the Moscone Center,
see:
<http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/52/52ognabsb.html>
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Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
by DCDave
Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down
a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense,
other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends
heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party.
1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.
2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "How dare you?" gambit.
3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If,
in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the
suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe
the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")
4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest
charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors (or
plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all
the charges, real and fanciful alike.
5. Call the skeptics names like:
"conspiracy theorist," "nutcase," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and, of
course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and
adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more
reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid
fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For
insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.
6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting
strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply
pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to
over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).
7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can
be very useful.
8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or
"taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of
candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless,
less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of
a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With
effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by
stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.
10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as
ultimately unknowable.
11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With
thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. E.g. We
have a free press. If evidence exists that the Vince Foster "suicide" note
was forged, they would have reported it. They haven't reported it so there
is no such evidence. Another variation on this theme involves the
likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press who would report
the leak.
12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. E.g. If Foster was
murdered, who did it and why?
13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing
distractions.
14. Lightly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This
is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.
15. Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to attribute
the "facts" furnished the public to a plausible-sounding, but anonymous,
source.
16. Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own stooges "expose"
scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is to pre-empt real
opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation is to pay rich people
for the job who will pretend to spend their own money.
17. Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the question,
"What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon hour on Internet
news groups defending the government and/or the press and harassing genuine
critics?" Don't the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers,
magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print
critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them from
radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is not.
David Martin
THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD
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Homeless Dying Slowly of AIDS
By GEORGE WATSON
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP)
October 2, 2000
They carry their life's possessions on withering
backs and hide death within their broken bodies.
Some are veterans of the streets, seeking a home under a molding
cardboard box in an alleyway. Some are teens who ran from something
but stumbled into a life far worse; they trade sex for a night in a
bed. Others believe their luck has run out after losing jobs,
apartments and friends.
Yet every day, a handful of the thousands of homeless men and
women living with AIDS in New York City make an effort rarely taken
by their brethren. They seek help.
That fight for life, no matter the inevitable future, is
mirrored across the nation, where hundreds of public and nonprofit
groups struggle to help the needy.
Funds are already limited because of the curious problem caused
by scientists who haven't cured HIV or AIDS yet keep patients
living longer through powerful drug concoctions. Now advocates
wonder how they can possibly help all the people infected with the
virus.
``Today, people think the epidemic is over,'' said Gina
Quattrochi, president of the National AIDS Housing Coalition and
executive director at Bailey House, a private center in Greenwich
Village helping homeless AIDS patients. ``The reality is people are
living much longer, but the vast majority are disabled.''
Advocates like Quattrochi are urging Congress to add $60 million
above this year's $232 million federal budget for housing and other
services to homeless AIDS patients. They worried when President
Clinton proposed upping it to just $260 million and became fearful
because Senate leaders don't want to increase the appropriation at
all.
``It's thin. We have to get it up,'' said U.S. Rep. Jerrold
Nadler, D-N.Y., a longtime supporter of AIDS services. ``This
country is rolling in money.''
Expending millions of dollars for AIDS-exclusive assistance
meets resistance in every case.
``There has always been pressure from the far right to portray
it for drug addicts and queers,'' Quattrochi said, adding that
others question the need to fund specific AIDS housing.
Quattrochi says only half of Bailey House's residents are gay or
lesbian. By conservative estimates, she says, at least 450,000
Americans with AIDS need housing.
New York City, which served 1,200 homeless people with AIDS in
1988, now assists more than 27,000. This month, a Brooklyn federal
judge chided the city's Division of AIDS Services for
systematically delaying or terminating assistance and ordered the
agency placed under federal oversight for three years. The city
plans to appeal the decision.
If Congress would look at operations like Bailey House,
Quattrochi believes it would understand the plea for more money.
The alternative, she says, is soaring health care costs from
homeless AIDS patients seeking treatment in emergency rooms, which
is more expensive than standard care.
Bailey House started in the mid-1980s when AIDS was still
considered by many as homosexuals' punishment from God. The 6
1/2-story building, in a prime location along the Hudson River,
nurtured homeless AIDS survivors.
In 1995, Bailey House added a vocational studies program because
clients lived longer and weren't interested in just wasting away.
``I wanted to do something productive with my life,'' said Sean
Ransom, 31, who contracted the virus in the late 1980s. ``I didn't
want to ... take my meds and wait to die.''
Those medications _ a triple combination of drugs _ have doubled
the average time it takes for the HIV infection to develop into
AIDS, said Professor Alvaro Munoz of Johns Hopkins University's
School of Public Health. They increased the average survival time
of AIDS sufferers from 18 months to six years.
In the late 1980s, residents in Bailey House stayed an average
of three months, and their stay almost always ended in death. These
days, they stay about three years. Many now walk out on their own.
Beyond treatment, stable housing is crucial to patients' health,
Quattrochi says.
Living on a friend's couch or moving between shelters, patients
find it difficult and tiring to get steady care; the effort weakens
the body and strengthens the disease _ a deadly duo. Patients also
need refrigerators to keep their medicine effective.
These problems become remote when a homeless person wakes up
after a night under crumbled, urine-stained newspapers.
Medications? It's doubtful they have any. It's often little better
in city-run shelters.
Derryck, who declined to give his last name, lived in emergency
housing officially called Single Room Occupancy Units, but known by
residents as bare-boned welfare hotels.
He could touch all four walls from the middle of his cubicle.
Occupants shared a single bathroom, and he shudders when
remembering the filth, prostitutes, drugs and loan sharking.
Derryck, 50, concedes he was lucky to live there. ``There's even
a lack of bad housing,'' he said glumly.
Derryck found his way to Bailey House. Now he can sit on his bed
in his 85-square-foot home, with a view of the Hudson River, watch
TV, grab a snack _ or his medications _ from his mini-fridge, or
use his personal bathroom.
``It works for me,'' he said with a grin as jazz wafted from his
stereo.
Behind him, through a window, a sailboat sliced through gusty
winds on its way to the open harbor.
On the Net: <http://www.baileyhouse.org>
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New Voluntary Standards Proposed for Experiments on People
<http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/29/science/29PATI.html>
by PHILIP J. HILTS
The new head of the federal office that oversees research on people
said yesterday that the system was flawed and would be revised to
increase protection for human subjects.
The official, Dr. Greg Koski, said stricter standards were needed
because of the increasing number of experiments involving people.
Dr. Koski, who became director of the Office of Human Research
Protections this month, said he would ask universities to verify
that scientists dealing with human subjects had formal training in
ethics. He also said the review boards at the universities that
approve human experiments must show that they have sufficient staff
members and expertise to conduct proper ethical reviews of proposed
experiments.
In addition, he is asking the Institute of Medicine at the National
Academy of Sciences to devise a way to measure the performance of
the scientists and boards.
The moves come after several lapses in experiments that Dr. Koski
said had shaken public confidence.
Last fall, Jesse Gelsinger, 18, of Tucson, Ariz., died in a gene
therapy experiment. And in the past two years, the federal government
has shut down human research at eight major universities and
hospitals for failure to abide by the nation's ethics rules, and
has cited an additional 34 universities and hospitals for similar
violations, according to an agency within the Department of Health
and Human Services.
Dr. Koski said he hoped that most of the changes could be adopted
voluntarily by research centers. But if they are not, he said,
public sentiment will probably force Congress to mandate such
standards.
"We must move beyond the culture of compliance, to move to a culture
of conscience and responsibility," he said at a news conference at
his office in Washington.
Until now, there has been no certification or accreditation of
scientists or review boards to make sure they have formal ethics
training. Federal officials do not even know how many review boards
there are in the United States, how many experiments are conducted
on humans, or exactly what qualifications researchers and ethics
reviewers have.
Instead, under the system in place since the mid-1970's, researchers
propose experiments on humans to an ethics review board, usually
at their home university or hospital. That board reviews the proposal
to assure that patients are not likely to be harmed and that the
experiment complies with federal ethics rules. Federal oversight
has been minimal.
Dr. Koski said his office had already increased the number of
investigators to six from two.
For now, he said, the certification of scientists and supervisory
boards by universities and medical centers will remain voluntary.
But in the end, he said, his office has the option of suspending
any program that gets federal money to carry out research. Research
carried out with private money is not covered by the system.
Adil E. Shamoo, vice president of Citizens for Responsible Care
and Research, a nonprofit group that has criticized government
supervision of human experiments, said the moves announced by Dr.
Koski were "good first steps."
"It will now depend on how they are carried out," Mr. Shamoo said,
"and whether they can address the weakest link in the system: that
the review boards themselves are employees of the institutions
doing the experiments.
That conflict of interest is the central problem."
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Study: Full Jails Not Lowering Crime
September 28, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Putting more people in prison doesn't automatically result
in less crime, says an organization that advocates alternatives to
incarceration.
Although the study by The Sentencing Project acknowledged that the connection
comes into play quite often, it says that's not automatically the case.
The private group based its findings, released Thursday, on an analysis of
crime statistics from 1991 to 1998 from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.
During that period, overall U.S. crime decreased by 22 percent, the study
said.
During the same time frame, the number of state and federal prisoners across
the country rose by a half, to more than 1.2 million.
However, the Sentencing Project said, much of the reduction in crime rates is
due to the expanding economy, changing demographics and new approaches to
policing, among other factors.
Rising incarceration rates in some states didn't bring about a commensurate
drop in crime, the group said in its report, ``Diminishing Returns: Crime and
Incarceration in the 1990s.'' Some advocates have long argued that some
policymakers try to use tougher penalties as deterrents to crime.
The FBI statistics show that many states where the rates of incarceration
rose saw large reductions in crime, the Sentencing Project acknowledged. But,
the group said, the numbers also show crime rates fell steeply in a few
states with much smaller increases in prison population.
For instance, in Texas the number of prisoners per 100,000 people rose 144
percent from 1991 to 1998, a rate of incarceration that led the nation.
However, the group said, Texas saw a 35 percent drop in crime -- among the
highest of the 50 states.
But Massachusetts also saw a 35 percent drop in crime, while its
incarceration rate rose by only 21 percent, said the group, which drew its
conclusions from an analysis of prison populations and crime rates.
``What this shows us is that continuing to build and fill prisons is a
limited strategy in responding to crime, and that the fiscal cost and the
social cost may be too great to bear, given that we have better approaches to
dealing with these problems,'' said Marc Mauer, the group's executive
director.
New York, which saw its crime rate drop the most precipitously, by 43
percent, saw its incarceration rate rise only 24 percent, the study said.
California, which saw a 36 percent drop in crime, saw its rate of
incarcerations rise 52 percent.
On average, states' rate of incarcerations rose by 47 percent and saw a 15
percent drop in crime. That included a 12 percent drop in violent crime and a
15 percent drop in property crime.
Maine was the only state to show a single-digit increase in incarceration --
2 percent -- but had a drop in crime comparable to many other states. In
Maine, the crime rate dropped 19 percent, the study said.
On the Net:
The Sentencing Project: <http://www.sentencingproject.org>
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Someone's Watching: Online, at Work - Everywhere
<http://foxnews.com/national/092200/privacy_fnc.sml>
Friday, September 22, 2000
NEW YORK - Twenty-year-old Amy Boyer never knew her life was in danger.
A former high school classmate used the Internet to learn Amy's birthday and
Social Security number to find out where she worked. Then he murdered her
and took his own life.
"It's actually obscene what you can find out about people on the Internet,"
the cyberkiller wrote on his personal Web site.
It's a sad reality: In the information age, wherever you go, whatever you
do, you are not alone. And there's little you can do about it.
How does it happen? All a would-be murderer or identity thief needs is your
Social Security number.
"The Social Security number is the de facto national identifier," said James
Huse, inspector general of the Social Security Administration. "It's the
piece that unlocks almost any other identity item that we have."
Information about who you are comes from public documents or credit-rating
services. All it takes to get a slew of personal data on someone is a small
fee paid to a commercial tracking site - and perhaps a bogus story about why
you want the info.
"I think Congress should prohibit companies from selling information to PIs,
lawyers or others, because a stalker or ID thief can masquerade as a lawyer
or private detective," said Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest
Research Group.
But more and more, consumers' records come from consumers themselves.
E-commerce Web sites track visitors by downloading to a customer's computer
a high-tech ID tag called a cookie. Then they can watch where you go on the
Web and record it in their databases - which are often sold to other
companies or marketing firms.
And what about cell phones? All will soon have a chip making it possible for
law enforcement to find out, within 40 feet, where a call originates from.
It may be a life-saving feature in an emergency, but in the wrong hands it's
a tracking device.
Look up as you go about your day and you're liable to see a surveillance
camera. In big cities, you can expect to be on camera an average 76 times in
a single day. Critics say it's a violation of unreasonable search and
seizure.
And is somebody watching you at work? Probably.
According to an American Management Association survey, more than 73 percent
of major U.S. companies snoop on their employees. That figure has doubled in
the past three years, fueled by growing concerns over what workers are doing
on the Internet.
And it's not just advanced technology that can affect your privacy.
Imagine being turned down for a car loan because you once had treatment for
a heart condition. Privacy advocates say it could happen because of a new
law allowing affiliated stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies to
exchange customer files.
Even your neighborhood supermarket might know more about you than you
realize. Bonus cards can track buying habits such as how much liquor and
cigarettes you're taking home.
While some of this might seem trivial, that's part of the problem. We might
not realize how much privacy we have given up until it's too late.
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Security Problems Plague Federal Accounting System
By Kellie Lunney
Full story: <http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1000/100200m1.htm>
Serious computer security problems continue to plague the government's
central accounting system, putting data and dollars at risk.
The General Accounting Office delivered that message in a report released
last week. GAO praised the Treasury Department's Financial Management
Service, or FMS, for making strides in outlining security procedures and
guidance--a recommendation GAO made in its fiscal 1998 report on FMS--but
criticized the organization for poor training of security staff and lax
enforcement of security policies.
FMS oversees the federal government's accounting and reporting systems and
distributes money to most federal agencies. For fiscal year 1999, the
government distributed over $1.7 trillion, mainly for social security and
veterans benefit payments, IRS tax refunds, federal employee salaries, and
contractor payments.
The GAO report said, "The pervasive weaknesses we identified in FMS'
computer controls at most of its data centers during our fiscal year 1999
audit render FMS' overall security control environment ineffective in
identifying, deterring, and responding to computer control weaknesses
promptly. Consequently, billions of dollars and collections are at
significant risk of loss or fraud, sensitive data are at risk of
inappropriate disclosure, and critical computer-based operations are
vulnerable to serious disruptions."
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Linked stories:
********************
Human Rights Act becomes law
<http://itn.co.uk/news/20001002/britain/03legal.shtml>
The Human Rights Act, described as the most significant change to
English law since the Magna Carta, has come into force. The law
gives everyone the right to life and a fair trial, freedom from
torture and freedom of expression.
********************
Web firms still burning through cash
<http://www.msnbc.com/modules/exports/ct_infobeatBIZ.asp?/news/470800.asp>
A survey of Internet companies using data from Pegasus Research International
found that 273 of the 339 firms surveyed burned more cash than they took in.
********************
Disenfranchised
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/10/02/disenfranchised/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=665>
Young black men get singled out among drug offenders for the harshest
punishment, then they lose their right to vote. With laws like this, who
needs Jim Crow? By Arianna Huffington
********************
U.S. Picks New Crypto Standard
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39194,00.html?tw=wn20001002>
It's spelled Rijndael, it's pronounced 'Rhine-dahl,' and it's the new
encryption standard as selected by the U.S. government. It only took 23
years... Declan McCullagh reports from Washington.
********************
RIAA Chief: Piracy Is Doomed
<http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39188,00.html?tw=wn20001002>
RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen has taken her licks from the media, consumers,
and technology industry. Brad King sits down with Rosen in Washington
to discuss why digital piracy must be stopped.
********************
======================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
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