-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 64 - October, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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Contents:
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--Big Brother Capabilities in an Online World
--A Government For The Military-Industrial Complex
--The Feds' Latest Crusade
--Among parents, backlash builds to Ritalin
--Big business has us bang to rights
--reader commentary
Re: Gun control is global flop [RT # 41]
Linked stories:
*Russian Pirates Rule the CDs
*Radio Operator Wants Station Back
*Chicago Elects to End Vote Sales
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Begin stories:
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Big Brother Capabilities in an Online World
Full story here--> <http://www.bernal.co.uk/nota.htm>
State Surveillance In The Internet
Every new technology in history has always first been introduced and
(ab)used by the established
powers, in support of their activities, particularly war and policing, and
as an instrument of controlling
public opinion and suppressing alternative thought and action. At the same
time, every new medium has
always and can always also be used as an instrument of liberation, better
communication, alternative thought and action. Print was the first
important example, the computer is the latest.
Even though, or rather because the computer networks are and will be used
by the existing controlling
powers, they must and will also be used by an increasing number of people
against the powers, and no
amount of electronic surveillance will stop that -apart from the fact that
while surveillance is a reality no
computer net is completely immune against it.
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A Government For The Military-Industrial Complex
<http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1460/a09.html>
Sun, 01 Oct 2000, Boulder News
by Jim Mann
WASHINGTON - What's behind Washington's huge, expensive military
intervention to combat drugs in Colombia?
Last week, the actions of the House Republican leadership suggested one
possible answer:
procurement. The Republican Congress, it appears, wants to help American
defense firms sell helicopters for use in Colombia - and to obtain the
prices they want for these copters.
This is not all that unusual. In fact, it's a classic example of how
Congress sometimes works harder for private defense contractors than for
taxpayers.
Last summer, the Clinton administration and Congress approved the $1.3
billion Plan Colombia, a package of aid (most of it military) designed to
bolster the Bogota government's efforts to eradicate drugs and to combat
traffickers.
On Sept. 21, the House International Relations subcommittee on the Western
Hemisphere summoned representatives of the State and Defense departments to
a hearing on the progress of Plan Colombia.
The executive branch officials came armed with facts and figures on the
details of the program.
But they had barely started before Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., made plain
what the Republican leadership cared most about: concluding a deal for the
use of Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.'s Black Hawk helicopters in Colombia.
Ordinarily, Bereuter wouldn't even have attended this hearing, because he
isn't a member of the subcommittee. But he announced that he had come at
the "personal request" of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
Hastert, he said, was dismayed that it was taking too long for Sikorsky to
obtain a contract for its Black Hawks.
The Republican leadership wanted to know why there had been so many
delays. Congress had approved the purchase of 18 Black Hawk helicopters,
but U.S. officials had subsequently said they might buy a lower
number. Sikorsky was willing to sell 16 Black Hawks for $234 million,
Bereuter said.
What was going on here? At first, it seemed as though the Republicans might
be concerned only about speeding up Plan Colombia. The record shows that
Hastert, to his credit, has taken a personal interest in the issue of
stopping drugs for years, even before he became the House speaker.
Still, Bereuter persisted, growing more and more specific. "The Sikorsky
offer still stands, $234 million for 16 Black Hawks," he told the executive
branch officials. "Is that an understanding?"
Finally, Rand Beers, assistant secretary of State for narcotics programs,
pointed to the underlying issue: In the original Plan Colombia, $234
million was supposed to purchase 18 Black Hawks, and now Sikorsky seemed to
be proposing to supply 16 helicopters for that same $234 million.
"Sikorsky is giving you a number for a lower number of helicopters, and
that's not our objective," Beers said.
In short, the dispute wasn't just about timing, but also about price. And
the House Republican leadership seemed to be weighing in on Sikorsky's side
in its contract negotiations with the Pentagon.
This week, Sikorsky suggested that in Bereuter's effort to help, perhaps he
had gotten his numbers wrong.
"We have said consistently that we would be prepared to deliver 18
helicopters, appropriately configured, for $234 million, presuming timely
contract negotiations with the government," said Scott Seligman, a
spokesman for Sikorsky's parent company, United Technologies.
The point here is not that Republican lawmakers behave differently than the
Democrats. In Congress, being solicitous of defense contractors is a
bipartisan cause.
Sikorsky is located in Connecticut. Earlier this year, Connecticut's two
Democratic senators, Joseph I. Lieberman and Christopher J. Dodd, both
pushed hard for Sikorsky to win congressional approval for the use of Black
Hawks in Colombia.
Rather, the point is that the pressures for contracts and sales in
America's defense industry are so strong that neither of the major parties
can resist them.
In the wake of the end of the Cold War, American companies have been eager
to find new sorts of missions for which they can supply planes and
helicopters. The drug war in Colombia is one such effort.
"The market for military equipment abroad is not great these days, and
obviously these (helicopter) companies have to sustain their production
base," says Gabriel Marcella, a specialist on Latin America at the
U.S. Army War College.
Sikorsky is merely one of many U.S. companies that hope to take part in
Plan Colombia. Last month, the Financial Times listed others, such as
Textron, which is upgrading Huey helicopters, and Lockheed Martin, which
makes early-warning systems. Other smaller, private companies will hire
former American soldiers to help train the Colombian military.
Nearly four decades ago, in January 1961, President Eisenhower warned in
his farewell address about the influence of what he famously called the
"military-industrial complex."
What we're witnessing now is something new. It's the emergence of a
narco-industrial complex - a proliferation of U.S. companies lining up,
with congressional support, to obtain public money for anti-drug campaigns
overseas.
Beware.
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The Feds' Latest Crusade
<http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/columns/0,4164,2637321,00.html>
October 5, 2000
by Lewis Z. Koch, Special To Inter@ctive Week
The U.S. government is now embarking on a new war against teen hackers. It's
likely to be no more successful than our "War on Drugs," but geeky keyboard
desperados, handicapped by raging hormones and other afflictions of puberty,
are much easier and safer marks than well-armed cartel terrorists.
Thus it was that earlier this year, the full force of the federal
government, including the highly secretive Defense Criminal Investigative
Service, marshaled 11 weapons-toting enforcement officers clad in
bulletproof vests. Their target was the home of a 16-year-old South
Floridian, Jonathan James, whose girlfriends thought he was real cool for
being able to hack into computers at the Pentagon, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, BellSouth and, of course - shades of War Games -
the Miami-Dade school system.
A Miami Herald reporter, Martin Merzer, quoted James' father as saying of
his boy: "He's just like your son, just like the boy next door, but a few
steps sharper. I've been in computers for 20 years, and I can't do what he
was doing." It appears that, among other hacks, young James downloaded a
bunch of e-mail from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which Merzer said
was created to "reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, chemical - and
technological - mayhem." James' father said his son told him the agency's
e-mail put him to sleep.
More, bigger, better
The fact that kids like James are more nuisance than danger - the cyberspace
equivalent of kids who toilet-paper houses - is apparently of no importance
to policy-makers. The Department of Justice is asking Congress for new
powers to punish juveniles who experiment with their computers.
A proposed DOJ amendment to Section 5032 of Title 18, the Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention Act, would give federal courts and prosecutors
jurisdiction over juveniles for a specific list of offenses: espionage,
theft of information from a federal computer or unlawful access to a federal
computer. Those seem reasonable enough if the threat is real. But it would
also offer a general provision for "damage" to any computer used in
interstate or foreign commerce - which takes in just about every computer
out there and raises the question of what constitutes damage.
Offenders would be prosecuted as juveniles, not as adults. At present, just
about every state-run juvenile detention facility is horrendously
overcrowded. Perhaps with the precipitous drop in the adult crime rate, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the DOJ have to develop a whole new set
of "enemies" through which they can justify - maybe even increase - their
budgets. Or do they actually believe that the entire teen-age population of
the United States is riddled with hackers, who pose an imminent danger to
society unless convicted and detained?
Since prison facilities are already bulging from the "War on Drugs," maybe
the next president and DOJ, in collusion with the 107th Congress, could
allocate funds to build special federal detention centers for juvenile
computer hackers.
Of course, such a center would end up being a perpetual hackers' summit, a
place for all those young amateurs to graduate as seasoned pros after
sentences spent exchanging their own special hacking techniques, analyzing
and carefully scrutinizing where they tripped up and deliberating on how to
avoid repeating their mistakes. Hey, far cooler than regular school, dude! A
24/7 course in hacking!
Another hacker, another dollar
Maybe they could bring in some other networked kiddy criminals for peer
counseling - like 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed, of Cedar Grove, N.J. Lebed was
the kid who made $273,000 by illegally promoting stocks on the Internet in
what the Securities and Exchange Commission called a "pump and dump" scheme.
It seems that Lebed would go into a chat room or log on to a bulletin board
and announce that a penny stock, about which he had "secret, inside"
information, was going to rise to $20. Lebed didn't have to go to jail, but
he did have to return all the money plus $12,000 in interest.
Lebed's father said of his son's intrepid behavior: "So they pick on a kid."
Gretchen Morgenson, author of The New York Times "Market Watch" column, made
the same observation, albeit a little more pointedly: How different were
Lebed's actions, she asked, from those by Wall Street equity analysts whose
firms financially benefit from the price targets they put on stocks? "And
how, precisely, do Jonathan [Lebed]'s activities differ from the gunning of
stocks by big investors at the end of each day or each quarter, a practice
widely known as window-dressing, to make their performance look better and
attract more investors?" Morgenson wondered. "What about the accounting
games corporate managements play to keep their stocks aloft?"
She capped it all by observing: "The manipulations Jonathan [Lebed] was
accused of involved misleading statements. Many of today's most popular
accounting tricks mislead too: for example, so-called pro forma numbers that
reflect only what companies want investors to see, rather than the entire
picture."
A modest proposal
Everyone knows there are country club federal penitentiaries, places with
tennis courts, libraries and classes, where white-collar corporate
miscreants wind up. Without spending a great deal more, the feds could set
up a juvenile wing of the country club pens. Then it would be easy to set up
a mentoring system. You could put one computer-genius kid together with one
top-notch, cunning white-collar criminal. They could - how do social workers
put it? - oh yes, they could bond with one another. Won't that be
constructive! Kids can learn a lot from adults.
There are great benefits for the adults as well. Most grown-ups aren't very
computer-literate. Often, the best they can do is read e-mail. In a sort of
reverse apprenticeship, the kids could help the adults to develop their
computer skills to more criminally advantageous levels. Who knows? Some
long-term partnerships might even develop.
Even now I can hear fading ghosts in the Oval Office charting moves against
mostly imagined enemies:
"We haven't used the [Federal] Bureau [of Investigation], and we haven't
used the Justice Department, but things are going to change now," Richard M.
Nixon declared shortly after his re-election in 1972.
"That's an exciting prospect!" gushed White House counsel John Dean.
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Among parents, backlash builds to Ritalin
<http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/10/06/fp1s4-csm.shtml>
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2000
By Alexandra Marks ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
NEW YORK
One day last year, a social worker came knocking on the door of Michael
Carroll's home in West Berne, N.Y.
The trouble: The father of four had been reported to Child Protective
Services for putting his seven-year-old son, Kyle, at risk.
Stunned, Mr. Carroll asked what he'd done.
The answer infuriated him and put the Carroll family at the center of a
heated debate about the educational system and the larger culture's
increasing use of psychotropic drugs, such as Ritalin, to cope with
difficult kids.
Carroll's supposed misdeed was not abusing the drugs, but refusing them.
He'd been reported by the local school district for taking Kyle off Ritalin.
The stimulant, whose use in the United States has increased 700 percent in
the past decade, had, Carroll says, turned the once-rambunctious boy into a
withdrawn insomniac with no appetite. And his reading level, which was the
original cause of Carroll's concern, had not improved.
"The school never objected, it just immediately called child protection,
without any contact with me whatsoever," he says. "It was crazy."
While the case may be extreme, it is not unique. Parents who question the
use of Ritalin increasingly find themselves at odds with educators,
psychologists, and a medical community firmly convinced of the drug's
ability to help hyperactive kids lead relatively normal and stable lives.
The controversy has prompted a series of congressional hearings, proposals
for a national policy to guide schools in their advocacy of the drug, and
several class-action lawsuits. The suits charge the American Psychiatric
Association and the drugmaker Novartis with conspiring to promote the
fraudulent use of Ritalin in American children.
"The drugging of children has gotten so out of hand that America is waking
up to this," says Peter Breggin, a critic of the use of Ritalin. "This is a
national catastrophe. I'm seeing children who are normal who are on five
psychiatric drugs."
But advocates of the use of medicine to help disruptive and impulsive
youngsters worry the controversy will create a backlash that could prevent
millions of children from getting the help they need to focus and do better
in school.
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 3 to 5 percent of
American children - as many as 6 million - suffer from attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). If untreated, NIMH says, the disorder could
lead to serious problems in later life. In the largest clinical study of its
kind, NIMH researchers concluded that Ritalin can eliminate the symptoms up
to 85 percent of ADHD children. Currently, Ritalin is prescribed to as many
as 2 million US children.
"People need to stand back from the issue and let reason and factual
understanding of what these medications do and don't do prevail," says
Patricia Dalton, a clinical psychologist in Washington. But she is also
troubled by the intervention of child welfare services and the courts in the
Carroll case. Short of a life-threatening situation, she says, parents
should have sovereignty in making decisions that affect their children.
"But if you see a child that improves greatly on medication, that's
important, too," Dr. Dalton says. "If they're better able to learn and
function, you have to look at the cost of not being on it."
>From the start, Carroll says he simply wanted Kyle to get special education
to improve his reading. After local pediatrician prescribed Ritalin, the
school gave Kyle speech and occupational therapy. But Carroll saw that as a
way for the school to say Kyle was getting special help, without really
addressing his reading problem.
"From the beginning ... I kept asking for special-education classes," he
says. "They just wanted him to sit still and to push him through the
system."
After child welfare officials told Carroll to put his son back on Ritalin or
risk losing custody on grounds of neglect, Kyle resumed taking the drug.
But this summer, a judge ruled that if Carroll could find another doctor to
say Ritalin was unnecessary, Kyle could stop taking it. Carroll succeeded.
Since August, Kyle has not used Ritalin. He's regained his appetite, and his
father says Kyle is his old outgoing self and is doing well in
special-education classes at a different school.
Lawrence Diller, author of "Running on Ritalin," says more and more parents
who buck the medication find themselves, like the Carrolls, at odds with
schools. The problem is indicative of a growing cultural acceptance of what
he calls a misperception - that physiological factors are primarily
responsible for influencing children's misbehavior and underperformance.
"In most of these situations, the kids are dealing with a host of issues,"
says Dr. Diller. "What's being overlooked is that there are alternative
strategies to medication that work well for hard-to-handle kids."
The problem is they take more time, money, and effort than Ritalin. But
class-action lawsuits in California and New Jersey, brought last month,
accuse the makers of Ritalin and APA of worse than expedience. They claim
the two conspired to create a market for the drug by concocting the ADHD
diagnosis and putting out pamphlets in schools that touted the drug's
effectiveness without advising that it has "no long-term effect" in
improving academic performance or in helping kids overcome hyperactivity.
In a prepared statement, the APA contends that's "unfounded and
preposterous." At a hearing last week in Congress, the APA's Dr. David
Fassler defended its definition of the disorder. "The diagnostic criteria
are ... the product of extensive and numerous research studies."
But Breggin and other critics say there is still nothing physical that a
doctor can point to, besides behavior, to determine if a child has ADHD.
That, among other factors, led the Frasers of Rockville, Md., to question
the pattern of increasing drug use their son was subjected to.
Andrew has a high IQ. When he was in second grade, a teacher recommended he
get treatment for ADHD. After a visit to a doctor, Andrew was put on
Ritalin. But, like many children on the stimulant, he eventually had trouble
sleeping. To make a long story short, side effects of one drug were
addressed by prescribing additional drugs - until Andrew was taking four
psychotropic medications at once, including Prozac.
The Frasers, deciding enough was enough, looked for alternative treatments.
Andrew's now in eighth grade in a private school. "He's doing great. He's
not taking any medications at all, his behavior has improved," says Fraser.
"There's no question in anybody's mind that getting him off the medication
was the right thing to do."
Fraser says he never felt pressured by the schools to medicate his son. But
when he began the withdrawal process, it was clear the school would have
preferred Andrew continue with the medication. "He is an active and an
energetic kid, and I think a lot of times schools are looking for that
leveling device, which certainly these medications can be," he says.
The Frasers say they learned a difficult lesson themselves. In retrospect,
they wish they'd never put their son on the drugs, and instead, had taken a
look at their family situation and made some hard career choices so they
could spend more time with him.
"If you have a child that has a higher level of need, maybe more than you'd
like, you have to bite the bullet," says Fraser. "That's what you have to
do, labor in anonymity and become that world-class parent."
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Big business has us bang to rights
<http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4072040,00.html>
Corporations behave as if they are more human than we are
by George Monbiot, Guardian
Thursday October 5, 2000
The location of the boundaries of our humanity is perhaps the key moral
question of our age. Whether a test-tube baby should be selected so that
his cells can be used to save the life of his sister, whether one conjoined
twin should die so that another can live, whether partial human embryos
should be cloned and reared for organ transplants confront us with problems
we have never faced before. Medical advances, both wonderful and
terrifying, are eroding the edges of our identity.
The new Human Rights Act is intended to provide us with some of the
guidelines we need to help sort this out. It insists that we have an
inalienable right both to life itself and to the freedoms without which
that life would be wretched. But while the rights it guarantees have proved
fairly easy to define, it is, curiously, the concept of humanity which
turns out to be precarious.
Human beings, you might have thought, are animate, bipedal creatures a bit
like you and me. But the lawyers would have it otherwise. Big companies
might not breathe or speak or eat (though they certainly reproduce), but
they are now using human rights laws to claim legal protections and
fundamental liberties. As their humanity develops, so ours diminishes.
Last month, a quarrying company called Lafarge Redland Aggregates took the
Scottish environment minister to court on the grounds that its human rights
had been breached. Article 6 of the European Convention determines that
human beings should be allowed a fair hearing of cases in which they are
involved "within a reasonable time". Lafarge is insisting that the results
of the public inquiry into its plan to dig up a mountain in South Harris
have been unreasonably delayed. The company, as the campaigning academic
Alastair McIntosh has argued, may have good reason to complain, but to use
human rights law to press its case sets a frightening precedent.
It is a concept developed in the US. The 14th amendment to the constitution
was introduced in 1868 with the aim of extending to blacks the legal
protections enjoyed by whites: equality under the law, the right to life,
liberty and the enjoyment of property. By 1896, a series of extraordinary
rulings by a corrupt, white and corporate-dominated judiciary had succeeded
in denying these rights to the black people they were supposed to protect,
while granting them instead to corporations.
Though black people eventually reclaimed their legal protections, corporate
human rights were never rescinded. Indeed, while they have progressively
extended the boundaries of their own humanity, the companies have ensured
that ours is ever more restrained.
Firms in the US have argued that regulating their advertisements or
restricting their political donations infringes their "human right" to
"free speech". They have insisted that their right to the "peaceful
enjoyment of possessions" should oblige local authorities to grant them
planning permission, and prevent peaceful protesters from gathering on
their land.
At the same time, however, they have helped to ensure that the "social,
economic and cultural" rights, which might have allowed us to challenge
their dominance, remain merely "aspirational". As the solicitor Daniel
Bennett has pointed out, article 13 of the European Convention, by which we
could have contested the corporations' absolute control of fundamental
resources, has been deliberately excluded from our own Human Rights Act.
The rise of corporate human rights has been accompanied by an erosion of
responsibilities. Limited liability allows firms to shed their obligations
towards their creditors. Establishing subsidiaries - regarded in law as
separate entities - allows them to shed their obligations towards the rest
of us. And while they can use human rights laws against us, we can't use
human rights laws against them, as they were developed to constrain only
the activities of states. As far as the law goes, corporations are now more
human than we are.
The potential consequences are momentous. Governments could find themselves
unable to prevent the advertising of tobacco, the dumping of toxic waste or
the export of arms to dictatorships. Yet in Britain the public discussion
of this issue has so far been confined to the pages of the Stornoway Gazette.
The creatures we invented to serve us are taking over. While we have been
fretting about the power of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, our
domination by bodies we created but have lost the means to control has
already arrived. It is surely inconceivable that we should grant human
rights to computers. Why then should they be enjoyed by corporations?
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reader commentary
Re: Gun control is global flop [RT # 41]
Thank you for having an item that is pro-gun rights. I'm not saying you need
to take a stand in either direction, but it's good to see a progressive
person who is willing to pass along a criticism of gun banning. I truly
DON'T see what is progressive or Left to wanting effective (armed) force
monopolized into the hands of the police and the military -- but this is all
gun "control" really does.
Josh
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Linked stories:
********************
Russian Pirates Rule the CDs
<http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39234,00.html?tw=wn20001007>
Think it's hard to keep tabs on music pirates in the United States?
Try regulating the former Soviet Union, where the Russian Mafia appears
well on the way to pirating the music and entertainment businesses.
********************
Radio Operator Wants Station Back
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39288,00.html?tw=wn20001006>
A man who operated a low-power radio station without a spectrum
license takes his case to the Supreme Court. Does the case hold merit?
********************
Chicago Elects to End Vote Sales
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39282,00.html?tw=wn20001006>
Election officials in the Windy City ask federal and state prosecutors
to shut down voteauction.com. The website wants to sell absentee
ballots to the highest bidder.
********************
======================================================
"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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