We're from the government, and we're here to grope you...

[R.A. Hettinga]

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USNews.com

Home Issues 11/29/04
Nation & World
 An Intrusive new search

 Thanksgiving travelers may be in for a bit of a shock as they plod through
security lines at the nation's airports. Passengers chosen for secondary
screening or whose clothing appears suspicious or bulky are now subject to
frisking--in a pretty intrusive way. In late September, the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA) began allowing security checkpoint screeners
to manually pat down women's breasts and the genital and derriere regions
of both sexes during searches. The point is to find hidden explosives while
machines that might perform the job are still being tested. "I know it's
not pleasant," says Rep. John Mica, chairman of the House aviation
subcommittee, "but until we get the technology, what are the options?"
   The air marshals hasn't exactly taken off

The new policy reflects an increasing sense of urgency about the lack of
explosives-detection equipment. Today, only a small percentage of carry-on
luggage and passengers is tested for bombs. In its final report, the 9/11
commission said the TSA must give "priority attention" to checking
passengers for explosives. In August, two Russian airliners crashed, almost
certainly because of explosives two Chechen women had concealed beneath
their clothing--underscoring the danger.

Complaints. The TSA policy says that passengers can request that the new
screening be done in a private room and requires that the frisker be the
same gender as the traveler. But graduate student Sommer Gentry, 27, says
that male screeners at Boston's Logan International Airport tried to pat
her down while a female screener at Baltimore-Washington International
Airport roughly jabbed a metal-detector wand between her legs. "How can I
feel safe," Gentry said, " when the TSA is ordering me to let strangers put
their hands all over my most intimate places?" TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield
says the new policy generates only about a dozen complaints a week, but
there have been reports of passengers, mostly women, growing angry during
searches.

The TSA is currently testing machines that could eliminate the need for
such frisking, like "trace portals" that blow puffs of air at passengers to
dislodge and sniff for bits of explosive material. But it will be a while
before the machines are ready for widespread use. In the meantime, the TSA
will continue the pat-downs and train screeners to explain the process more
carefully. "These are very valid security measures," says Hatfield. "They
get at a very specific potential threat." But that's not enough for Gentry.
"I am now," she says, "an ex-frequent flier." -Samantha Levine

- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Microchip passport critics say ID theft possible

[R.A. Hettinga]

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USA Today



Microchip passport critics say ID theft possible
The Associated Press
The United States hasn't issued any microchip-equipped passports yet, but
as the Department of State tests different prototypes, the international
standards for the passports are under fire from privacy advocates who worry
the technology won't protect travelers from identity thieves.

 The American Civil Liberties union has raised alarms and even an executive
at one of the companies developing a prototype for the State Department
calls the international standards woefully inadequate.

 The international standards for "electronic" passports were set by the
U.N.-affiliated International Civil Aviation Organization, which has worked
on standards for machine-readable passports since 1968.

 On the latest passports, the agency has "taken a 'keep it simple'
approach, which, unfortunately, really disregards a basic privacy approach
and leaves out the basic security methods we would have expected to have
been incorporated for the security of the documents," said Neville
Pattinson, an executive at Axalto North America, which is working on a
prototype U.S. electronic passport.

 As part of heightened security post-Sept. 11, all new U.S. passports
issued by the end of 2005 are expected to have a chip containing the
holders' name, birth date and issuing office, as well as a "biometric"
identifier - a photo of the holders' face. The photo is the international
standard for biometrics, but countries are free to add other biometrics,
such as fingerprints, for greater accuracy.

 Privacy advocates have complained about the security standards for the
passports, but Pattinson is the most prominent person involved in their
creation to express concern that they could become prey for identity
thieves if safeguards aren't standardized.

 A slide in a presentation he gives says, "Don't lose the public's
confidence at the get go." Another asks, "Who is up for a black eye?"

 The international passport standards call for "a very sophisticated smart
card device," that uses a chip and an antenna embedded in the passports'
covers, Pattinson said.

 Unlike cheaper and dumber RFID tags, the passport chips would be
microprocessors that could send one piece of information at a time in
answer to queries from a machine reader. They could also be equipped with
multiple layers of encryption for security.

 The international standards spell out ways the passports could incorporate
more protection from identity thieves, but they make those methods optional.

 Under the standards, information on the chip could be picked up by someone
who wires a briefcase with a reader, then swings it within inches of a
passports, Pattinson said. Over a greater distance, an interloper could
eavesdrop on border control devices reading the passports, he said.

 "There's no security built into it," said Barry Steinhardt, director of
the technology and liberty program, at the American Civil Liberties Union.
"This will enable identity theft and put Americans at some risk when they
travel internationally."

 One rudimentary way to protect electronic passports from identity thieves
is to wrap them in tinfoil, which blocks radio waves. A single size Doritos
bag would do the trick. Protecting border control agents' readers with a
metal shield would protect against eavesdropping.

 The International Civil Aviation Organization and State Department say
they're looking at more organized methods.

 The privacy issues "have come up and they are being looked at," said Denis
Schagnon, a spokesman for ICAO. "This is a process that is being
implemented over the next few years, it is not something that happens
overnight." One way to fight identity theft is already in the standards, he
said: The passports will have built-in encrypted authentication to let
electronic readers know they are original documents, not forgeries.

 The international standard "is obviously a baseline," said Angela Aggeler,
spokesperson for the bureau of consular affairs at the State Department.
"This is something we continue to develop and work on. (Privacy) is the
thing that is driving a lot of our considerations. Personal privacy issues
are of paramount consideration."

 Other countries are also making the switch to microchipped, biometric
passports, at U.S. request. Under the Patriot Act, visitors from 27
countries whose citizens don't need visas to visit the United States will
need electronic passports, too.

 The United States originally asked that visitors from those countries have
the electronic passports by this October. President Bush in August gave the
countries an extra year to issue them; they will be required by next
October.

 In testimony before a House committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell
said that other countries were finding the switch "daunting," as was the
United States.

 The Governme

Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[R.A. Hettinga]

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At 11:21 AM -0800 11/22/04, John Young wrote:
>Every application of US military might since WW2 has failed.

Korea. Yes. Korea.

Hell, the entire Cold War, John. Including your beloved Viet Nam, which was
a *battle*, not a war in same. When Castro, and North Korea, etc., finally
fall, then the cold war will be over. Heck, when China's current
gerontocracy dies off and has an *election*, the war will be over. They're
already starting to have private property. So much for "communal"
ownership. Once property is completely transferrable, the last nail will be
in the coffin.

Just because, like some ancient techtonic seafloor, your political compass
ossified in the general direction of Moscow, ca 1965, doesn't mean that the
magnetic pole's there anymore, John. Heck, that pole's actually flipped
polarity, last time I looked.

The current war against western civilization started in the 1920's, when
Qutb started writing his Moslem triumphalist blather in reaction to the
complete collapse of the Turkish Caliphate in the wake of World War I.
It'll be finished when the residents of its modern equivalent has property
rights and personal freedom.

As for the the article that started this thread, I'm merely pointing out
that we're entering a period of *Republican* triumphalism. That it has
gotten completely up your nose is no surprise, of course.

Cheers,
RAH

- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[R.A. Hettinga]

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At 10:38 AM -0500 11/22/04, John Kelsey wrote:
>we need people to do the occupying,

I'm pretty heretical about this. I think if we had decapitated Iraq, went
after our military objectives, like securing what was a threat to us,
including Iraq's senior military and political leadership and their weapons
stockpiles, and left political order to emerge there on its own, like we
did in Afghanistan, we could have done it with Rumsfeld's original 50,000
troop estimate.

No. Seriously. :-).

Cheers,
RAH
- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[osint] Man returned to France after U.S. refuses entry

[R.A. Hettinga]

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To: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thread-Index: AcTQKrhgI3WPsIUuRROdx12oO2BMqgADm0dw
From: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 21:16:14 -0500
Subject: [osint] Man returned to France after U.S. refuses entry
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]




Man returned to France after U.S. refuses entry
Officials: Traveler appeared on no-fly list

(CNN) -- A traveler departed on a flight to France Sunday after
authorities refused him entry to the United States, a spokesman for the
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said.

Authorities identified the traveler as being on a so-called no-fly list
on Saturday, and diverted his Paris-to-Washington flight to Bangor,
Maine, where it was met by federal officials, the Transportation
Security Administration said.

The man was taken off the plane, and another man traveling with him
chose to depart the aircraft. The Air France flight then proceeded to
Washington Dulles International Airport without the two men, who spent
the night in Bangor's Penobscot County Jail.

Sgt. Steven Slowik, shift supervisor at the jail, identified the men as
Ahmed Lhacti, 47, and Mohammad Oukassou, 76, both Moroccan.

Slowik said federal authorities had not told jail officials which man
was on the no-fly list, or why.

U.S. authorities use no-fly lists to screen suspected terrorists from
flying on airlines. Due to mistaken identity, some travelers have been
wrongly denied permission to fly or to enter the United States.

While the men were being processed in Bangor, agents determined that the
man on the no-fly list was traveling with an expired passport, and he
was denied entry, said Barry Morrissey with U.S. Customs and Border
Protection.

The man's apparent traveling companion chose to return to Paris with him
Sunday.

A TSA spokeswoman said Saturday that Air France should not have allowed
the passenger to board the flight to the United States while in Paris.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/21/flight.diverted/index.html



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- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[R.A. Hettinga]

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At 8:26 PM -0800 11/21/04, John Young wrote:

>Jesus, Bob, this and the Schwartz hosannah for Free Fallujah
>are about as bad a puke as anything you've posted.

and...

>BTW, Bob, what's your draft status?

Born in 1959. One of two years in most of the last century that were
draft-exempt.

:-)

By the way, John, did you know that Bush Is Going To Revive The Draft???

Or was it that Bush Lied and People Died???

Or maybe, it was that John Kerry Was In Viet Nam???

One man's "puke" is another man's "original thought", apparently.

Cheers,
RAH

- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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The Yikes Years

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
The Yikes Years
Life as the world's lone superpower is beginning to make the Cold War look easy

 By David Von Drehle

 Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W16

 The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak observed that "history
cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing." Which was an
interesting assertion from a man who saw, among other clearly historic
events, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the Stalinist
terror and World War II.

But let's work with Boris a little. No doubt he was correct in the sense
that history sort of sneaks up on us. Day after day, stuff happens, and
some of it is strange, some is unsettling, some is stirring, some is
portentous. But we don't often know, in real time, whether these various
happenings are adding up to anything meaningful enough to be called
"history."

Yet there comes a day when you look out the window and notice that the lawn
is extremely shaggy. You may not have seen the grass growing, but suddenly
it's so high you can no longer find the dog's chew toys or the baseball
glove you asked your kid 400 times to put away. And then it rains for three
straight days and you realize there is no way your lawn mower can get
through the sopping wet, jungle-thick morass without making a terrible mess
of the mower, the lawn, your shoes . . .

 Based on interviews with esteemed experts, the perusal of a stack of dense
tomes, a plodding trip through thousands of pages of knotty articles in
learned journals, plus the findings of assorted blue-ribbon federal
commissions and weeks of squint-eyed reflection, I can report that this is
precisely where America finds itself today.

We are up to our shins in the sloppy grass of history.

Maybe you have noticed. The past half-dozen years or so, strange things,
unsettling things, stirring things, portentous things have been happening
right and left. The decade of the 1990s danced in with such promise. No
more Cold War. No more Evil Empire. The Persian Gulf War required a mere
four days of land operations and seemed to spell the end of that gloomy,
doubt-America malaise widely known as the "Vietnam syndrome." For a moment,
it genuinely seemed that the most interesting question a president could
face was, "Boxers or briefs?"

Then:

February 1998. A bloodthirsty zealot with a billionaire father declared war
on America. Weird. From some cave or compound in Afghanistan, Osama bin
Laden dispatched a fatwa to a London newspaper announcing the sacred duty
of Muslims to kill Americans anywhere they could find us. Only a handful of
us even noticed. But this strange event turned out to be truly historic.
After all, how many rich fanatics have declared war on an entire country?

And how many, within six months, have managed to blow up two U.S. embassies?

Our elected leaders began making their own sort of history. On December 19,
1998, the designated speaker of the House, Louisiana congressman Bob
Livingston, marched onto the floor of Congress, announced he was quitting
on account of a sex scandal, and called on President Clinton to do
likewise. That certainly felt new. The rich guy in Afghanistan was trying
to have a war with us, but our government had painfully snagged on what we
were calling "zipper problems." Yet this wasn't even the biggest story of
the day, because Livingston's speech was a footnote to the fact that the
House impeached a president for only the second time in U.S. history.

Then bin Laden's troops bombed, and nearly sank, a U.S. Navy destroyer.

Then came a deadlocked presidential election, the first in more than a century.

All this played out against a backdrop of dazzling new technologies and
dizzying new wealth. Men and women barely out of college were making and
losing fortunes that might have turned John D. Rockefeller's head -- and
how? Strange, unsettling stuff: data harvesting, digital pet-food sales,
cooking the books.

And then, bin Laden brought his war to the American mainland. Hitler
couldn't get here. Brezhnev couldn't get here. But the radical Islamists
managed to hit us harder than we had been hit at home since the Civil War.

Followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. Some people have begun using the phrase
"World War IV." (No, you didn't miss one: WWIII is what used to be called
the Cold War.)

 Rogue states are developing nukes.

There's a plague decimating Africa.

The polar ice caps are melting.

It's no wonder our civic mood is grouchy. We are bombarded by banner
headlines, caught in CAPS LOCK mode, deluged with dire declarations. Tom
Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the Me Decade. We're living in the Yikes Years.

BACK IN THE SUNLIT ERA WHEN THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN, before all hell
broke loose, a theorist named Francis Fukuyama published an influential
essay announcing "The End of History." It was a highly philosophical piece
having to do with the ideological triumph of democracy

Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[R.A. Hettinga]

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The Green Side

Sunday, November 21, 2004



 Email from Dave - Nov 19, 04

Dear Dad -

Just came out of the city and I honestly do not know where to start.  I am
afraid that whatever I send you will not do sufficient honor to the men who
fought and took Fallujah. 

 Shortly before the attack, Task Force Fallujah was built.  It consisted of
Regimental Combat Team 1 built around 1st Marine Regiment and Regimental
Combat Team 7 built around 7th Marine Regiment.  Each Regiment consisted of
two Marine Rifle Battalions reinforced and one Army mechanized infantry
battalion.

Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT-1) consisted of 3rd Light Armored
Reconnaissance Battalion (3rd LAR), 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines (3/5); 3rd
Battalion, 1st Marines (3/1)and 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry (2/7).  RCT-7
was slightly less weighted but still a formidable force.  Cutting a swath
around the city was an Army Brigade known  as Blackjack.  The Marine RCT's
were to assault the city while Blackjack kept the enemy off of the backs of
the assault force.

The night prior to the actual invasion, we all moved out into the desert
just north of the city.  It was something to see.  You could just feel the
intensity in the Marines and Soldiers.  It was all business.  As the day
cleared, the Task Force began striking targets and moving into final attack
positions.  As the invasion force commenced its movement into attack
positions, 3rd LAR led off RCT-1's offensive with an attack up a peninsula
formed by the Euphrates River on the west side of the city.  Their mission
was to secure the Fallujah Hospital and the two bridges leading out of the
city.  They executed their tasks like clockwork and smashed the enemy
resistance holding the bridges.  Simultaneous to all of this, Blackjack
sealed the escape routes to the south of the city.  As invasion day dawned,
the net was around the city and the Marines and Soldiers knew that the
enemy that failed to escape was now sealed.

3/5 began the actual attack on the city by taking an apartment complex on
the northwest corner of the city.  It was key terrain as the elevated
positions allowed the command to look down into the attack lanes.  The
Marines took the apartments quickly and moved to the rooftops and began
engaging enemy that were trying to move into their fighting positions.  The
scene on the rooftop was surreal.  Machine gun teams were running boxes of
ammo up 8 flights of stairs in full body armor and carrying up machine guns
while snipers engaged enemy shooters.  The whole time the enemy was firing
mortars and rockets at the apartments.  Honest to God, I don't think I saw
a single Marine even distracted by the enemy fire.  Their squad leaders,
and platoon commanders had them prepared and they were executing their
assigned tasks.

As mentioned, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry joined the Regiment just prior to
the fight.  In fact, they started showing up for planning a couple of weeks
in advance.  There is always a professional rivalry between the Army and
the Marine Corps but it was obvious from the outset that these guys were
the real deal.  They had fought in Najaf and were eager to fight with the
Regiment in Fallujah.  They are exceptionally well led and supremely
confident. 

 2/7 became our wedge.  In short, they worked with 3rd Battalion, 1st
Marines.  We were limited in the amount of prep fires that we were allowed
to fire on the city prior to the invasion.  This was a point of some 
consternation to the forces actually taking the city.  Our compensation was
to turn to 2/7 and ask them to slash into the city and create as much
turbulence as possible for 3/1 to follow.  Because of the political
reality, the Marine Corps was also under pressure to "get it done
quickly."  For this reason, 2/7 and 3/1 became the penetration force into
the city. 

 Immediately following 3/5's attack on the apartment buildings, 3/1 took
the train station on the north end of the city.   While the engineers blew
a breach through the train trestle, the Cavalry soldiers poured through
with their tanks and Bradley's and chewed an opening in the enemy defense. 
3/1 followed them through until they reached a phase[line  deep into the
northern half of the city.  The Marine infantry along with a few tanks then
turned to the right and attacked the heart of the enemy defense.  The
fighting was tough as the enemy had the area dialed in with mortars.  3/5
then attacked into the northwest corner of the city.  This fight continued
as both Marine rifle battalions clawed their way into the city on different
axis. 

 There is an image burned into my brain that I hope I never forget.  We
came up behind 3/5 one day as the lead squads were working down the
Byzantine streets of the Jolan area.  An assault team of two Marines ran
out from behind cover and put a rocket into a wall of an enemy
strongpoint.  Before the smoke cleared the squad  behi

Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism

[R.A. Hettinga]

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TCS: Tech Central Station -
 
Ryan H. Sager


Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism

By Ryan Sager
 Published 
 11/19/2004 


Libertarians need to get serious about foreign policy.

That's the proposition I put forward earlier this week on my blog,
Miscellaneous Objections, as part of a broader discussion of the future of
libertarianism, and it has drawn a number of interesting -- and often
heated -- responses.

Questions of foreign policy have always been difficult for those of us who
espouse a philosophy of limited government domestically, and they have only
grown more difficult, though at the same time more critical, since
September 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, instead of reassessing their minimalist instincts when it
comes to intervention abroad, many in the institutional centers of the
libertarian movement -- principally at the Cato Institute and, to a lesser
extent, at Reason magazine -- have remained mired in a pre-9/11 mindset.

Here, I would like to address some of the key arguments people are making
against both the need for a coherent (or at least vaguely cohesive)
libertarian foreign policy and the premise that one doesn't exist already.

"We're libertarians, we don't need to agree on anything."

The most common response to any call for libertarians to rethink their
stances on foreign policy is that there's no reason that libertarians
should all have to agree on one approach. True enough, if libertarianism is
a debating club. But that sort of thinking is a bit facile if libertarians
hope to have any impact on politics and public policy.

And we should want that. We are not powerless. This year, a Rasmussen
survey estimated that libertarians make up roughly 10% of the electorate --
and that's just self-identified libertarians. People who share libertarian
beliefs in small government and social tolerance likely make up another
10%-20% of the electorate.

In a 50-50 political landscape -- or even a 51-48 landscape -- that's real
power. When libertarians are so united on domestic issues (taxes, Social
Security, spending, drug laws, gay marriage, etc.), is it not worth it to
begin a serious debate about what libertarians believe about foreign policy
and what ideas we can offer in the War on Terror?

Foreign policy, with the focus right now on the war in Iraq, is the primary
issue that dilutes the libertarian voting bloc. Since similar issue are
likely to define the next few federal elections -- at the very least --
libertarians are going to have to reach a rough consensus of some kind.
Otherwise, their votes will perpetually be split between the two parties,
lessening their leverage with regard to each.

Libertarianism can, of course, continue to exist in such a state. But it
would enjoy less sway within its traditional home, the Republican Party,
while at the same time never making a full move to the Democratic Party.

That's why, for those of us who believe in a muscular foreign policy -- or
at least a more-than-minimal one -- it is worth engaging our libertarian
friends, to at least see how far apart we are.

What will not work is the current attitude in some libertarian circles that
the focus can be kept on domestic issues -- where we agree with each other
and have more experience -- while the national debate passes by us.

"What exactly do you mean by 'serious'?"

The first response of libertarians accused of not being "serious" about
foreign policy is to suspect they are really being called wimps for not
supporting the war in Iraq.

The question of Iraq is inextricable from this debate, but it is not
central. People of good will and good judgment disagreed about the Iraq
invasion before it happened, and we all have our various assessments of how
it has turned out so far.

The question now, however, is how are libertarians dealing with the Iraq
issue as it stands today? There is a strong temptation for them to say,
"Hey, it's not our problem." But that's obviously not very helpful.

Nonetheless, that would be a fairly accurate description of the output of
the Cato Institute foreign-policy staff since the war started.

* On Dec. 13, 2003 -- after the March 2003 invasion -- Cato published a
policy analysis titled, "Iraq: The Wrong War." ("We told you so!")

* On Jan. 5, 2004, Cato published, "Can Iraq Be Democratic?" (Cato's
answer: "No.")

* This June, Cato published the book, "Exiting Iraq." The book calls for a
withdrawal date from Iraq of -- wait for it -- Jan. 31, 2005. (That's a
little over two months from now.)

* Since the start of the war, Cato has also called for the United States to
withdraw all troops from the Gulf region -- even suggesting that we reverse
the long-standing policy of deploying a carrier battle group in the Persian
Gulf. (Talk about a surrender. But at least terrorists have never taken
Western withdrawal as a sign of weakness and an invitation to further
attacks -- oh, wait.)

Now

Long Live Free Fallujah!

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Tech Central Station  
Long Live Free Fallujah!

By Stephen Schwartz
 Published 
 11/19/2004 


With the liberation of Fallujah and the fall of the jihadist regime in the
town, it is apparent that American media intend to keep their story on
message: the message being that the U.S. military operation there has
failed and that Fallujans, and Iraqis in general, still hate the
intervention forces.   

 At the same time, other reports tell a more significant and eloquent
story: the jihadists had set up a Taliban-style dictatorship, in which
women who did not cover their entire bodies, people listening to music, and
members of spiritual Sufi orders -- that is, ordinary Fallujans -- were
subject to torture and execution.
 
 The Fallujans have learned the same lesson the Shias learned before them,
and the Afghans before them: U.S. boots on Muslim soil may be onerous, but
American military action is preferable to the unspeakably vicious
criminality of Islamist extremists financed, recruited, and otherwise
encouraged by Wahhabism, the state religion in Saudi Arabia.

 When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge almost 30 years ago, Western media
reported it as the liberation of a city. Noam Chomsky hailed the forced
evacuation of Cambodian towns as a noble social experiment. But many
journalists were soon forced to record the truth about Khmer Rouge cruelty.
 
 It took longer for Western, and especially American media, to stop
glamorizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Stalinist guerrillas in El
Salvador, and to admit that the masses of people in those countries
rejected their claims to represent them. An editor at the San Francisco
Chronicle, where I worked, on the day after Violeta Chamorro (remember
her?) won election in Managua in 1990, told me, "Nicaragua is no longer a
news story for us." I asked, "is that because there will be no more
violence?" He said, "No, it's because the U.S. is no longer a target." I am
sure he meant "a target of our reporting."

Since the Vietnam era, American journalists seem to operate by an ethic
reversing the infamous slogan of antiwar demonstrators, who chant "media
lies, people die." Much more accurate would be to say "people die, media
lies." American media lied about Vietnam, telling us the Communists won the
Tet offensive when they were defeated -- and when, by the way, the
recapture of the traditional capital city of Hue disclosed that the
Communists had rounded up and executed some 6,000 people. American media
lied about Central America, as noted; American media still lie about Cuba,
portraying the Castro regime, which has driven the average standard of
living of the people drastically down, as the most progressive in Latin
America.

Much of American media lied about the wars in Yugoslavia, depicting
Slobodan Milosevic, early on, as a reformer in the style of Gorbachev. They
continued by "explaining" Serbian aggression against Slovenes, Croats,
Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians by the alleged wholesale collaboration of
the victims' great-grandparents with the Nazis. Presumably, the 1,100
children killed in the siege of Sarajevo were all members of a Bosnian
Waffen SS division about which much propagandistic ink has been spilled
over the years. And they repeated ad nauseam the false charge that equal
atrocities were committed on all sides, when the great majority of mass
murders, rapes, deportations, and expulsions were carried out by the Serbs.

Where the ink of lies is spilled, the blood of victims soon follows. Media
liars are sharks; they gather at the smell of blood. And in this deadly
cycle of untruths, Iraq has set new standards for media mendacity.
President Bush and his team are reviled because the Iraq war was described
by one adviser as a "cakewalk;" well, the conquest of Baghdad was a
cakewalk, remember? Then the administration was defamed because the Iraqis
did not strew roses in the path of our service personnel. Terrorism
suddenly became "insurgency" and "resistance," with the veteran fabricators
of The New York Times -- who lied about Stalin's famine in the 1930s and on
numerous occasions thereafter -- adopting the propaganda vocabulary of
al-Jazeera.

Strangely, throughout the Iraqi struggle, Western media have joined Western
politicians in a reluctance to name the "foreign fighters" in Fallujah as
what they are -- mostly Wahhabis, and mainly Saudis. Those who monitor Arab
media know this to be true because when jihadists die in Fallujah, their
photographs and biographies appeared in newspapers south of the Iraq-Saudi
border. Western media "analysts" added to the fog of disinformation by
alleging that the Shia rebels of Moqtada ul-Sadr would join the Wahhabis in
Fallujah. But Islamic media around the world began to produce curious
items: Moqtada ul-Sadr issued an order for the execution of any Wahhabis
caught infiltrating the Shia holy cities; Abu 

A Tale of Two Maps

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Tech Central Station  

A Tale of Two Maps

By Patrick Cox
 Published 
 11/17/2004 

The now familiar map of the United States, separated into red and blue
states, makes the point, graphically, that the coastal population centers
tend to vote Democratic while fly-over country leans Republican.

Unfortunately, the map's binary either/or electoral college nature
overestimates the philosophical division within the country while failing
to show the extraordinary degree to which Americans' voting behavior
reflects the degree to which their own neighborhoods are more or less
crowded.

A far better illustration, devised by Princeton University mathematician
Robert Vanderbei, uses shades of purple to indicate the spectrum of
election preferences within counties.

Here is a map, executed by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman
of the University of Michigan using his procedure:



Here is a map showing U.S. population density in 1990:
 

Comparisons of these two maps make startlingly obvious the extent to which
population density predicts voter behavior. Though not a perfect match, the
relationship is undeniable -- and ultimately enigmatic.

What, we are led to ask, could explain this relationship? How does the
number of live humans per square mile either influence or reflect political
philosophy?

The standard, rather unexamined, assumption is that rural America has more
traditional cultural values that are associated with the Republican Party.
These include religious, family and pro-military values. Urban population
centers and surrounding environs, on the other hand, are associated with
more progressive values associated with Democratic Party. These values are
assumed to be more secular, progressive and anti-military.

While this may be an accurate description, no one, to my knowledge, has
provided a convincing explanation for the differences between lower and
higher density regions. Why would, after all, city life cause one to
embrace liberal political views? Why would life in the country yield a
conservative perspective? What, specifically, are the causative factors?

There has been a surfeit of speculation about psychological factors, but
relatively few specifics and even less evidence. Urban areas do have higher
crime rates and, while this attribute is widely recognized, there is little
real analysis of such as a causative factor in political attitudes. One of
the few efforts even to quantify the correlation of population density and
crime rates comes from John R. Lott and David Mustard who studied the
impact on crime rates of Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun laws -- which is
higher in rural areas.

One of the very few studies to actually examine the effects of population
density on behavior and attitudes is "Measuring Helping Behavior Across
Cultures" by Robert V. Levine of California State University, Fresno.
Levine found, through a series of interesting tests, such as feigning a
blind person trying to find and retrieve a lost letter, that

"Far and away the best predictor of helping was population density. Density
was more closely tied to the helpfulness of a city than even
characteristics like crime rates, the pace of life, economic conditions or
environmental stressors like noise and air pollution. Overall, people in
more crowded cities were much less likely to take the time to help. New
York City was Exhibit A. Crowding brings out our worst nature. Urban
critics have demonstrated that squeezing too many people into too small a
space leads to alienation, anonymity, de-individuation and social
isolation. Ultimately, people feel less responsible for their behaviors
toward others -- especially strangers. Previous studies have shown that
city dwellers are more likely to do each other harm. Our U.S. results
indicate that they are also less likely to do them good, and that this
apathy increases with the degree of city-ness."

This, of course, is only one study and may not take into account other less
observable forms of "helping" so it may not be safe to read much into the
author's conclusions.

Another fascinating and easily verifiable correlation may be tied only
indirectly to the characteristics of population density. The red states,
that voted for Bush in both of the last elections, it seems, are net
receivers of federal tax revenues.

In 2002, Dean Lacy of Ohio State University and the Hoover Institution.
published "A Curious Paradox of the Red States and Blue States: Federal
Spending and Electoral Votes in the 2000 Election." He found that,

"Thirty of the U.S. states reap more in federal spending than their
citizens contribute to the federal government in taxes. The other 20 states
provide more in taxes than they receive in spending. In the 2000 U.S.
presidential election, George W. Bush w

[osint] NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post

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To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82
From: "gwen831" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:45:18 -
Subject: [osint] NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]



http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1104/111704g1.htm



GovExec.com

DAILY BRIEFING
November 17, 2004


NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post

By George Cahlink
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

The Central Intelligence Agency has been rocked in recent weeks by
changes brought by new director Porter Goss, and the shake-up could
continue with the appointment of a tough deputy director.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that Goss was considering naming National
Security Agency Director Lt. Gen Michael Hayden to the agency's No. 2
slot. John McLaughlin, who served as acting CIA director this summer,
recently announced his retirement from the deputy director post.

Hayden has been one of NSA's most visible, powerful and, in some
quarters, controversial directors, as he has fought to reorganize the
signals intelligence agency. If he were tapped for the CIA slot, he'd
likely bring the same aggressive management style to the beleaguered
agency.

Goss served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence before being nominated for the CIA job in August. In that
position, he conducted oversight of the NSA and worked closely with
Hayden to increase the agency's budget.

Hayden, who is NSA's longest-serving director, has been relentless in
pushing change at the intelligence agency since taking over in March
1999. He's asked longtime agency workers to retire to make way for new
hires, outsourced information technology work, expanded the pool of
contractors, raised the agency's profile, and consolidated leadership
ranks.

Few would argue that changes were not needed at an agency with a
veteran workforce trained and computer systems designed for the Cold
War. James Bamford, author of two best-selling books on the NSA,
credits Hayden with continuing to let veteran workers go even after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"The people they had were people they did not need," said Bamford, who
noted that the agency had a surplus of Soviet analysts and linguists
but too few Middle East experts.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Boyd, now head of Business
Executives for National Security, who served with Hayden, said, "He
sold needed reforms to those with oversight and resources. He's
presided over a transition there from an institution geared toward the
Cold War into one for a new world with different technology."

Some NSA veterans however, have protested Hayden's moves.

"Coming to a place and telling a large group of well-qualified
professionals they need be cleaned out is not the way to change an
agency," said Michael Lavin, who worked at the agency from 1947 to
1993, first as an analyst and later as a policymaker and spokesman.
NSA veterans with obsolete skills should be retrained to prevent the
loss of corporate memory, Lavin argued.

Hayden earned praise for his efforts to expand the NSA's contracting
base and upgrade the agency's aging computer systems. In 2001, the
agency inked a $2 billion outsourcing deal with an industry team, led
by Computer Sciences Corp., to upgrade and run the agency's computer
operations over the next 10 years.

Congress, however, has not been happy with how the agency tracked its
spending. In 2004, the NSA lost its independent spending authority,
and its budget is now managed by Defense undersecretaries.

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert with the Federation of
American Scientists, noted that Hayden is one of the few intelligence
managers to escape blame for Sept. 11. "Everyone has been down on the
CIA," he said, "but NSA came through almost completely unscathed."











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Stephen Moore: A Tax-Ban No Brainer

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The National Review
 November 19, 2004, 11:21 a.m.
A Tax-Ban No Brainer
Congress should keep the Internet-tax ban in place.



Today the House of Representatives will vote to extend the ban on Internet
taxation through November of 2007. Keeping cyberspace tax free has long
been a goal of anti-big-government and pro-technology forces in Washington.
This bill, led by Chris Cox in the House and John McCain and George Allen
in the Senate has significant opposition from tax-eater lobbying groups on
Capitol Hill, especially state and local governments who hope that the
World Wide Web will be their next great cash cow. The Senate enacted the
bill earlier this week; the House should follow suit, and keep the
Internet-tax ban in place.

 President Bush strongly supports this legislation. So, if the House does
its job, next week this pro-taxpayer legislation will be the law of the
land.

The new law will mean no taxes on Internet access, unless you use dial up
and pay the telephone tax (which should be eliminated as well). It also
means no tax on Internet sales. In other words, the Internet will be a
genuine tax-, regulation-, and tariff-free zone.

 A tax on the Internet would do real damage to the U.S. economy. Economic
growth in recent years has been propelled by the technology sector, which
has made a big-time rally after the implosion of 2000-01, when the NASDAQ
fell from 5,000 to 1,500.

The argument against the ban on the Internet tax is that states and
localities need the money and that Internet purchases are eroding the tax
base of city hall and state governments. This is preposterous. The states
and localities are now awash in cash. For example, my home state of
Virginia has a $1 billion state-tax surplus. The same rosy fiscal picture
is true in local governments across the nation. A new Cato Institute study
finds that states and localities have already doubled their tax collections
over the past twelve years, even without tapping into the new frontier of
the digital economy. Governors and mayors should now be aggressively
cutting taxes, not finding sneaky new ways to add to their coffers.

The policy that Congress is about to adopt is simply a continuation of the
federal law that has been in place for the past six years. Since 1998
Congress has wisely declared the Internet a tax-free zone by establishing a
moratorium on Internet-access charges. An "access charge" is essentially a
toll on using the Internet. The idea was to prevent the government from
causing infant crib death of this new consumer technology. After all, as
Justice John Marshall once observed, "the power to tax is the power to
destroy." By all accounts, the Internet-tax moratorium has been a
resounding success. In 1985, about one in six American families and
businesses had access to the web; now, three in four do.

 Moreover, e-commerce is the new frontier of business enterprise.
International Data Corporation recently estimated that the Internet economy
in 2003 reached $2.8 trillion. In the U.S. alone, e-commerce accounted for
$500 billion in business activity and employed 2.3 million Americans. The
Internet sector of the economy is growing at 12 percent per year
compounded. E-commerce, in short, is to the early 21st century what the
steam engine was to early-20th-century economic development. Meanwhile, the
telecommunications sector of the economy now stands ready to invest
billions to upgrade the nation's communications networks and make
high-speed (or broadband) Internet access available to all American homes
and small businesses, as it is for large corporations today.

 All of this is to say, if ever a public policy has worked precisely as
hoped, it is the Internet-tax moratorium.

 Moreover, if the Republicans in Congress really wants to keep tax relief a
centerpiece of their domestic agenda, keeping the IRS and state tax
collectors away from the Internet is critical. By some estimates, a tax on
Internet access could cost families up to $150 a year. If purchases on the
Internet were also taxed, these costs could double or triple.

 There is only one problem with the bill that Congress will vote on today.
It does not make the Internet a tax-free zone permanently. Also, it seems
that if we want a regime of "tax fairness" and a level playing field, all
forms of Internet access, whether dial-up or wireless, should be immunized
from state, local, and federal taxation. While Sen. McCain's compromise
does not meet all of these criteria, it brings us a lot closer to the
ultimate goal.

 Congress today has a chance to ring the bell for liberty. The opportunity
now exists to create, through the growth of the Internet economy, a massive
global free-trade zone. Opponents of the Internet-tax ban argue that this
bill will only put added pressure on all levels of government to lower
taxes on "bricks and mortar" busine

Home Office stalls on weapons scanner health risks

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The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register  Internet and Law  Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs Â

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/blunkett_xray_blank/

Home Office stalls on weapons scanner health risks
By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk)
Published Thursday 18th November 2004 18:00 GMT

Are your children being irradiated? Are you being irradiated? The UK Home
Office seems unconcerned by the question, despite being responsible for at
least one of the government organisations wielding the devices that might
be doing the irradiating. Weapons scanners that use x-rays are now being
tested by the Metropolitan Police and at Heathrow airport, and while the
effect of a single scan will probably be negligible, the actual health risk
will depend on the nature of the particular deployments, and on the
individuals being scanned. So they should therefore not be deployed
casually, without careful prior consideration, on the basis that they're
'harmless'.

Earlier this week Norman Baker MP asked the Home Office the following
parliamentary question: "To ask the Secretary of State for the Home
Department what air kerma rate has been used to assess radiation doses
associated with the use of the Rapiscan Secure 1000 apparatus." David
Blunkett's (yes, him again, sorry about that) response was: "The
information sought is not in the public domain."
Which is not much of a response from a department deploying at least two
Rapiscan 1000s, and with a unit offering them to police forces throughout
the country.
(http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crimpol/police/scidev/news/items/xray2907.html)
Nor is the answer true. (Air kerma, by the way, refers to the amount of
radiation produced by a device.)

Rapiscan 1000s are indeed mostly harmless, probably, depending. Technology
of this sort has been used for baggage scanning for some time now, but more
recently people-sized versions have been undergoing testing in the US and
elsewhere in the world, and x-ray scanning is also being used in other,
mobile and less controlled environments (e.g. scanning containers and
trucks for stowaways). You can find some more about that here.
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/heathrow_scanner_pilot/) One of
the public domain sources of information about the effects of x-ray
scanners, including the Rapiscan 1000, that David Blunkett says don't exist
can be found here.
(http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/03/briefing/3987b1_pres-report.pdf) A
presidential report by the US National Council on Radiation Protection and
Measurements carried out for the Food and Drug Administration - very
obscure, not.

The document's very existence provides us with a small case study of how
things work in government on either side of the pond. Both the US and the
UK are proposing and using x-ray scanners on people, but in the US this
involves a diligent process of measurement for potential hazards, while in
the UK they just get haphazardly deployed. Both governments still repress
us, but the US one is somehow more professional about how it starts off,
while the UK one regularly gives the appearance of not being able to find
its arse with both hands.

Back, however, to the document, the measurements and the risks. The dose of
radiation delivered by a scan, which the NCRP team measured in the range
0.04 ÂSv - 0.05 ÂSv, is not terrifying by the radiation standards the US
uses. Negligible Individual Dose (NID) over a year is defined as 10 ÂSv,
which is the effective dose deemed acceptable for a single source, while
ANSI approved a standard in 2002 defining an acceptable dose per scan as
being 0.1 ÂSv or less. This would mean that a security scanner would have
to deliver 2,500 scans of an individual annually at 0.1 ÂSv per scan in
order to reach the US administrative control level of 0.25 mSv. For an
airport security scanner, even operating at a rather higher level, you'd
probably have to be living in it to achieve that kind of level.

But it's not necessarily going to be the only source of radiation you're
exposed to, nor will all of these sources necessarily operate at such low
levels. Cumulative dosage will be higher from scanners you have to pass
several times every day (say, a weapons scanner at a school), and you'll be
exposed at the hospital, at the dentist, and maybe there will be high
exposures you don't know about. The NCRP speaks of proposals for concealed
scanners, and mobile scannners that could check vehicles (which we covered
in our earlier piece), while just today UK Secretary of State for Education
Charles Clarke was proposing to give schools powers to search pupils for
weapons, and to "have arrangements with their local police forces to
undertake snap searches if they thought knives were on school premises".
What kind of equipment did you have in mind they bring with them when they
do that, Cha

Re: E-Mail Authentication Will Not End Spam, Panelists Say

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At 11:19 AM -0500 11/19/04, Russell Nelson wrote:
>Anybody can pay to send email right now.

:-).

Of course, I'm talking about something like postage, at the $MTP level.

Again, forget it.

Cheers,
RAH

- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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A Less-Visible Role For the Fed Chief: Freeing Up Markets

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This is a really good article, with a lot of useful financial history.

Also note the following:

>"It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for
>honest dealings and a quality product," he wrote in Ms. Rand's
>"Objectivist" newsletter in 1963. Regulation, he said, undermines this
>"superlatively moral system" by replacing competition for reputation with
>force. "At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which
>characterizes all regulation lies a gun."

Cheers,
RAH
- ---



The Wall Street Journal


 November 19, 2004

 PAGE ONE


The Deregulator
 A Less-Visible Role
 For the Fed Chief:
 Freeing Up Markets
Greenspan Blessed Mergers
 And Blocked Regulation;
 Using the 1800s as a Model
Is Modern Finance Too Risky?

By GREG IP
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 19, 2004; Page A1


WASHINGTON -- As Alan Greenspan approaches his last year as chairman of the
Federal Reserve Board, he continues to draw praise for his most visible
job: steering the economy by raising and lowering interest rates. But
behind the scenes, the 78-year-old economist has had a big impact on
American life in an entirely different role: pushing the government to stay
out of financial markets.

Consider what happened in 2002, when Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein
proposed new rules to govern how traders buy and sell contracts to deliver
energy through financial instruments known as derivatives. Her move came
after Enron Corp. and others helped send electricity prices soaring in
California by manipulating that market. When she telephoned Mr. Greenspan
for support, he declined, telling her the proposal threatened the
multitrillion dollar derivatives industry, which he considers an important
stabilizing force that diffuses financial risk.

Mr. Greenspan persuaded other Bush-appointed regulators to join him in a
critical letter that Sen. Feinstein's opponents wielded as a weapon on the
Senate floor. The bill was narrowly defeated on a procedural motion. Sen.
Feinstein reintroduced the proposal a number of times and at least twice
Mr. Greenspan rallied fellow regulators to oppose it. "I believe it would
have passed without his opposition," Sen. Feinstein says.


In addition to thwarting the post-Enron impulse to regulate derivatives,
Mr. Greenspan has helped remove Depression-era barriers between the banking
and securities industries and has blessed mergers creating banking
behemoths. He has implored regulators to keep their hands off hedge funds
and other markets that are replacing banks as financiers of American
business. Although the Fed is a major bank regulator, it has become a less
intrusive one under Mr. Greenspan.

Behind this advocacy is a passionate belief that freely functioning
financial markets are better than government regulators -- and even central
bankers -- at protecting the economy from booms and busts. Mr. Greenspan
once read that a B-2 "stealth" bomber would crash without a computer that
continuously adjusted its wing flaps. In conversations, he compares markets
to the B-2's computer: They continuously redistribute risk so the economy
can absorb shocks.

The result is a paradoxical position for one of the world's most
influential civil servants: He would prefer that the state play virtually
no role in the economy. His ideal is the pre-Civil War period when the
federal government was so invisible it didn't even issue a national
currency.

In reality, Mr. Greenspan sometimes tailors that radical position to suit
the demands of his job -- such as dealing with the near-collapse of hedge
fund Long Term Capital Management -- as well as the political requirements
of surviving in Washington. But, on balance, his views have been powerfully
influential in deregulating markets at a crucial time in their history when
they are increasing in size, complexity, and the number of ways in which
they interact with everyday people. With Mr. Greenspan's term set to end in
January 2006, an important question is whether his successor will carry on
this less visible role.

Critics say his hands-off regulatory philosophy has made the Fed a less
effective watchdog, citing complicity by Fed-regulated banks in recent
corporate scandals. His intellectual opponents also argue that some
regulation is necessary to moderate the risks inherent in modern finance.

Mr. Greenspan first articulated many of his views in the 1960s when he was
part of the intellectual circle surrounding libertarian philosopher Ayn
Rand. If businesses were solely responsible for their own reputation, he
said at the time, they would do whatever necessary to maintain it or
ultimately fail.

"It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for
honest dealings and a quality product," he wrote in Ms. Rand's
"Objectivist" newsletter in 1963. Regulation, he said, undermines this
"superlatively moral sys

Terror Net

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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Technology Review


Terror Net




 By Lakshmi Sandhana
 Innovation News
December 2004


Ever since the September 11 terrorist attacks, federal agencies have been
wishing for a system capable of issuing a nationwide alert at the first
sign of a chemical, biological, or radiological attack. Now such a system
is undergoing trials in Tennessee.


Developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory
in Tennessee, the new system consists of sensor packages attached to
structures such as cell-phone towers. The packages will include detectors
for airborne chemicals and radioisotopes, and for weather changes. The
intent of the system-which is being tested in Knoxville, Nashville, and
other locations-is to detect plumes of contaminants, predict their spread,
and quickly alert command centers. In a 2002 test, prototype sensors
successfully detected discharges of simulated sarin gas in three cities 140
to 270 kilometers apart and dispatched pertinent data in less than two
minutes. The current trial will test the system on an even larger scale.

The Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and other
organizations are sharing the cost of developing the system; at least $12
million has been assigned to it for the coming year. "At this point, we are
not deployed nationwide, but we've demonstrated the scalability of the
technology," says Jim Kulesz, special-projects manager at Oak Ridge.
Observers say the technology, while promising, is not a panacea. If fully
deployed, says Paul Sereiko, president of Needham, MA-based wireless-sensor
maker Sensicast Systems, it "will provide an excellent early-warning system
for wide-area contaminant monitoring." But, he adds, additional local
monitoring will still be needed.


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[ISN] Under Phishing Attack, British Bank Shuts Down Some Services

[R.A. Hettinga]

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- --- begin forwarded text


Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 05:03:00 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISN] Under Phishing Attack, British Bank Shuts Down Some Services
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: InfoSec News 
List-Archive: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Subscribe: ,

Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CIGVP13WT43RMQSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=53700579

By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb News
Nov. 18, 2004

One of the four biggest banks in the United Kingdom has taken the
unusual step of suspending some features of its online service
following a phishing attack.

On Wednesday, NatWest, which is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland
Group and one of Britain's big four banks, shut off features to its
million-plus online customers. When users logged on to the NatWest
site, they saw a message that read, "We have temporarily suspended the
ability to create or amend Third Party Payment mandates and create
Standing Order mandates."

Third-party-payment mandates, said Caroline Harris, a NatWest
spokesperson, are ad-hoc electronic-payment requests outside the
normal bill payments already established. They're typically used to
pay individuals electronically. Standing-order mandates are the U.K.
equivalent of a scheduled bill payment.

"We've not shut down the entire site, as some press reports would have
you believe," said Harris, "but we've only restricted one small part."

The phishing e-mail received by NatWest customers claimed to be part
of a software update to the online banking service.

"This is only temporary," said Harris, "and is a preventative measure
to protect our customers. Because we've [blocked third-party-payment
and standing orders] the phishers haven't been able to take money out
of customer accounts."

She reiterated that no NatWest customer had lost money to the scam.

NatWest urged customers who may have given up personal information to
contact the bank, and said that alternate ways to make payments, such
as by telephone, remained an option.

Although Harris said such action was "nothing new" and that the bank
had done similar things before when faced with determined phishers, a
U.S.-based banking analyst said it was news to her.

"I've never heard of that tactic before," said Avivah Litan, a
research director and vice president with Gartner who specializes in
bank fraud and phishing issues. "Not that it's a bad action, but it
sounds to me that NatWest didn't have a way to contain the damage.

"It's an extreme measure. It probably means that they don't have other
risk-control mechanisms in place, or the attack was getting out of
hand," she added.

And while NatWest reacted quickly, there's a real chance a temporary
measure like this won't stop phishers from exploiting stolen
information. Increasingly, she said, it seems phishers are a lot more
patient than anyone thought.

"When you look at the big picture, there's more and more evidence that
phishers are sitting on the information [they steal], and that the
real damage may not show up for a year or two."

Phishers, Litan went on, "are very clever, and have a lot of time and
patience." Rather than use their ill-gotten information immediately --
which is what NatWest assumes by temporarily limiting on-the-fly
payments -- there's growing concern that cyber-criminals wait a long
time before pouncing.

One tactic phishers are using, said Litan, is to apply for new credit
cards using stolen identity information, use and pay those cards, and
over a period of months, even as long as two years, build up the
cards' credit limits.

"Then they'll do 'bust-outs,'" said Litan. "That's when they run
through the credit limit, say $50,000, before the first bill comes
due, with no intention of paying."

The worst news, about NatWest's move, concluded Litan, is that it may
only be the beginning of a new wave of banking business disruptions.

"Once I thought that maybe phishing was a fad, and after a while it
would be replaced by some other scam, like keyloggers. But it's not a
fad. It's going to get worse, and it's not going to slow down."



_
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable -
http://www.osvdb.org/

- --- end forwarded text


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Tax inspector's quest in 'The Cryptographer'

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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The Star Online: Lifestyle


Friday November 19, 2004

Tax inspector's quest in 'The Cryptographer'
Review by JOANN KOH

The Cryptographer
 Author: Tobias Hill
Publisher: Faber and Faber 

 If cryptography is the science of concealing something, such as "the
blueprint of a gun in a conversation about snow", then Tobias Hill himself
must be an expert cryptographer.  

 If he had meant to be so, that is. 

 This book is full of brilliant insights - but I had to dig for each
nugget, because he is not always clear. Or direct. But perhaps it is
because Hill is good at getting under his characters' skin (he won the 1998
PEN/MacMillan Award for Fiction for his debut novel, Skin).  

 Then again, perhaps he is too good. 

 In the book, the protagonist Anna Moore, tax inspector A2 grade of Her
Majesty's Inland Revenue Service, is paid to doubt what her "client" says
(client being a euphemism for those we must investigate), and Anna Moore
doubts plenty. In trying to show us how the mind trips up when doubting,
Hill may have caused us to stumble, too. It is quite an exercise of
tenacity, by page 20, to reread what Anna says or doesn't say - to make
sure what Anna says, or doesn't say, is what Anna means exactly. But then
again, this is stream-of-consciousness writing, and novels with ambiguity
of this level do not sit well with me.  

 That said, however, if you enjoy ideas and feel up to a challenge, this
novel could be for you.  

 It is the year 2021, when Soft Gold, an unbreakable form of electric money
has replaced paper money. Anna is assigned to investigate John Law,
cybergenius, cryptographer and inventor of Soft Gold, for an undeclared sum
of four million dollars in an account in his son's name - a surprising sum
to be secret about for a quadrillionaire. For Anna - who believes that
after a certain point, we begin chasing money not for money's own sake, but
for the love of someone we have, someone we want or hope to be - this is
the beginning of an obsession. Anna wants to know whom John Law thinks of,
when he thinks of money.  

 In this invented world, the future belongs to John Law. But the world of
the future fears him as much as they respect him. For a man who knows how
to embed "encrypted information in the genetic code of plants and flowers",
(the patent of which, at age 17, he sold to the US government for seven and
a half million dollars) may also embed a deadly virus in our bodies should
he wish to quietly exterminate us. A man with so much wealth can vacuum his
gut ever so frequently and outlive us - a demigod amongst mortals.  

 And so on and so forth.  

 Law creates the downloadable Soft Gold freeware, which he guarantees is
totally secure because no computer has yet been invented that can break the
code. But he also knows it is human nature to want to break an unbreakable
code, for by breaking it, not only does one discover its defects, one also
exceeds its inventor. So, it is just a matter of time when Soft Gold gets
broken into and John Law becomes a hunted man. This time, Anna is assigned
to hunt him down.  

 Concealed within are two love stories, involving old loves Anna and
Lawrence and new loves Anna and John. Lawrence waits patiently to re-ignite
a stalled relationship, but Anna feels she no longer loves him; she has
betrayed his trust, once; she feels she trusts him though. But she doesn't
know if she can trust John Law, although she wants to; the second pursuit,
on a personal level, is for her to find out if she can. Because without
trust, she knows, love will not be possible.  

 Read The Cryptographer for the thinker in you, and not the "feeler". And
welcome to the invented world of Tobias Hill.

- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Pioneer of Sham Tax Havens Sits Down for Pre-Jail Chat

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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The New York Times

November 18, 2004

Pioneer of Sham Tax Havens Sits Down for Pre-Jail Chat
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

EATTLE, Nov. 17 - Jerome Schneider, the nation's best-known seller of
fraudulent offshore banks, said in an interview today that he had helped
hundreds of rich Americans evade taxes, including actors, celebrities and
business owners.

 Mr. Schneider, who pleaded guilty in February to conspiring to help his
clients evade the tax laws, said that he expected "every single one" of his
clients to be prosecuted or sued for the taxes they evaded. He said clients
sought to evade taxes on incomes ranging from $100,000 to $40 million,
though most were from a third to half a million dollars.

 Mr. Schneider, 53, spoke in a cramped hotel room here under the watchful
eye of three Internal Revenue Service criminal investigators, who said
nothing but smiled broadly at times as he answered questions and named
clients and associates. The I.R.S. set up the interview with Mr. Schneider
but did not interfere with it. The agency, by law, cannot comment on
individual taxpayers.

 Under the terms of his agreement with the government to plead guilty, Mr.
Schneider may not make any public comments about his former clients
"without prior consent of the government." He is to be sentenced on Monday
in Federal District Court in Los Angeles. In return for his cooperation, he
is expected to serve no more than 24 months in prison. He has already paid
$100,000 in restitution.

Mr. Schneider said he always reported his full income to the I.R.S. and
never personally used an offshore bank to hide income.

Since 1976, Mr. Schneider has set up sham banks for clients in the Cayman
Islands, Grenada, Montserratt, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands and, recently, in
Nauru, a Pacific island.

Clients paid as much as $60,000 to "acquire" an offshore bank, which
consisted of nothing more than pieces of paper to create the appearance of
legitimate business activity, he said, confirming the accusations in the
government indictment. He said that while most clients wanted to hide money
from the I.R.S., some also wanted to conceal money from estranged spouses
or creditors.

"Every one of my clients knew full well what they were getting into,
including the potential to be prosecuted," he said, detailing how they
signed contracts, were advised by lawyers and were told that if tax
authorities ever caught onto them they could go to prison. "They understood
that," he contended.

 He said that all his clients had two things in common - they were rich and
they wanted to escape taxes.

Most of the nation's major accounting firms worked with one or another of
his clients, he said, and he named two law firms that he said were central
to his business.

 He said one prominent actress sent money to the United International Bank
in Nauru, which he said he created. He said the actress paid $50,000 for a
legal opinion asserting that the arrangement was legal.

 Mr. Schneider also said that in 1988 he arranged for a prominent
motivation coach to place $250,000 in an offshore bank without reporting
the money to the I.R.S.

 In addition, Mr. Schneider said that a billionaire media businessman, one
of several clients who he said were on the Forbes 400 list of the
wealthiest Americans, sent $40 million to a sham bank in Nauru to pay for a
nut-processing company in 1994. The owner of the company has died, but his
estate is challenging in Tax Court an I.R.S. demand that taxes be paid on
profits from the sale.

 For 28 years, Mr. Schneider promoted offshore tax schemes. He sold, he
said, more than a million copies of his book, "The Complete Guide to
Offshore Money Havens," which he advertised in The Wall Street Journal and
SkyMall, a magazine found in the seat-back pocket on many airlines. The
2000 edition book carried an endorsement by Representative Billy Tauzin,
the Louisiana Republican, who also spoke at one of Mr. Schneider's tax
evasion conferences. Mr. Tauzin's spokesman, Ken Johnson, said the
endorsement was "a stupid mistake."

 Mr. Schneider, 53, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, was the
picture of a successful businessman, dressed in a knit shirt, gray wool
slacks and black loafers, his graying hair clipped short, his face framed
by horn-rimmed glasses.

 He began the interview by describing his conduct in terms of helping
people, but when pressed he said, "Yes, I am a criminal."

 Mr. Schneider said his undoing began the day more than a decade ago when
he asked Jack Blum, a former United States Senate investigator, to speak at
one of his offshore seminars. Mr. Blum, who specializes in exposing
international financial crimes, wrote a letter to the Justice Department
that prompted the investigation that led to Mr. Schneider's guilty plea.

 Mr. Blum said, "That Schneider could operate openly for years, buying ad

Re: E-Mail Authentication Will Not End Spam, Panelists Say

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

At 9:15 PM -0500 11/18/04, Russell Nelson wrote:
>The proper route to control spam is to
>involve users in prioritizing their email, so that their friend's
>email comes first, followed by anybody they've sent mail to, followed
>by people they've gotten email from before, followed by mailing list
>mail, followed by email from strangers (which is where all the spam
>is).

A whitelist for my friends, all others pay...

oh, forget it.

Cheers,
RAH

- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[CYBERIA] A VERY significant DMCA case

[R.A. Hettinga]

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- --- begin forwarded text


DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com;

b=oTDVOd2nHalBsKpKJum+5IY+lu1RJaHM79+4MmwY72xPRCq9nhudLZRniLNmeZojjGL9Cl3sFptEpXD2Go79CazzJCeB/dg4OT0EcNTRhLoB3c/qMqE5b0YopkFen3gJ4Zw0SKmrbN1bSGKlXBqAkrsurOheKaqq7Dd2lM/Yq68=

 ;
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 07:53:23 -0800
Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Comments: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys
From: Paul Gowder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [CYBERIA] A VERY significant DMCA case
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

This just came to my attention.  I don't know if it's
been mentioned here before, since I only read this
list intermittently.  Still...

Lexmark International Inc. v. Static Control
Components Inc., 6th Cir., No. 03-5400 10/26/04
http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/04a0364p-06.pdf

This case appears to be a ringing blow against the
DMCA, and against copyright fascism in general.  The
Sixth Circuit, vacating a grant of preliminary
injunction, held that a program was likely
uncopyrightable, because unoriginal, because its
functional requirements merged with its expression.
It further concluded that the DMCA can't be used to
protect such an un-copyrightable work.

Because this was before the court on review of a
preliminary injunction, it's not terribly definitive
on the facts -- but as a statement of law -- it seems
very promising.

Thoughts?



__
Do you Yahoo!?
The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free!
http://my.yahoo.com


**
For Listserv Instructions, see http://www.lawlists.net/cyberia
Off-Topic threads: http://www.lawlists.net/mailman/listinfo/cyberia-ot
Need more help? Send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
**

- --- end forwarded text


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Just Another Chip in the (Privacy) Wall

[R.A. Hettinga]

Technology Review


Just Another Chip in the (Privacy) Wall
 An electronic database implanted under the skin can assure speedy and
proper medical care-but is it worth it?



By David Kushner
November 18, 2004





You can almost see the ads now: Imagine a bright future with a chip in your
arm!




Went to the supermarket, but left the wallet at home? No problem! Flex your
bicep and the smiling cashier passes a scanner over your arm.
Voila-identification chip recognized! Problem solved. Your credit is good
with us!

Passed out during a sunrise jaunt on the top of Haleakala Mountain in Maui?
Fret not! The hospital down below is on the case. Arm please. Scanner! The
readout on the computer is fine. Just a little altitude sickness.

Key to the safety deposit box weighing you down? Chuck it! Next time you're
in the bank, give the teller a friendly wave-and watch the doors open to
greet you!

After decades as the stuff of sci-fi novels and anime movies, the age of
chipped humans is finally a reality. Last month, following two years of
review, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of an implantable
chip for medical applications. Each Verichip is the size of a grain of rice
and contains a unique, 16-digit radio frequency ID. Linked to a database,
that ID tag can call up a variety of information-from medical records to
financial information.

 Not surprisingly, the technology is causing its share of controversy.
Civil liberties groups are calling this the end of privacy. Religious
groups are calling it the number of the beast. Down on the shores of Delray
Beach, FL, Applied Digital-the company behind the Verichip-calls it a
goldmine.

 Like a lot of new technologies, the Verichip happened rather by accident.
Fifteen years ago, a company called Digital Angel developed implantable
identification chips for the purpose of tracking companion pets and cattle.
But the idea was nothing to moo at. Last year, 800,000 animal chips were
sold in the United States for $55 to $70 apiece-30 percent more than in
2002.

 If the chips could identify animals, why not a human being? This thought
occurred to Richard Seelig, a surgeon in New Jersey, shortly after the
attacks of September 11, 2001. Seelig watched with horror as New York City
firemen scrawled their social security numbers in black ink on the
forearms-just in case they were to be burned beyond recognition in the
inferno. Familiar with Digital Angel's work, Seelig voluntarily implanted
himself with a radio frequency identification chip. And the race to bring
it to the rest of the world was on.



According to Angela Fulcher, spokesperson for Applied Digital, the human
chip works in essentially the same manner as the animal chips. The chip is
contained inside a cylindrical transponder, a glass tube 11 millimeters in
length and 2.1 millimeters in diameter. Along with the chip is an antenna
coil, which picks up and transmits the identification number to a scanner.
The Pocket Reader, an existing handheld scanner created by Applied Digital,
reads the radio frequency ID number when it's passed over the skin within a
space of three or four inches.

Unlike the animal version, the human chip is coated with Biobond-a porous
polypropylene sheathe that connects to surrounding tissues. The chip is
implanted, via a proprietary Verichip inserter, in a fleshy area such as
the bicep. "Based on our experience at with microchips and animals,"
Fulcher says, "we see the lifespan at being 10 years."

 Although newly approved by the FDA, Verichips are already in use outside
the United States. In total, an estimated 1,000 people have been implanted
thus far. In Mexico, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, the country's attorney
general, was implanted with a chip to provide secure access to government
documents. In Barcelona, a beach club is injecting partiers with ID chips
in lieu of hand stamps.

 Despite the announcement of the FDA approval, however, such frivolous
implants may soon be second guessed. Organizations have criticized Applied
Digital for not adequately disclosing the FDA's finding of Verichip's
risks. A group called the Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion
and Numbering, or Caspian, obtained a letter from the FDA to Applied
Digital dated October 12, and posted it on the Web. The letter cites
several "potential risks to health associated with the device," including
adverse tissue reaction, migration of the implanted transponder,
electromagnetic interference, electrical hazards, and incompatibility with
magnetic resonance imaging.

 In addition to medical concerns, privacy advocates lament the potential
abuses of implantable IDs. The outcry stems from the proliferation of radio
frequency identification in products and badges. The San Francisco Public
Library is trying to put ID chips in all of its books. In Virginia, the
Department of Motor Vehicles is considering putting chips on every driver's
lic

[osint] Group to launch terrorist database

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1


- --- begin forwarded text


To: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thread-Index: AcTNAwGu+++zgK7aQ5yfqJWprtY+xAAFRDpg
From: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:42:54 -0500
Subject: [osint] Group to launch terrorist database
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]





Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Group to launch terrorist database
BY Diane Frank
Published on Nov. 17, 2004

National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism

"DHS plans info hub" [FCW.com, April 7, 2004]

"DHS debuts info portal" [FCW.com, April 19, 2004]
A new system with detailed historical information on terrorism could become
the first stop for first responders and other government officials
developing strategies to prevent incidents nationwide, experts said
Wednesday.

The Terrorism Knowledge Base is the latest Web-based resource from the
National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit
organization in Oklahoma City. The institute developed three solutions,
which also include the Lessons Learned Information System and the Responder
Knowledge Base, with funding from the Justice and Homeland Security
departments.

This system provides open-source, unclassified information on international
and domestic terrorism, pulling information from a database of terrorist
incident information maintained since 1968 by Rand, nonprofit research
organization. It also incorporates links to original court documents
pertaining to suspected terrorists.

The institute's analysis tools collect this information and allow officials
to compare and sort the information. A wizard tool takes users through a
step-by-step process to find the information they want.

The Rand database had not been available to the public or much of government
until now, and it provides information about groups, individuals, incidents,
tactics and other issues that can provide critical context when developing a
prevention and response strategy, said James Ellis, research and program
coordinator for the project at the institute.

"A lot of people, when they're doing that kind of planning, they're always
trying to think hypothetically, theoretically, what might terrorists do,"
Ellis said. "That's fine, but why don't we look at what they actually have
done over the last several decades, and use that to be able to have
real-world data to support them."

Using open-source terrorist information from public and private sources is
one of the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, said Lloyd Salvetti, a
former officer with the CIA and a consultant to the commission. It is an
important complimentary resource for the intelligence community and first
responders, he said.

For first responders at the federal, state and local levels of government,
the systems fill a void by providing information in a resource that even
those who are not technology-savvy can use, said Suzanne Mencer, director of
DHS' Office for Domestic Preparedness.

"Whenever you can look at historically what has occurred in a particular
area, that gives you some indication of the potential for what may occur in
the future," she said. "This is an indicator, ... one tool in the toolbox
for the investigator, for the academic, or anyone that is in the
decision-making process."


http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/1115/web-terrordata-11-17-04.asp





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OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
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that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.
For more inf

How scammers run rings round eBay

[R.A. Hettinga]

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The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register  Internet and Law  Wild Wild Web Â

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/16/petty_fraudsters_ebay/

How scammers run rings round eBay
By Ken Young (robin.lettice at theregister.co.uk)
Published Tuesday 16th November 2004 16:15 GMT

Everyone knows that buying and selling on eBay is precarious. Even eBay
admits this and gives basic advice on its site that it believes helps
eliminate most fraud.

But there appears to be a basic weakness in eBay's system that fraudsters
and petty thieves are exploiting. It occurs when buyers pay sellers direct
into the sellers' bank account by cheque or cash. The following is a real
example that occurred in September this year (names withheld for legal
reasons). Let's call the buyer Tom and the seller Harry.


Tom won the bid for a mobile phone and agreed to pay Harry (who lives 80
miles away from Tom) Â185 plus Â6 insurance using cash at a branch of
Harry's bank. A few days later a box arrived. It contained a battery
charger and an earplug, but no phone. Tom informed Harry who said that he
believed someone at the post office must have stolen the phone and that he
would look into it.

Days passed and Tom then asked Harry to claim on the insurance. Harry said
he had lost the insurance slip and would instead refund 50 per cent of the
Â185. A week passed and Tom called Harry to say no payment had been
received and that he was losing his patience and would report the matter to
eBay.

Harry made more excuses and stopped answering his mobile phone. Over the
next few weeks they spoke occasionally but Harry refused to send any money
and blamed Tom for his removal from eBay (subsequent to Tom informing eBay
of his loss). Tom contacted Harry's bank but the bank refused to provide
Harry's address. Tom only knows Harry's mobile phone number and Hotmail
email address.

In summary, Tom spent Â196 on a phone that never arrived and he is not
alone. As a result of basic research for this story we have been contacted
by five people who have experienced similar scams (their stories, in
emails, are copied below). The fact is it appears far too easy for this
scam to be perpetrated.

Pattern of fraud

The pattern is all too predictable. Buyers and sellers agree not to go
through the more secure PayPal system because it costs more to do so. So
buyers take the risk of sending the money to the seller who either doesn't
send the goods or sends shoddy or fake goods. The sellers protect
themselves against prosecution by claiming loss, or disputing the buyer's
version of events. The amounts involved - though not insignificant to the
buyer - are too small for eBay to want to take the matter further.

There is one other common factor in all these stories. Though the buyers
report the matter to eBay they are invariably frustrated at standard email
responses and being steered towards a mediation system which costs the
buyer Â15 and even then may or may not lead to resolution. Alternatively,
sellers can claim compensation through eBay and may get a maximum of Â105 -
if they claim between 30 and 90 days after the event and meet the criteria
for payment. In our example above Tom made a claim last month and is still
waiting.

A common refrain is: "Should I report this to the police? eBay are not
replying to my emails about this and I don't know if the police are aware
or not. What should I do?"

eBay declined an interview in relation to this story but instead issued a
statement:

"eBay takes the issue of fraud very seriously and investigates every case
of fraud reported to it. eBay currently has over 1,000 people worldwide
with backgrounds in law enforcement, customer support, advanced computer
engineering and analysis dedicated to making eBay one of the safest places
to trade online and, in the UK, employs an ex-Scotland Yard officer as
liaison point for law enforcement agencies.

"The majority of transactions on the eBay site are completely secure and
without incident. Approximately 0.01 per cent of transactions end in a
confirmed case of fraud."

This means that for every million transactions, 100 are 'confirmed'
fraudulent, though the criteria for this confirmation are not available.
Any security consultant will say that is an acceptable level of risk and
way below fraud levels on credit cards. Not surprisingly, eBay therefore
does not advise people specifically not to pay by cheque or cash payment
into a seller's bank account.

Top tips

On the eBay website its 'top tips' state that sellers should ideally use
secure payment systems like PayPal (which offers greater levels of
protection, though still limited if the seller has little or no track
record) and should NOT use money transfer services "like Western Union".

But aside from telling buyers to be wary it does not tell buyers NOT to
send cheques or pay direc

CBS 11: Dallas Server Company Carries Zarqawi Death Videos, Terrorist Websites

[R.A. Hettinga]

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CBS 11 | cbs11tv.com

DALLAS SERVER COMPANY CARRIES ZARQAWI DEATH VIDEOS, TERRORIST WEBSITES
*   THE PLANET.COM SAYS IT IS UNWITTING VICTIM, CAN'T POLICE ITSELF
Nov 14, 2004 11:00 pm US/Central

By Todd Bensman and Robert Riggs
The Investigators
CBS-11 News

CARBONDALE, ILL. -- The grainy Internet movie file flashes a title: "Al
Qaeda Movement in the Land of the Two Rivers. An Operation Against the
British Troops Near Baghdad."

The streaming online video clip shows a car as it motors slowly up a
single-lane road, away from the cameraman who shakily zooms in as it
gathers speed toward a British checkpoint. A caption appears, reading "Here
goes the brave lion to tear up his prey and to win paradise." The cameraman
is speaking in Arabic, his voice rising with "God is Great, God is Great"
as the car at center screen arrives at the British checkpoint and a soldier
standing in the road.

Suddenly, a massive fireball of orange and black lashes upward and outward,
instantly slaughtering him and wounding two other British soldiers of the
Black Watch Regiment, along with the suicide bomber, according to later
press reports. The Jihadists responsible are then filmed at the scene
kicking a dismembered arm left behind by a recovery tank squad.

This is a movie clip put up just last week by notorious terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi's organization within a few days of the actual Nov. 7 attack.

Sometime over the weekend, as CBS-11 aired promotions for this story, it
disappeared with others of its ilk on an Internet server owned by an
up-and-coming Dallas web site hosting company called The Planet. In
downtown Dallas ((www.theplanet.com). Glorifying the slaughter of American
soldiers and their allies in Iraq. Helping to enhance the global street
credentials of Zarqawi among any like-minded person with access to a
computer.

Aaron Weisburd, a self-appointed cyber warrior who since 2002 has run a
crusade called Internet Haganah (www.Internet-Haganah.us) to shut down
these so-called "e-jihadists," is the one who tracked the movies to Dallas.
And in recent weeks, Weisburd has discovered that Zarqawi's home movies on
The Planet servers have plenty of other bad company in Big D.

The Planet's Dallas servers have in recent months hosted web sites run by
Islamic extremist organizations the U.S. government has long since banned
as Designated Terrorist Organizations - three different Palestinian Islamic
Jihad promotional sites and Hamas' monthly news magazine. Two Hamas
websites and two Al Quaeda websites remain on The Planet's servers,
according to Internet Haganah.

For the past two and a half years, Weisburd and his Internet Haganah
(www.haganah.us) volunteer translators and analysts across the globe have
been using a tracking program he devised to expose the presence of
extremist outlawed Jihadists and hound them off the Web by asking the
server companies to drop their business.

A former computer programmer, Weisburd started chasing after e-jihadists on
a lark and soon realized that literally thousands of extremist Islamic web
sites were out there in cyberspace, beckoning to millions of Muslims around
the world to join their bloody causes.

"Every moment that these sites are up they encourage jihadists to commit
acts of terrorism," Weisburd told CBS-11 News in his first interview with
an American media organization. "They provide instructions to people in how
to do things like build bombs. They build identity and a sense of
community. They incite violence. They encourage people to go out and kill
people.

"I'm of the opinion that one ought not to just sit there and tolerate
terrorists advertising their organization," he said. "They're not just some
other organization. They're not a humanitarian organization. They're not a
corporation. They're terrorists. They're in the business of killing people.
They shouldn't be allowed to enjoy that kind of legitimacy."

- From his home office in the southern Illinois college town of Carbondale,
Weisburd has found sites in Dallas literally singing the praises of suicide
bombing, sporting photo memorials of martyrs and promoting their bloody,
violent causes. Working internationally, he claims his efforts have knocked
down more than 550 extremist web sites.

Sometimes, he said, service provider companies resist but most do not want
to be associated with terrorists.

"My guess is that in the grand scheme of things one bad customer isn't
worth nearly as much as all the good customers you want to keep who don't
want to be associated with this stuff either," Weisburd said. "I mean, do
you really want to be known as associated with terrorists?"

Most of the time, the giant service providers do not know what kinds of web
sites they are hosting until someone complains. Such companies typically
sell wholesalers their web space and those wholesalers in tu

[osint] Al-Qaeda propaganda website shut down

[R.A. Hettinga]

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To: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thread-Index: AcTMRPaUQi8W4viLTUaHaDASsEmcWgAAM3oQ
From: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:38:21 -0500
Subject: [osint] Al-Qaeda propaganda website shut down
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Al Qaeda propaganda website shut down


Wednesday November 17, 05:54 AM


Al-Qaeda propaganda website shut down

A web site that reportedly contained speeches by Suleiman Abu Ghaith, an
alleged spokesman for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was shut down by a
Swedish internet provider after the site was traced to its server.

Spray Network, a subsidiary of Lycos Europe, shut the site down after being
informed of the site, said Fredrik Skaerheden, a Spray Network spokesman.


"We have a very clear policy that any material that in any way may urge or
encourage criminal acts or violence is immediately removed," Skaerheden told
The Associated Press.

The web site, www.members.lycos.co.uk/abugaith1, reportedly contained
several audio files of Abu Ghaith giving speeches and sermons in Arabic, and
contained several violent and bloody images.

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, which first
traced the site to the Swedish server, at least one of the sermons called
for Muslims to give their lives to fight the United States.

A report on MEMRI's Web site quoted the sermon as hailing bin Laden and
describing the Jihad fighters as people who "seek death as others seek life
and seek Allah's promise in the Koran and sacrifice their property, their
blood, and their lives as a sign of the sincerity of their faith."

Anyone can create a web site for free on Lycos' servers, Skaerheden said,
adding that many of the Lycos Europe member sites are hosted by Spray's
servers in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/041116/2/rr8i.html




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- --- end forwarded text


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Crypto-Tax: Re: India to tax / levy license fees on ISPs that offer VPNs

[R.A. Hettinga]

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Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 05:47:53 +0530
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Deepak Jain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: NANOG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: India to tax / levy license fees on ISPs that offer VPNs
Organization: Outblaze Limited - http://www.outblaze.com
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6i
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Deepak Jain [16/11/04 18:15 -0500]:
>
> I guess it depends on how you define a VPN over just a private network.
> Is an SSH tunnel a VPN? What about an encrypting SOCKS proxy?
>

This "tax" is aimed at a few Indian ISPs that are making lots of money
selling managed IP-VPN services.. the incumbent telco seems to think all the
money going there would be better spent by companies if they bought copper /
fiber from it, and so the DoT (http://www.dot.gov.in) - lots of telco types
there who wouldn't know a vpn from a hole in the ground - decided to "level
the playing field"

Just for laughs, here's the DoT press release on this:

srs

http://www.dot.gov.in/pressnote10nov04ISP.doc

142/04
www.pib.nic.in


PRESS INFORMATION BUREAU

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
**


ISP LICENSING CONDITIONS  AMENDED TO PERMIT VPN SERVICES


New Delhi,  Kartika 19, 1926
November 10, 2004

The Department of Telecommunications today decided to extend the scope of
the Licence conditions of Internet Service Providers (ISP) ,thereby
allowing them to provide managed Virtual Private Network services to
corporates and individuals.

In accordance with the decision, the ISP licences (both -Licence without
Internet Telephony and with Internet Telephony) will have an enabling
provision for VPN services by ISPs under specified terms & conditions. The
annual licence fee will be at 8% of the Gross Revenue generated under the
licence. There will be one time non-refundable entry fee of Rs. 10, 2 and 1
crore for Category A, B , and C ISPs respectively

ISP-with VPN licencee will be permitted to lay optical fibre cable or
use radio links for provision of the services under their licence in its
Service Area.  Further, ISPs shall be free to enter into mutually agreed
commercial agreement with infrastructure service providers for sharing of
infrastructure.  The ISPs shall not engage in reselling bandwidth directly
or indirectly.  The above decision will help as many 388 ISP Licensees,
more particularly 61 all India (Category A) ISP Licensees, to offer VPN
services to their customers, thus adding to their revenue stream from
Internet Access Services.

VPN is a service where a customer perceives to have been provided with a
private network which actually is configured over a shared public network.
Benefits of VPN include secure communication over public network and
guaranteed quality of service.  A High Level DoT Committee had examined
the matter and had observed that while on one hand such VPN services were
not under the scope of the present ISP licences, on the other hand it
would be desirable to permit ISPs to provide such services in the present
day liberalized telecom environment in the country.  The services which
are technologically possible should be allowed while at the same time
ensuring level playing field to all the service providers.  Such VPN
services which provide a platform for utilization of bandwidth in a very
cost effective and efficient manner are emerging services internationally.
This facility is necessary for the corporate world in meeting their
growing communication needs of inter-office connectivity to send/transfer
data securely and such services are widely available in telecom sector
globally.

RM/AMA 101104 ISP Licencing Conditions

- --- end forwarded text


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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The Beginning of the Crypto Era

[R.A. Hettinga]

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EWeek



The Beginning of the Crypto Era
November 15, 2004

 By   Larry Seltzer
 In a move that was totally expected, if a little early, Yahoo has
announced that it will put its money where its mouth is and start checking
Yahoo Mail with its DomainKeys system.


The company had told me that it would do so by the end of the year, but I
suppose it had had this last week, during the FTC e-mail authentication
summit, as an internal deadline. Earthlink also announced that it will test
DomainKeys on its system.

DomainKeys is important. It is the main implementation of the second of the
two most credible approaches to SMTP authentication, specifically the use
of cryptographic signatures to authenticate messages against the domains
from which they were sent. The other approach-to check against the IP
addresses of the servers in those domains-also moved forward recently with
the second version of the Sender ID spec.

Don't assume that the DomainKeys implementation is the final form. There is
an IETF group called ietf-mailsig working in preliminary stages to
standardize the crypto approach to SMTP authentication and they might want
to make some changes to the approach used by Yahoo. And I expect Yahoo to
be open to such suggestions.

In fact, Yahoo's openness to reasonable suggestions and unobjectionable
licenses is a big reason to be optimistic about widespread adoption of it.
Indeed, while Yahoo has intellectual property claims on its developments in
DomainKeys, the company isn't being a jerk about it, like some other
coMpanieS in this business that shall remain naMeleSs.
There are some interesting questions about DomainKeys and Yahoo's handling
of it. The first has to do with performance. My own first impression of
cryptography as a solution was that the added performance burden on MTAs
(message transfer agents, better known as mail servers) would be great and
that many companies would have to upgrade their hardware to run a
DomainKeys-enabled server with decent performance. In a recent eSeminar in
which I participated, Richi Jennings of Ferris Research echoed this view.

But while it's still too early to tell, there's reason to believe the
performance issue is not as serious as first impressions would indicate.
I've spoken to Sendmail, the leading MTA company in the world, about it.
Nobody, except Yahoo, has more hands-on experience actually testing and
coding DomainKeys than Sendmail. Sendmail thinks the added performance
burden, entirely CPU-based, is on the order of 15 percent to 20 percent.
This isn't nothing, but MTAs aren't typically CPU-constrained-they are
network- and perhaps disk-constrained-so there could easily be spare CPU
capacity in the typical MTA (unless it's running Exchange Server or Notes,
in which case it's CPU-starved).

Next Page:  Why no SPF implementation?

The other question I have about Yahoo is why it has refused to implement
SPF. Sender Policy Framework is the uncontroversial part of Sender ID, the
part that checks the message envelope.

 Many people still argue that SPF is all we really need. But no serious
people believe this, least of all SPF's author Meng Weng Wong, who is a
principal author and sponsor of the Sender ID spec and also a fan of
DomainKeys. All SPF really stops is bounce messages, also known as "Joe
Jobs." It's an important part of the solution, but it's far from an
adequate one.

But it is an easy one, and there's no good technical reason why Yahoo
should resist it. All the other major mail providers, to my knowledge, are
implementing SPF as part of their experimentation. The answer for Yahoo is
probably something as stupid as not wanting people to get the misimpression
that they are hedging on DomainKeys. I asked the company about this several
weeks ago, and it weaseled out of a direct answer. Most dissatisfying.

The Yahoo announcement focuses on phishing, probably because it's topical.
Spam has become a major annoyance, but phishing is scary. And SPF does
nothing to address phishing. This is why Microsoft developed Caller ID, the
header portion of Sender ID.

I should also take a moment to wag my finger at those who continue to
express concern at how spammers are adopting SPF and other authentication
standards in order to get around them. I don't know if they're walking into
a trap or if they're just experimenting, but it won't do them any good. The
more spammers authenticate, the easier they will make themselves to block.
For insights on security coverage around the Web, check out eWEEK.com
Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer's Weblog.

Remember, authentication systems are not complete anti-spam systems. They
just identify who is sending the mail, not why they are sending it. This
whole approach requires the coordinated use of reputation systems that will
use the authenticated address to tell you whether a sender is trustworthy.
In such a scenario, an 

'Virtual Debit Card' Aims To Combat Online Fraud

[R.A. Hettinga]

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The Wall Street Journal


 November 16, 2004

 MONEY


'Virtual Debit Card' Aims
 To Combat Online Fraud

By JENNIFER SARANOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 16, 2004; Page D2


Consumers typically have been wary of using bank cards online. One bank's
solution is to get rid of the cards.

In an effort to ease customers' concerns about fraud and identity theft
when shopping online, PNC Bank has launched a new checking account with a
"virtual debit card." In addition to a regular debit card that can be used
at automated teller machines and in stores, the "Digital Checking" account
comes with an "eSpend" card. The card is basically a piece of paper with an
account number, expiration date and verification code for making purchases
online, over the phone and by mail order. Customers can set a daily limit
for their eSpend card (say $1,000) and once that amount is spent,
additional purchases won't be approved.

PNC Bank, a unit of PNC Financial Services Group Inc., Pittsburgh, hopes
the eSpend card will attract people who want to make purchases online with
their debit card but are uncomfortable doing so for fear of making their
bank account vulnerable to fraud.

If an unauthorized person obtains a customer's eSpend number, only the
specified daily limit could be taken out of a customer's bank account. If
this occurs, PNC says customers aren't liable for the charges. Purchases
made with the eSpend card show up separately on bank statements. The
account, which is aimed at online-banking customers, also comes with
identity-theft reimbursement insurance, a debit card rewards program and no
fee for using non-PNC ATMs. The account has a monthly $11 service fee
unless customers opt for direct deposit of paychecks or government checks
such as Social Security, and pay at least three bills online.

The eSpend card comes as debit cards are quickly overtaking cash and checks
as preferred methods of payment. According to a report from the American
Bankers Association and Boston-based Dove Consulting, 31% of in-store
purchases were made with a debit card last year, up from 21% in 1999.

Consumers typically have been wary of using debit cards online because,
unlike credit cards, they are directly tied to bank accounts. But online
use of debit cards is starting to grow. In the first quarter of this year,
Visa debit cards were used for 46% of online purchases, up from 43% a year
earlier, according to Visa International.

Analysts are skeptical about how excited consumers will be about PNC's new
card. "I think it's an interesting idea but if you look at consumer usage,
consumers are using their debit cards online today in increasing numbers,
so it's unclear how much of a demand there would be for a card with that
unique application," says Tony Hayes, a Dove analyst.

Other banks have long offered similar credit-card products as a way to
encourage purchases on the Internet and reduce the amount of fraud they are
liable for. In June of 2002, for example, Citigroup Inc.'s Citibank
launched free, downloadable software that allows credit-card customers to
obtain a new disposable account number each time they make a purchase
online. A downside: Such "virtual account numbers" can't be used when a
credit card must be shown at pickup.


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[ISN] BlackBerry prickles Department of Defence spooks

[R.A. Hettinga]

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Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 07:34:56 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISN] BlackBerry prickles Department of Defence spooks
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: InfoSec News 
List-Archive: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Subscribe: ,

Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/15/1100384480556.html

By Rob O'Neill
November 16, 2004
Next

Department of Defence communications spooks are restricting the use of
wireless BlackBerry devices in government over concerns about the
security of confidential and restricted information.

The Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), the nation's high-tech
electronic eavesdropper, says the popular devices must not be used to
transmit confidential or secret information or connect to systems that
process it.

Agencies may use BlackBerry devices with systems that handle
"unclassified, x-in-confidence (excluding cabinet-in-confidence) and
restricted information".

Telstra, one of several providers of BlackBerry services, insists the
systems are secure.

"They are used by a lot of customers that require high levels of
security in the financial services industry, and even the CIA and the
Pentagon," a Telstra spokesman says.

Paul Osmond, Asia-Pacific regional director of BlackBerry developer
Research In Motion, is "thrilled" the Government has decided the
Department of Defence can use the device, because 18 months ago they
were prohibited.

"Their restrictions are fairly common when you look at a first
go-around," Osmond says. "They are similar to those the US defence
forces put out when they first used it."

The DSD will review the guidelines in February when it is expected RIM
and ISPs will seek to have their say.

The hand-held BlackBerry device, which allows access to corporate
email, including attachments, from almost any location, has become the
new must-have corporate accessory in the US and is receiving strong
support here.

But the swarm of new mobile computing devices poses security
challenges to government and private organisations. They are keen to
have the functionality but worry about privacy and access.

Other consumer devices have also generated alarm. A British security
firm's survey revealed Apple's iPod, which has large portable storage
capacity and can be plugged into most PCs, is considered a threat.

Sometimes such concerns can seem overblown, as in 1999 when the Furby,
a computerised toy, was banned from US National Security Agency
premises because it could be used as a recorder.



_
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable -
http://www.osvdb.org/

- --- end forwarded text


- -- 
- -
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Version: 1308

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Banned Chechen Web Site Now Operating On Swedish Server

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Wall Street Journal


 November 15, 2004 4:57 a.m. EST


 Banned Chechen Web Site Now Operating On Swedish Server


DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
November 15, 2004 4:57 a.m.


STOCKHOLM (AP)--A pro-independence Chechen Web site that was shut down by
the Lithuanian government and then removed from a Finnish server because of
a posting that claimed responsibility for the school massacre in southern
Russia began operating on a Swedish-owned server.

Jean Hamberg, managing director for Port80 AB, a Stockholm-based Internet
service provider, said the Web site, www.kavkazcenter.com, was up and
running on its servers since late last week.

"Nobody has complained about it," he told The Associated Press on Monday.
"No officials, I should say."

The site is regarded as a clearing house for pro-Chechen information and a
mouthpiece for Chechen rebel leaders battling Russian troops in the
breakaway province.

Lithuania's State Security Department shut the site down in September when
it was hosted by Elneta, an Internet service provider in the Lithuanian
capital, Vilnius.

In early October, the site surfaced on a server owned by Finland's Sonera,
but was shut down by the Finnish government.

Russia's government has called the site an "information tool of
international terrorists."

On Sept. 17, the site posted a letter - purportedly by Chechen rebel leader
Shamil Basayev - in which he claimed responsibility for the three-day siege
of a Russian school in Beslan. More than 330 people died in the standoff,
nearly half of them children.

It was impossible to confirm whether the letter on the Web site was
genuine, but Basayev's previous claims of responsibility have appeared
there.

Hamberg said the Web site would stay online, since it appeared to have not
violated any law.

"Our policy is if they're doing anything illegal, then they're out," he
said. "If they're not doing anything illegal we don't wish to interfere."

The Swedish government had no comment on the site.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Gettin' Our Scots-Irish Up

[R.A. Hettinga]

Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray.

Cheers,
RAH
---



The National Review
 November 15, 2004, 8:24 a.m.
Gettin' Our Scots-Irish Up
Country music reflects America's spirit.



I am fortunate to have been given the opportunity to review Jim Webb's
magnificent new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,
for NRODT [National Review on dead trees --RAH]. It is a wonderful social
history of an individualistic, stubborn, rebellious people responsible for
creating America's strongest cultural force.

A particularly powerful component of this culture is country music. Webb
calls country music "a uniquely American phenomenon," a "hypnotic and
emotionally powerful musical style" that evolved from its Celtic origins in
the mists of Scotland and Ireland.


Country music is at the heart of the Scots-Irish cultureIn the hollows
through those earlier years the dulcimer found its plaintive notes, the
traditionally exquisite violin turned into such a hot fiddle that some
warned it came from the devil (think Charlie Daniels: "The Devil came Down
to Georgia"), and the banjar, a native African instrument made with a
gourd, evolved into the hillbilly banjo.


 Indeed, anyone who wants to understand the Scots-Irish in America would do
well to begin by listening to this genre.

 It is no accident that Webb describes the importance of country music for
the Scots-Irish in his chapter entitled "Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray." Country
music is about real life, about "hard living, cheating hearts, and
good-looking women." It's also about sin and redemption. Country music
teaches that actions have consequences, and no one has ever conveyed this
reality more clearly than the hard-living, hard-drinking George Jones. The
titles of his songs tell it all: "From Hillbilly Heaven to Honky-Tonk
Hell," "Hell Stays Open All Night Long," "The Man that You Once Knew," "He
Stopped Loving Her Today," and "I've Had Choices."

 I've had choices, since the day that I was born.
 There were voices, that told me right from wrong.
 If I had listened, no I wouldn't be here today,
 Living and dying, with the choices I've made.

 Country music teaches these lessons in a way that puts to shame most of
what passes for poetry these days. Consider what I believe to be the
greatest country song of all time: "Amarillo By Morning," by the
incomparable George Strait.

 Amarillo by morning, Up from San Antone
 Everything that I've got, Is just what I've got on...
 They took my saddle in Houston, Broke my leg in Santa Fe
 Lost my wife and a girlfriend, Somewhere along the way
 Amarillo by morning, Up from San Antone
 Everything that I've got, Is just what I've got on
 I ain't got a dime, But what I've got is mine
 I ain't rich, But Lord I'm free
 Amarillo by morning, Amarillo's where I'll be.

 Or "Whiskey Lullaby," by Brad Paisley and Alison Krause:

 She put him out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette
 She broke his heart, he spent his whole life tryin' to forget
 We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
 But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
 Until the night.
 He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
 And finally drank away her memory
 Life is short but this time it was bigger
 Than the strength he had to get up off his knees.

Country music can be overtly religious, which, of course, scares the
dickens out of secular elites in this country. Consider Jimmy Wayne's "I
Love You This Much":

 He can't remember the times that he thought
 Does my daddy love me?
 Probably not
 But that didn't stop him from wishing that he did
 Didn't keep from wanting or worshipping him
 He guesses he saw him about once a year
 He could still feel the way he felt
 Standing in tears
 Stretching his arms out as far as they'd go
 Whispering daddy, I want you to know.

Chorus

  I love you this much and I'm waiting on you
  To make up your mind, do you love me too?
  However long it takes
  I'm never giving up
  No matter what, I love you this much.
  He grew to hate him for what he had done
  'Cause what kind of a father, could do that to his son
  He said 'damn you daddy', the day that he died
  The man didn't blink, but the little boy cried.

Chorus

  Half way through the service
  While the choir sang a hymn
  He looked up above the preacher
  And he sat and stared at him
  He said "Forgive me father"
  When he realized
  That he hadn't been unloved or alone all his life
  His arms were stretched out as far as they'd go
  Nailed to the cross, for the whole world to know.

Chorus

But even a man of faith can lose it - at least for a while - if the burden
is great enough. The next time you get a chance, listen to Alan Jackson
sing "you left my heart as empty as a Monday-morning church" about a man
who has just buried his wife.

 As Webb observes, when the Scots-Irish aren't praying, they are often
fighting, singing, or sinning in other

Certicom First to Earn FIPS 186-2 Validation for Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm

[R.A. Hettinga]

Certicom First to Earn FIPS 186-2 Validation for Elliptic Curve Digital
Signature Algorithm
 
  Validation of ECC-based algorithm another step in
 ECC standardization and widespread adoption

MISSISSAUGA, ON, Nov. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Certicom Corp.
(TSX: CIC), the authority for strong, efficient cryptography, today announced
that its implementation for the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
(EassociateCDSA) has earned the Federal Information Processing Standards
(FIPS) 186-2
validation certification No. 1 - making it the first company to receive the
designation for an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) -based algorithm.
This validation is particularly valuable for original equipment
manufacturers (OEMs) and software vendors who sell to government
organizations. By using Certicom's ECDSA implementation in their products,
they meet FIPS requirements without undergoing the time-consuming and costly
testing process. ECDSA is used to build in digital signature functionality and
is a faster alternative to legacy algorithms.
For the cryptography community, and in particular proponents of ECC, the
testing of ECC as part of the FIPS validation process is a significant step in
the adoption of this public key cryptosystem. Considered a benchmark for
security in government, a FIPS validation assures users that a given
technology has passed rigorous testing by an accredited third party lab as set
out by the National Institute of Standards for Technology (NIST) and can be
used to secure sensitive information. Typically, it drives wide-scale adoption
in government and in commercial sectors, particularly in the financial and
healthcare sectors that recognize the significance of FIPS validation. This
milestone in ECC's evolution follows last year's announcement from the
National Security Agency (NSA) that ECC is a 'crucial technology'. Both events
are part of the U.S. Government's crypto modernization program.
"A major hurdle to widespread adoption of any security technology is
standardization. We witnessed that 25 years ago with the Data Encryption
Standard (DES) and now are seeing it play out with Advanced Encryption
Standards (AES), the successor to DES," said Scott Vanstone, founder and
executive vice-president, strategic technology at Certicom. "As a
complementary cryptosystem to AES, we can expect the same for ECC. By testing
ECC-based algorithms in the FIPS certification process, NIST added a level of
assurance that says they've done the due diligence on it and now organizations
can be very comfortable adopting it."
ECC is a computationally efficient form of cryptography that offers
equivalent security to other competing technologies but with much smaller key
sizes. This results in faster computations, lower power consumption, as well
as memory and bandwidth savings, thereby making it ideal for today's
resource-constrained environments.
Certicom is considered a pioneer in ECC research and implementations,
backed by 20 years of experience. The company developed the industry's first
toolkit to include ECC, which has since been adopted by over 300
organizations. Tomorrow it will host the Certicom ECC Conference 2004, the
first-ever conference that brings together Elliptic Curve Cryptography
researchers, industry experts and users. During the two-day conference,
participants from North America, Europe and Asia will discuss the evolution of
ECC and share best implementation practices and insights for future
applications.

About Certicom
Certicom Corp. (TSX:CIC) is the authority for strong, efficient
cryptography required by software vendors and device manufacturers to embed
security in their products. Adopted by the US Government's National Security
Agency (NSA), Certicom technologies for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
provide the most security per bit of any known public key scheme, making it
ideal for constrained environments. Certicom products and services are
currently licensed to more than 300 customers including Motorola, Oracle,
Research In Motion, Terayon, Texas Instruments and Unisys. Founded in 1985,
Certicom is headquartered in Mississauga, ON, Canada, with offices in Ottawa,
ON; Reston, VA; San Mateo, CA; and London, England. Visit
http://www.certicom.com .

Certicom, Certicom Security Architecture, Certicom CodeSign, Security
Builder, Security Builder Middleware, Security Builder API, Security Builder
Crypto, Security Builder SSL, Security Builder PKI, and Security Builder GSE
are trademarks or registered trademarks of Certicom Corp. Intel is registered
trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and
other countries. All other companies and products listed herein are trademarks
or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Except for historical information conta

Certicom Announces Security Builder NSE (National Security Edition)

[R.A. Hettinga]

Certicom Announces Security Builder NSE (National Security Edition)
 
Cryptographic toolkit enables government contractors to add security that
meets NSA guidelines to protect mission-critical information

MISSISSAUGA, ON, Nov. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Government defence
contractors got a helping hand today when Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC), the
authority for strong, efficient cryptography, announced Security Builder(R)
NSE(TM). This developer toolkit enables organizations to build applications
and devices that meet the field-of-use guidelines set out by the National
Security Agency (NSA) to protect mission-critical national security
information. According to the NSA, there are over one million high-grade
devices in the U.S. Government today that will need to be replaced to include
security based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).
At an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting on November 11, the
NSA presented their requirements for strong security over the next 50 years
and further information about their licensing agreement with Certicom for its
ECC-based intellectual property. The NSA presentation can be found at
 http://www.machshav.com/~smb/saag-11-2004/ .
In October 2003, the NSA selected elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) as
the public-key cryptosystem to meet these new, stronger security requirements
under its crypto modernization program. The agency purchased licensing rights
for 26 ECC-based patents from Certicom for a particular field-of-use, defined
as implementations of ECC that are over GF (p), where p is a prime greater
than 2 to the power of 255.
"This toolkit is a logical next phase for Certicom as it helps
contractors meet the NSA guidelines for protecting the most critical
government information. The agency has set out the guidelines and made the
crypto licenses available to contractors. We're now providing a tool to help
developers integrate optimized security features that meet those guidelines,"
said Ian McKinnon, president and CEO of Certicom.
With this toolkit, organizations can be assured of proven implementations
backed by Certicom, a team of cryptographic experts that has focused on
optimizing public-key cryptosystems for almost two decades. The Security
Builder NSE toolkit covers the technology that was part of the 26 patents
licensed by the NSA plus optimized implementations that enable developers to
meet the NSA field-of-use guidelines and FIPS 140-2 validation requirements.

The toolkit, which is available in C code, includes:
-  Elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA)
   (FIPS-validated) for digital signatures;
-  Elliptic curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) for key agreement and
   transport;
-  SHA-1 and SHA-2 (FIPS-validated) for hashing;
-  Advanced encryption standard (AES) (FIPS-validated) for strong
   encryption;
-  Random number generation (RNG) (also FIPS-validated);
-  Point compression for size and performance efficiencies; and
-  Support for Windows and Linux platforms.

Security Builder NSE is part of the Certicom Security Architecture, which
unifies all of Certicom's existing toolkits across a single API and enables
developers to quickly migrate their applications to whichever cryptographic
module is required.

Pricing and Availability
Security Builder NSE will be available in the first quarter of 2005 and
priced at a one-time license fee with no royalties starting at US$50,000 per
project in the field-of-use plus support and maintenance. A free license for
the patents in the NSA field-of-use is available from the NSA or Certicom.

About Certicom
Certicom Corp. (TSX:CIC) is the authority for strong, efficient
cryptography required by software vendors and device manufacturers to embed
security in their products. Adopted by the US Government's National Security
Agency (NSA), Certicom technologies for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
provide the most security per bit of any known public key scheme, making it
ideal for constrained environments. Certicom products and services are
currently licensed to more than 300 customers including Motorola, Oracle,
Research In Motion, Terayon, Texas Instruments and Unisys. Founded in 1985,
Certicom is headquartered in Mississauga, ON, Canada, with offices in Ottawa,
ON; Reston, VA; San Mateo, CA; and London, England. Visit
http://www.certicom.com .

Certicom, Certicom Security Architecture, Certicom CodeSign, Security
Builder, Security Builder Middleware, Security Builder API, Security Builder
Crypto, Security Builder SSL, Security Builder PKI, and Security Builder GSE
are trademarks or registered trademarks of Certicom Corp. Intel is registered
trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and
other countries. All other 

[Osint] DHS Now Has Non-Disclosure Agreement For *Un*classified Info

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


To: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thread-Index: AcTLBDc4vJyL80TwSZuIiwn1AOddIQACB0Zg
From: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 07:13:19 -0500
Subject: [osint] A NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT FOR UNCLASSIFIED INFO]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]



 A NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT FOR UNCLASSIFIED INFO

 In a momentous expansion of the apparatus of government secrecy, the
 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is requiring employees and
 others to sign legally binding non-disclosure agreements as a
 condition of access to certain categories of unclassified information.

 Up to now, non-disclosure agreements have only been used by
 government agencies to regulate access to classified information. In
 fact, they are one of the defining features of the national security
 classification system, along with security clearances and the "need
 to know" principle. As far as Secrecy News could determine, such
 classification-like controls have never before been systematically
 imposed on access to unclassified information.

 But now at DHS a non-disclosure agreement must be executed in order
 to gain access to any one of a panoply of new and existing categories
 of unclassified information, including:

 "For Official Use Only (FOUO); Official Use Only (OUO); Sensitive
 Homeland Security Information (SHSI); Limited Official Use (LOU); Law
 Enforcement Sensitive (LES); Safeguarding Information (SGI);
 Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information (UCNI); and any other
 identifier used by other government agencies to categorize
 information as sensitive but unclassified."

 The proliferation of controls on unclassified information signifies a
 massive increase in government secrecy, particularly since the number
 of officials who are authorized to designate information in one of
 these categories dwarfs the number of officials who can create
 classified information.

 And while the classification system operates according to certain
 well-defined rules and limitations, including procedures for review
 and challenge of classification decisions, the same is not true of
 the "sensitive but unclassified" domain. Furthermore, there is
 nothing like the Information Security Oversight Office to monitor and
 oversee the restriction of unclassified information.

 (Some types of sensitive but unclassified information are not
 specifically protected by statute and can still be successfully
 requested under the Freedom of Information Act. But with Justice
 Department encouragement, agencies take an expansive view of the
 scope of the Act's exemptions and access is increasingly uncertain.)

 The DHS non-disclosure agreement is apparently the first such
 document crafted in the Bush Administration. It represents a new high
 water mark in the rising tide of official secrecy.

 A copy of DHS Form 11000-6, Non-Disclosure Agreement for Sensitive
 But Unclassified Information, dated August 2004, was obtained by
 Secrecy News and is posted here:

 http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dhs-nda.pdf








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[ISN] Japanese Government Bans Security Researcher's Speech

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 04:48:20 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISN] Japanese Government Bans Security Researcher's Speech
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: InfoSec News 
List-Archive: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Subscribe: ,

Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.ejovi.net/archives/2004/11/japanese_govern.html

November 12, 2004

[JUKI net is Japan's national ID system. Ejovi performed a security
audit of the system for Nagano Prefecture one year ago]

Its been a long day. I am greatly disappointed that Soumushou, the
Japanese government that maintains JUKI net, prevented me from
speaking today at the PacSec security conference. Soumushou prevented
my talk by threatening the Japanese event who currently are seeking
contracts from the government

The Japanese government gave me two options.

1) Do not talk
2) Drastically change your slides to say what they want me to.

When I offered to not use slides at all and give my own opinion they
told me that I would not be permitted to speak AT ALL. It is obvious
to me that they did not have an issue with my slides or presentation.
They were afraid that I would draw attention to problems in JUKI net.
Soumushou thinks that they can hide from the issues. They think that
if they keep people from speaking about the issues, it will go away. I
thought I would be immune from such Japanese government pressures
however I underestimated Soumushou's ability to manipulate those
around me.

Soumushou's reason for forbidding me to speak was this "Since we are
endorsing the convention we have to right to tell you not to speak" if
this is the case, the Japanese government needs only sponsor or
endorse ANY event in which they don't agree with and force the
organizers to change the content. If this is the case Japan will never
make any progress towards a safer environment.

What is most upsetting to me is the fact that I HAD NO PLANS TO
CRITIZE the Japanese government. My talk was going to be extremely
fair and balanced addressing the issues raised by both sides. In fact
I invited Soumushou to meet with me directly so that I can address any
issues they may have. I told them this on the telephone and by email.
Instead they choose to pressure the Japanese representatives of the
conference. They never attempted to talk with me directly. Why is
this?

If they had issues with something I may say why not ask me about it?
Why pressure a company they relies on government contracts? Is this
fair? The purpose of my talk was to present both sides of JUKI net
security systems. I have no vested interest in seeing it fail or in
seeing it succeed. I only wanted to recommend how best to make it
safer, how best to improve the system. But Soumushou believed that my
recommendations on how to improve its security alone would mean that
JUKI net has problems and they refused to admit this. I'm sorry to
tell them but it does have security problems. The good news is that
the technical issues can be easily resolved. However the greatest
problem with JUKI net is not technical but Soumushou's inability to
even acknowledge that they exist! How can a system become secure if
the Japanese government are not willing to listen to someone who
points out issues.

Today was a sad day for Japan and a frustrating day for me.



_
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable -
http://www.osvdb.org/

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Want to surf net? Show I-card

[R.A. Hettinga]

: HindustanTimes.com

Prove identity to surf net in Bangalore

Press Trust of India
Bangalore, November 15



Advertisement


Internet surfers in over 50,000 cyber cafés across Karnataka now need to
show an identity proof before browsing the web. With an aim to prevent
misuse of the Internet by criminals, the state government has made it
mandatory for all such cafes to have a record of net users, failing which
the police can impound their licenses.

"We are introducing this law to check anti-social elements and
anti-national activities. Internet is a great medium for communication, but
people can also carry out a lot of such (illegal) activities through it,"
state IT secretary K.N. Shankaralinge Gowda told here.

According to the new norms, a surfer needs to display his/her identity card
at the cyber café or be photographed by a web camera by the attendant
before logging on.  
Printed From
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

[ISN] How a guy's gizmo spread fear at Fed

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 04:47:54 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISN] How a guy's gizmo spread fear at Fed
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: InfoSec News 
List-Archive: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Subscribe: ,

Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/251774p-215484c.html

BY THOMAS ZAMBITO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
November 11, 2004

It nearly sparked a financial catastrophe.

An electrician's homemade gadget wreaked havoc on the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, causing computer convulsions at a facility that
houses the world's biggest cash vault, the Daily News has learned.

The foulup short-circuited the career of journeyman electrician John
Cravetts, who was fired though he insists he meant no harm.

But it could have been much worse, according to papers filed in
Manhattan Federal Court.

"The results could have been catastrophic," said Barry Schindler, an
attorney for the New York Fed.

Fed officials say they might have had to shut down computers that
process some $2.5 trillion in funds and securities payments and $4
billion in checks every day.

Fortunately, backup systems kicked in after the Nov. 17, 2002,
incident.

The heavily guarded facility in East Rutherford, N.J., is also home to
a vault that handles more than $1 billion in currency, coins and food
coupons.

Cravetts, 62, was canned two weeks after the incident. A surveillance
tape caught him using the crude device - two red wires strung between
an ordinary household switch and plug.

He later filed an age discrimination suit and also charged his firing
was retaliation for reporting an electrocution hazard at the facility
where he'd worked for almost 10 years.

Manhattan Federal judge Harold Baer tossed out Cravetts' claim this
week.

"I had an unblemished record," Cravetts told The News yesterday.

"What I did was in good faith. I did not do anything malicious," added
the licensed electrician, who has since found a new job. "What do they
think I'm going to do, sabotage it?"

Although Fed attorneys presented a near-doomsday scenario in court
filings, Fed spokesman Peter Bakstansky downplayed the incident
yesterday.

"There was no point at which the operations of the Fed were in
danger," Bakstansky said. "We stopped him. ... We have a lot of
redundancy."

Cravetts had been asked to locate circuit breakers on the Fed
computers that had not been properly labeled.

He used his gizmo to conduct the search, plugging it in and tripping
breakers, knocking out power as he went along.

Cravetts told The News his superiors knew he used the device. He had
made four of them at work.

Fed attorneys say he should have used a device that sends a harmless
tone back to the breaker and doesn't cause disruptions.

Cravetts said that for more than a year, he had asked his bosses to
order the manufactured device needed for the job, but they never did.



*==*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC

C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org
*==*



_
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable -
http://www.osvdb.org/

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Tiny Antennas to Keep Tabs on U.S. Drugs

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times

November 15, 2004

Tiny Antennas to Keep Tabs on U.S. Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS

he Food and Drug Administration and several major drug makers are expected
to announce an agreement today to put tiny radio antennas on the labels of
millions of medicine bottles to combat counterfeiting and fraud.

 Among the medicines that will soon be tagged are Viagra, one of the most
counterfeited drugs in the world, and OxyContin, a pain-control narcotic
that has become one of the most abused medicines in the United States. The
tagged bottles - for now, only the large ones from which druggists get the
pills to fill prescriptions - will start going to distributors this week,
officials said.

 Experts do not expect the technology to stop there. The adoption by the
drug industry, they said in interviews, could be the leading edge of a
change that will rid grocery stores of checkout lines, find lost luggage in
airports, streamline warehousing and add a weapon in the battle against
cargo theft.

 "It's basically a bar code that barks," said one expert, Robin Koh,
director of applications research at the Auto-ID Labs of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. "This technology is opening a whole series of
opportunities to make supply chains more efficient and more secure."

 Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense have already mandated that their
top 100 suppliers put the antennas on delivery pallets beginning in
January. Radio tags on vehicles and passports could become a central tool
in government efforts to create a database to track visitors to the United
States. And companies are rushing to supply scanners, computer chips and
other elements of the technology.

The labels are called radio-frequency identification. As in automated
highway toll collection systems, they consist of computer chips embedded
into stickers that emit numbers when prompted by a nearby radio signal. In
a supermarket, they might enable a scanner to read every item in a shopping
cart at once and spit out a bill in seconds, though the technology to do
that is still some distance off.

 For drug makers, radio labels hold the promise of cleaning up the
wholesale distribution system, where most counterfeit drugs enter the
supply chain - often through unscrupulous employees at the small wholesale
companies that have proliferated in some states.

 Initially, the expense of the system will be considerable. Each label
costs 20 to 50 cents. The readers and scanners cost thousands of dollars.

 But because the medicines tend to be very expensive and the need to ensure
their authenticity is great, officials said, the expense is justified.
Costs are still far too high for individual consumer goods, like the amber
bottles that pharmacies use to dispense pills to individuals. But prices
are expected to plunge once radio labels become popular, so drug makers
represent an important set of early adopters.

Privacy-rights advocates have expressed reservations about radio labels,
worrying that employers and others will be able to learn what medications
people are carrying in their pockets. Civil-liberties groups have voiced
similar concerns about ubiquitous use of the technology in the marketplace.
But under the current agreement, the technology would not be used at the
retail level.

 The food and drug agency's involvement is crucial because drug
manufacturers cannot change a label without the agency's approval. In its
announcement, the agency is expected to say that it is setting up a working
group to resolve any problems that arise from the use of radio antennas on
drug labels.

Counterfeit drugs are still comparatively rare in the United States, but
federal officials say the problem is growing. Throughout the 1990's, the
F.D.A. pursued about five cases of counterfeit drugs every year. In each of
the last several years, the number of cases has averaged about 20, but
law-enforcement officials say that figure does not reflect the extent of
the problem.

 Last year, more than 200,000 bottles of counterfeit Lipitor made their way
onto the market. In 2001, a Sunnyvale, Calif., pharmacist discovered that
bottles of Neupogen, an expensive growth hormone prescribed for AIDS and
cancer patients, were filled only with saltwater.

 "We've seen organized crime start to get involved," said William Hubbard,
an associate food and drug commissioner. With some drugs costing thousands
of dollars per vial, the profit potential is huge, he said.

 The weak point, Mr. Hubbard said, is the wholesaler system, which ships
more than half of the 14,000 approved prescription drugs in the United
States. While three large companies - McKesson, Cardinal and
AmerisourceBergen - account for more than 90 percent of drugs that are sent
through wholesalers, there are thousands of smaller companies throughout
the country, many little more tha

THE ARRIVAL OF SECRET LAW FAS Secrecy News -- 11/14/04

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


To: "The Eristocracy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: Jon Callas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: THE ARRIVAL OF SECRET LAW FAS  Secrecy News -- 11/14/04
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 13:44:16 -0800
Sender: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
List-Subscribe:
 

From: "Aftergood, Steven" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: November 14, 2004 2:46:53 PM EST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Secrecy News -- 11/14/04

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2004, Issue No. 100
November 14, 2004


**  THE ARRIVAL OF SECRET LAW
**  TSA THREATENS TO ARREST LEAKERS
**  SUPPORT SECRECY NEWS


THE ARRIVAL OF SECRET LAW

Last month, Helen Chenoweth-Hage attempted to board a United
Airlines flight from Boise to Reno when she was pulled aside by
airline personnel for additional screening, including a pat-down
search for weapons or unauthorized materials.

Chenoweth-Hage, an ultra-conservative former Congresswoman (R-ID),
requested a copy of the regulation that authorizes such pat-downs.

"She said she wanted to see the regulation that required the
additional procedure for secondary screening and she was told that
she couldn't see it," local TSA security director Julian Gonzales
told the Idaho Statesman (10/10/04).

"She refused to go through additional screening [without seeing the
regulation], and she was not allowed to fly," he said. "It's
pretty simple."

Chenoweth-Hage wasn't seeking disclosure of the internal criteria
used for screening passengers, only the legal authorization for
passenger pat-downs.  Why couldn't they at least let her see that?
asked Statesman commentator Dan Popkey.

"Because we don't have to," Mr. Gonzales replied crisply.

"That is called 'sensitive security information.'  She's not
allowed to see it, nor is anyone else," he said.

Thus, in a qualitatively new development in U.S. governance,
Americans can now be obligated to comply with legally-binding
regulations that are unknown to them, and that indeed they are
forbidden to know.

This is not some dismal Eastern European allegory.  It is part of a
continuing transformation of American government that is leaving
it less open, less accountable and less susceptible to rational
deliberation as a vehicle for change.

Harold C. Relyea once wrote an article entitled "The Coming of
Secret Law" (Government Information Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 2,
1988) that electrified readers (or at least one reader) with its
warning about increased executive branch reliance on secret
presidential directives and related instruments.

Back in the 1980s when that article was written, secret law was
still on the way.  Now it is here.

A new report from the Congressional Research Service describes with
welcome clarity how, by altering a few words in the Homeland
Security Act, Congress "significantly broadened" the government's
authority to generate "sensitive security information," including
an entire system of "security directives" that are beyond public
scrutiny, like the one former Rep. Chenoweth-Hage sought to
examine.

The CRS report provides one analyst's perspective on how the secret
regulations comport or fail to comport with constitutional rights,
such as the right to travel and the right to due process.  CRS
does not make its reports directly available to the public, but a
copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

See "Interstate Travel: Constitutional Challenges to the
Identification Requirement and Other Transportation Security
Regulations," Congressional Research Service, November 4, 2004:

  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/RL32664.pdf

Much of the CRS discussion revolves around the case of software
designer and philanthropist John Gilmore, who was prevented from
boarding an airline flight when he refused to present a photo ID.
(A related case involving no-fly lists has been brought by the
ACLU.)

"I will not show government-issued identity papers to travel in my
own country," Mr. Gilmore said.

Mr. Gilmore's insistence on his right to preserve anonymity while
traveling on commercial aircraft is naturally debatable -- but the
government will not debate it.  Instead, citing the statute on
"sensitive security information," the Bush Administration says the
case cannot be argued in open court.

Further information on Gilmore v. Ashcroft, which is pending on
appeal, may be found here:

  http://papersplease.org/gilmore/


TSA THREATENS TO ARREST LEAKERS

Efforts by the Transportation Security Administration to
investigate air marshals for talking to the press or the public
"were appropriate under the circumstances," the Department of
Homeland Security Inspector General said last week, and did not
constitute a "witch hunt."

However, "air marshals from two locations said that they were
threatened with arrest and prosecution if they were found to have
released sensitive security information (SSI), even though release
of SSI is not a prosecutable offense," the Inspector General said.

In a related overstatement, Federal Air Mar

Mr. Blue Goes Deaf When He Sees Red

[R.A. Hettinga]

Mostly because I sent his "Declaration of Expulsion" here...

It's entirely possible that, absent a physical threat to keep the country
together, we have all the necessary ingredients to go the way of the Soviet
Union someday, and devolve.

Cheers,
RAH
--



HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE: The National Conservative Weekly Since 1944

Mr. Blue Goes Deaf When He Sees Red

by Mike Thompson
Posted Nov 12, 2004

 Twenty-four hours after the dramatic U.S. presidential-election results
were validated, Human Events Online published my essay (which I had been
hatching for two weeks), "Declaration of Expulsion," a slightly satiric
proposal to kick out of the Union the 12 most liberal states, either to
join the People's Socialist Dominion of Canada or, on their own, go
straight to Hell.

 Within hours (and I do not claim that my piece was a causal effect),
liberal voices formed into an enthusiastic chorus for roughly the same
idea: Democrat gurus Lawrence O'Donnell and Robert Beckel, as angry talking
heads on two separate TV news shows, taunted the newly solid-Republican
South (all states of which actually are overfed "welfare clients" of the
affluent, heavily taxed North, huffed O'Donnell) to secede, for the second
time since 1860; The reliably opportunistic Internet erupted with "I
Seceded" T-shirts for sale, plus the mocking map of a 31-Red-state nation
called "Jesusland," and An e-mail rapidly circulating among liberals touted
creation of the country of "American Coastopia," whose upscale Atlantic-
and Pacific-rim inhabitants joyfully would (what else?) fly over Fly-Over
Country to get away from "rednecks in Oklahoma and homophobic
knuckle-draggers in Wyoming."

 Then came confirmation of the growing fascination for dividing what once
was "one nation indivisible," when Manhattan-based liberal talk-show host
Alan Colmes invited me to be a guest for 15 minutes on his late-night radio
program.

 My on-air "15 minutes of fame" would mushroom into 45 minutes of
defamation: "Why are you so intolerant of liberals?" asked Herr Colmes, who
apparently had forgotten that he was supposed to ask me when I had stopped
beating my wife. I explained to him factually that more liberals than
conservatives publicly are advocating dissolution of the Union, and that
the issue, in either event, is not intolerance but rather
insolubility--that is, there is no middle ground, no compromise possible on
most CultureWar issues.

 "That's exactly what intolerance is!" asserted the intolerant talkmeister.

 "Listen carefully, Alan," I urged. "If you want Congress to pass a
10-dollar minimum wage and I want an eight-dollar cap, it's possible for us
to compromise at nine dollars. But how do we compromise on abortion? Shall
we kill only half as many babies? How do we compromise on gay marriage?
Shall we allow a lesbian to marry a lesbian but forbid a man to marry a
man? There are too many of these insoluble differences between the Red
states and the Blue states."

 "I can't believe how intolerant you are!" screamed Alan.

 Soon a self-identified lesbian called in breathlessly to confess "intense
fear of intolerant Red states." (Why, I thought, was she phoning a radio
show in the middle of the night instead of her local 911 operator?) The
perceptive host again verbally pounced on me, his guest, who safely lives
in the brimstone warmth of Red Florida: "Do you think, Mr. Thompson, that
this woman is evil or immoral?"

 "Alan, I have no idea who the woman is," I answered. "I have just met her
anonymously over the phone. All I know is that she has made a bad choice of
lifestyle, because lesbians have a documented higher rate of alcoholism, a
higher rate of mental problems and a higher rate of suicide than
heterosexual women."

 Alan, who apparently is aurally challenged, now was in the full-boost
stage of liberal ballistics: "What do you mean, this woman RAPES other
women? You are filled with hate! How DARE you say such a thing!"

 "Rape?" I asked, flabbergasted. "I said RATE--as in 'suicide rate.'
RATE--as in 'alcoholism rate'! Please listen to me, Alan. Is your phone
bad?"

 With no apology to his mystified guest, Alan disconnected the lesbian's
call and radically changed the subject: "Do you think John Kerry is a
traitor?"

 "Yes, Alan. One who commits treason," I observed coolly, "by definition is
a traitor. Kerry went to Paris and consulted with our Communist Vietnam
enemies, not with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Subsequently,
Kerry publicly endorsed the outrageous Communist 'peace plan,' not his own
country's plan.

 "In uniform, Kerry during the war and under oath before the U.S. Senate
also accused his fellow American soldiers of indiscriminately raping and
killing Vietnamese civilians and destroying their villages just for the fun
of it--false charges that were welcomed and used by the Communist nation's
cruel jailers for years to torture American prisoners. Therefore, Mr. K

Gov't Orders Air Passenger Data for Test

[R.A. Hettinga]

Yahoo!


Gov't Orders Air Passenger Data for Test



 Fri Nov 12, 2:35 PM ET

By LESLIE MILLER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -  The government on Friday ordered airlines to turn over
personal information about passengers who flew within the United States in
June in order to test a new system for identifying potential terrorists.

  


 The system, dubbed "Secure Flight," will compare passenger data with names
on two government watch lists, a "no fly" list comprised of people who are
known or suspected to be terrorists, and a list of people who require more
scrutiny before boarding planes.

 "Secure Flight represents a significant step in securing domestic air
travel and safeguarding national security information, namely, the
watchlists," the Transportation Security Administration said in a notice
announcing the order.

 Currently, the federal government shares parts of the list with airlines,
which are responsible for making sure suspected terrorists don't get on
planes. People within the commercial aviation industry say the lists have
the names of more than 100,000 people on them.

 The order follows a 30-day period during which the public was allowed to
comment on the Secure Flight proposal. About 500 people commented on the
plan; the overwhelming majority opposed it, saying it would invade their
privacy and infringe on their civil liberties.

 An airline industry representative said the carriers, which support the
plan, are studying the order.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Survey: People want receipt showing how they voted

[R.A. Hettinga]

Las Vegas SUN


Photo: Larry Lomax

Las Vegas SUN
 Today: November 12, 2004 at 9:43:50 PST

 Survey: People want receipt showing how they voted

LAS VEGAS SUN

 An Election Day poll in Las Vegas indicated that 81 percent of voters
surveyed want to take home a private "ATM style" receipt to verify for
themselves their vote was counted correctly, a consulting group said
Wednesday.

 Lombardo Consulting Group said it surveyed 362 voters in conjunction with
political science professor Michael John Burton of Ohio University.

 Given a choice between leaving a voter-verified paper ballot at the
polling place or taking home a receipt, 60 percent of those asked said they
preferred take-home receipts and self-verification, and 36 percent said
they preferred the idea of leaving a paper ballot with election officials.

 Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller, the man responsible for overseeing
elections throughout the state, opposes giving voters a printed receipt,
however. He said that while it may sound like a good idea, it could lead to
many problems.

 An employer could require a worker to show his receipt to prove he voted a
certain way, or the worker could be subject to loss of his job if he didn't
follow the wishes of the employer, Heller said. Unions could require a
member to verify he voted a certain way in order to keep his membership,
said Heller.

 Any of those actions would be illegal, however. Heller also said the
printed receipts could lead to electioneering problems. He referred to a
ruling from his office that a casino could not give free meals to customers
who showed records that they had cast their ballots. None of the problems
he cited would be caused by voters themselves, however.

 Nevada was the only state to use "statewide" voter-verified paper ballot
printers attached to electronic voting machines on Election Day.

 In a press release, Burton said that "many voters thought a private
receipt that they could take home would be the best way to know if their
vote was counted correctly. People are used to getting receipts from ATMs
or gas stations -- and they liked the idea of getting a receipt from the
voting booth."

 During the election in Nevada, voters were instructed by poll workers to
compare their vote selections on the electronic screen with what was
printed on the voter verified paper ballot scroll. The paper ballot scrolls
were retained by election officials for use in post-election audits or
recounts.

 The survey also examined voter interaction with Nevada's voter-verified
paper ballot machines and found that only 31 percent of the voters actually
compared the entire paper ballot to the machine ballot in order to ensure
their vote was recorded accurately.

 Lombardo Consulting Group is a corporate and political public opinion
research firm with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

 Complete survey results can be found at http://www.lombardo consulting
group.com /docs/ nvvotersurvey.pdf


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Bin Laden Has "Religious Approval" To Use Nuke

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Drudge Report


Support The DrudgeReport; Visit Our Advertisers



 FORMER HEAD OF CIA'S OSAMA BIN LADEN UNIT SAYS THE QAEDA LEADER HAS
SECURED RELIGIOUS APPROVAL TO USE A NUCLEAR BOMB AGAINST AMERICANS
 Fri Nov 12 2004 12:02:34 ET

 Osama bin Laden now has religious approval to use a nuclear device against
Americans, says the former head of the CIA unit charged with tracking down
the Saudi terrorist. The former agent, Michael Scheuer, speaks to Steve
Kroft in his first television interview without disguise to be broadcast on
60 MINUTES Sunday, Nov. 14 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television
Network.

 Scheuer was until recently known as the "anonymous" author of two books
critical of the West's response to bin Laden and al Qaeda, the most recent
of which is titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on
Terror. No one in the West knows more about the Qaeda leader than Scheuer,
who has tracked him since the mid-1980s. The CIA allowed him to write the
books provided he remain anonymous, but now is allowing him to reveal
himself for the first time on Sunday's broadcast; he formally leaves the
Agency today (12).

 Even if bin Laden had a nuclear weapon, he probably wouldn't have used it
for a lack of proper religious authority - authority he has now. "[Bin
Laden] secured from a Saudi sheik...a rather long treatise on the
possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Americans," says Scheuer.
"[The treatise] found that he was perfectly within his rights to use them.
Muslims argue that the United States is responsible for millions of dead
Muslims around the world, so reciprocity would mean you could kill millions
of Americans," Scheuer tells Kroft.

 Scheuer says bin Laden was criticized by some Muslims for the 9/11 attack
because he killed so many people without enough warning and before offering
to help convert them to Islam. But now bin Laden has addressed the American
people and given fair warning. "They're intention is to end the war as soon
as they can and to ratchet up the pain for the Americans until we get out
of their regionIf they acquire the weapon, they will use it, whether
it's chemical, biological or some sort of nuclear weapon," says Scheuer.

 As the head of the CIA unit charged with tracking bin Laden from 1996 to
1999, Scheuer says he never had enough people to do the job right. He
blames former CIA Director George Tenet. "One of the questions that should
have been asked of Mr. Tenet was why were there always enough people for
the public relations office, for the academic outreach office, for the
diversity and multi-cultural office? All those things are admirable and
necessary but none of them are protecting the American people from a
foreign threat," says Scheuer.

 And the threat posed by bin Laden is also underestimated, says Scheuer. "I
think our leaders over the last decade have done the American people a
disservice...continuing to characterize Osama bin Laden as a thug, as a
gangster," he says. "Until we respect him, sir, we are going to die in
numbers that are probably unnecessary, yes. He's a very, very talented man
and a very worthy opponent," he tells Kroft.

 Until today (12), Scheuer was a senior official in the CIA's counter
terrorism unit and a special advisor to the head of the agency's bin Laden
unit.

 Developing...


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Banks brace for cashpoint attack

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register » Security » Network Security »

 Original URL:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/banks_prepare_for_atm_cyber_crime/

Banks brace for cashpoint attack
By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus (klp at securityfocus.com)
Published Thursday 11th November 2004 10:42 GMT

An international group of law enforcement and financial industry
associations hopes to prevent a new type of bank robbery before it gets off
the ground: cyber attacks against automated teller machines.

This fall the Global ATM Security Alliance (GASA) published what it says
are the first international cyber security guidelines specifically tailored
to cash machines. Experts see new dangers as legacy ATMs running OS/2 give
way to modern terminals built on Microsoft Windows.


"The recommendations presented in this manual are essentially designed to
provide a common sense approach to ... the rapidly changing threat model
that the introduction to the ATM channel of the Windows XP and other common
use operating systems, as well as the TCP/IP network protocol suite, has
created," said the manual's author, Ian Simpson, in a statement.

The move comes one year after the Nachi worm compromised
(http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7517) Windows-based automated teller
machines at two financial institutions, in the only acknowledged case of
malicious code penetrating ATMs. The cash machines, made by Diebold, were
built on Windows XP Embedded, which suffered from the RPC DCOM security
hole Nachi exploited.

In response to the incident, Diebold began shipping new Windows-based ATMs
preinstalled with host-based firewall software, and offered to add the
program for existing customers.

Though ATMs typically sit on private networks or VPNs, supposedly-isolated
networks often have undocumented connections to the Internet, or can fall
to a piece of malicious code inadvertently carried beyond the firewall on a
laptop computer. Last year's Slammer worm indirectly shut down some 13,000
Bank of America ATMs by infecting database servers on the same network, and
spewing so much traffic that the cash machines couldn't processes customer
transactions.

The goal of the ATM cyber security best practices document, which has not
been made public, and a related white paper developed by GASA, is "to be
proactive in fighting what might be the next wave of ATM crime - namely
cyber attacks," said Mike Lee, founding coordinator of the group, in a
statement.

GASA's members include fraud prevention agencies, financial industry
associations, the US Secret Service, Visa and MasterCard, and some ATM
networks and manufacturers, including Diebold and NCR.


Related stories

ATMs in peril from computer worms?
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/20/atm_viral_peril/)
The ATM keypad as security portcullis
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/21/atm_keypad_security/)
Ukrainian teen fights the Rise of the Machines
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/13/girl_terminates_atm/)


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

FBI captures Intel staffer with Texas-sized gun cache

[R.A. Hettinga]

Ha! Made you look!

Cheers,
RAH
See .sig, below...

---




The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT
The Register » Odds and Sods » Bootnotes »

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/intel_gun_man/

FBI captures Intel staffer with Texas-sized gun cache
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk)
Published Thursday 11th November 2004 19:18 GMT

It's not often that "AK-47" and "Intel" make it into the same sentence, but
that's exactly what just happened after it was learned that a former Intel
employee has been charged with plotting to attack one of the company's
plants in Arizona.

Last month, David Dugan was arrested after agents observed him "picking up
an AK-47 and 1000 rounds of ammunition" at an Arizona gun shop. Dugan had
been under surveillance ever since he allegedly placed a phone call to a
family member, suggesting that he planned to shoot up Intel's Chanlder,
Arizona plant. Intel confirmed that Dugan was a former employee, and
investigators suspect that the man was disgruntled after being fired and
enduring a long-standing dispute over disability payments.

"The criminal complaint charges that on October 16, 2004, Dugan
communicated with a family member in Missouri via telephone, discussing
that Dugan had received a letter of termination from Intel and describing
ways in which Dugan would cause production at Intel to cease and that
people would possibly be hurt at the production facility," the Arizona
District Attorney said in a statement.

Dugan has been charged with one count of of transmitting a threat via the
telephone. He could face up five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

Agents searched Dugan's home and found an AK-47, a loaded rifle, a loaded
shotgun, two handguns and 1800 rounds of ammunition. In Texas, that's known
as "the executive weekend retreat package."

The FBI alleges that Dugan planned to open up gas pipes in the basement of
the Chandler plant and then to begin shooting at machinery. The former
manufacturing technician was looking to cause millions in damages,
according to the FBI's complaint.

A reporter for the Arizona Republic travelled over to Dugan's home and
interviewed some of his neighbors.

"My daughter had seen him out walking his dog," one neighbor told the
paper. "He had just had surgery, and he was very feeble in his walk."

A sign on Dugan's front door said, "No trespassing. No solicitations. Place
nothing on doorknob. Post no bills please," according to the paper. ®

Related links

Arizona Republic breaks the story
(http://www.azcentral.com/community/chandler/articles/1030cr-workplace30Z6.html)

Follow up on assault weapons
(http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/tempe/articles/1110gr-thomason10Z6.html)

Related stories

For sale: missiles, heroin and exploding Barbies
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/missiles_and_exploding_barbies/)
Eight fined in eBay auction scam
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/ebay_auction/)
'See through clothes' scanner gets outing at Heathrow
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/heathrow_scanner_pilot/)
37 arrested in net gun swoop
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/met_guns_net/)
Canada offers refuge to distraught Democrats
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/canada_offers_refuge/)

© Copyright 2004

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid
on our own! And we were grateful!" --Alan Olsen

E-pass defeats HP, MS' case dismissal demand

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register » Mobile » Devices »

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/e-pass_vs_ms_hp_nov_04/

E-pass defeats HP, MS' case dismissal demand
By Tony Smith (tony.smith at theregister.co.uk)
Published Thursday 11th November 2004 16:27 GMT

Microsoft and HP have suffered a set-back in their attempt to defend
themselves against allegations made by a patent holding company that their
PDA software and hardware violates its intellectual property.

Last week, Judge Kenneth M Hoyt of the US District Court for Southern Texas
in Houston rejected a request made by Microsoft and HP in July this year
that a series of claims made in the patent, number 5,276,311
(http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,276,311.WKU.&OS=PN/5,276,311&RS=PN/5,276,311),
filed in 1989 and granted in 1994, were invalid due to prior art. ?
E-pass' patent covers a "multifunction electronic card" which can be used
to store information on a range of credit and debit cards, accessed
securely through a password system. Essentially, it describes a single
device that users can carry around in place of a multitude of cards.

Long-time Register readers will recall that E-pass sued not only Microsoft
and Compaq (now part of HP), but 3Com's Palm subsidiary (now PalmOne). In
each case, it accused them of selling PDAs that duplicate functionality and
techniques outlined in its patent, without authorisation. The Palm action
was initiated in 2000
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/03/01/smart_card_company_sues_over/),
the Microsoft/HP case in 2002.

E-pass is also suing the Visa organisation. It claims Visa met the company
in 2000. After the meeting, it never heard from Visa again, until it
spotted Visa's then VP for Product Development, Susan Gordon-Lathrop,
appear with then Palm CEO Carl Yankowski to demo a Palm storing secure
credit card details.

The MS/HP case was put on hold pending the outcome of the Palm action,
which initially saw Palm victorious - only to be defeated at appeal. Much
of the legal toing and froing to date has centred on the patent's use of
the word 'card' and what that word means exactly, in this context. 'Card',
the defendants claimed, means a specific thing - something thin, flat and
the size of a credit card. Our devices are no so sized, said Palm - ergo,
they do not infringe E-pass' patent.

The US District Court of Northern California agreed, but in August 2003,
the appeal court rejected
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/22/judge_dismisses_palm_patent_case/)
the verdict, sending the case back to the lower court. The Court of Appeal
did not address Palm's infringement or otherwise of E-pass' patent, only
that the lower court had been mistaken in its application of the law.

The following November, E-pass won the right
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/12/epass_allowed_to_reopen_microsoft/)
to re-commence its action against Microsoft and HP on the basis of that
appeal court judgement. In February 2004, Judge Hoyt confirmed
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/27/judge_denies_ms_attempt/) the
appeal court's ruling and its definition of the word 'card' - it's any
"flat, rectangular piece of stiff material", in case you were wondering -
and essentially brought the Microsoft/HP case into alignment with the Palm
action.

The latest judgement centres on a request for dismissal based on prior art.
Microsoft and HP claim US patent number 4,701,601
(http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,701,601.WKU.&OS=PN/4,701,601&RS=PN/4,701,601),
the Visa SuperSmart card - which embodies that patent - and a manual
designed for the SuperSmart both detail key elements of E-pass' patent
before 5,276,311 was filed. However, Judge Hoyt ruled that in each of the
three cases they did not anticipate the claims made in E-pass' patent.

Assuming no further requests are made, the case is scheduled to go to trial
in March 2005. ®

Related stories

Judge denies MS attempt to re-define 'card'
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/27/judge_denies_ms_attempt/)
E-Pass allowed to re-open Microsoft, HP patent lawsuits
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/12/epass_allowed_to_reopen_microsoft/)
Judge dismisses Palm patent case win
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/22/judge_dismisses_palm_patent_case/)
Smart card company sues over Palm patent piracy claim
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/03/01/smart_card_company_sues_over/)

© Copyright 2004

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and F

Keeping Better Track From Factory to Checkout

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times

November 11, 2004
HOW IT WORKS

Keeping Better Track From Factory to Checkout
By BARNABY J. FEDER

IKE investing or hitting a baseball, using radio scanners to wirelessly
identify consumer products is simple in concept but dauntingly complex in
reality.

 The current form of the decades-old technology, now known as radio
frequency identification, or RFID, has three building blocks: small tags
built around microchips that carry a digital identification code; scanners,
which are also known as readers; and networking hardware and software to
link scanners to computer databases.

 The biggest challenge for retailers and their suppliers has been melding
the building blocks into systems that are reliable without being cumbersome
or unduly expensive. Unlike the RFID systems that automatically collect
tolls from motorists or control access to buildings, those designed for
commerce call for disposable, batteryless tags that are tiny and
unobtrusive. And since the tags are meant to be slapped on every pallet or
carton or even on every item, they must be cheap enough for businesses to
buy them by the hundreds of millions.

Perhaps most important, retailers need software capable of filtering out
huge amounts of data while recognizing relevant information - when an item
has unexpectedly disappeared from a shipment, for example.

 "It's been very hard to do an intelligent investigation into how you need
to change the business because the technology is not good enough yet," said
Simon Ellis, supply chain futurist for  Unilever, the consumer products
company. "It's costing over $1 a case, which is fine for a pilot test. But
there is no technology to get labels onto our production-line products."

 The ultimate goal of an RFID system is to track individual products all
the way from manufacture to sale. Under such a system, every item would
have a tag embedded in its label or attached separately. The tag consists
of a microchip and a flat ribbon of antenna; the microchip would contain a
unique code identifying the manufacturer, type of product and individual
serial number in a format approved by EPCglobal USA, a nonprofit group that
has been developing retail RFID standards.

As the item moved through the supply chain, scanners in doorways, on
loading docks or at other handoff points would capture the movement. Radio
waves from the scanners would be picked up by the tag's antenna, providing
enough energy for the tag to broadcast its identity back to the scanner.

Data would flow through the Internet or other networks to corporate
computers, but if the tags had read-write capability, status updates on the
item could be added to the tag itself as well.

 Once products reached the store, scanners in the stockroom could track how
rapidly they are moved to shelves, and scanners on shelves could monitor
when shoppers removed them. Finally a checkout scanner could ring up
everything in a shopping cart as it was wheeled toward the door.

Such technology could speed up checkouts and returns, but the bigger
economic impact would be in keeping store shelves filled with the products
consumers want. Right now, according to the Grocery Manufacturers
Association, stores are missing products consumers want to buy about 8
percent of the time on average and up to 15 percent of the time when the
product is being promoted.

RFID tracking would also make a big dent in theft and counterfeiting,
according to proponents of the technology. And, they say, the tags would be
designed so that consumers could easily disable them after purchase. That
will not mollify privacy advocates, who object to manufacturers and
retailers building up electronic records of shoppers' buying habits, but it
could calm fears that individuals or institutions outside the store could
use the tags to spy on consumer behavior.

So much for the vision. Today's tags are too expensive to put on every item
(the cheapest cost about 20 cents each). An effort by  Wal-Mart to force
its suppliers to use RFID has focused on handling tagged cases, cartons and
pallet loads of goods rather than individual items.

"Even Wal-Mart is still discovering what this technology can and cannot
do," said Omar Hijazi, an RFID specialist at the consulting firm A. T.
Kearney.

With standards not yet settled, few individual items being tagged and
retailers not yet demanding RFID tags at more than a few test distribution
centers, manufacturers have put off automating RFID tagging. Instead, most
are resorting to "slap and ship" strategies in which tags are applied to
items involved in tests just before they leave the warehouse.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world]

Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 3:40 PM + 11/12/04, ken wrote:
>And when was this stagnation?

Two words: Ming Navy

Cheers,
RAH
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Patriot Fixes

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Wall Street Journal


 November 12, 2004

 COMMENTARY


Patriot Fixes

By BOB BARR
November 12, 2004; Page A12


The most common charge levied against critics of the Patriot Act -- one
that Alberto Gonzales, the new face of Justice, is likely to repeat in his
days ahead -- is that they're "misinformed." Well, as a former U.S.
attorney appointed by President Reagan, a former CIA lawyer and analyst,
and a former Congressman who sat on the Judiciary Committee, I can go mano
a mano with any law-enforcement or intelligence official on the facts. And
the facts say that the Patriot Act needs to be reviewed and refined by
Congress.

Critics of the Act are not calling for full repeal. Only about a dozen of
the 150 provisions need to be reformed; these, however, do pose singular
threats to civil liberties. Here's how to bring them back in line with the
Constitution.

The two most significant problems are sections 213 and 215. The first
authorized the use of delayed-notification search warrants, which allow the
police to search and seize property from homes and businesses without
contemporaneously telling the occupants. The Justice Department often
claims that this new statutory "sneak and peek" power is innocuous, because
the use of such warrants was commonplace before. Actually, the Patriot
Act's sneak and peek authority is a whole new creature. Before, law
enforcement certainly engaged in delayed-notification searches, especially
in drug investigations. Importantly, this authority was available in
terrorism investigations. Courts, however, put specific checks on these
warrants: They could only be authorized when notice would threaten life or
safety (including witness intimidation), endanger evidence, or incite
flight from prosecution. It was a limited and extraordinary power.

The Patriot Act greatly expanded potential justifications for delay. The
criminal code now allows secret search warrants whenever notice would
"jeopardize" an investigation or "delay" a trial -- extremely broad
rationales. The exception has become the rule. Congress should remove that
catch-all justification and impose strict monitoring on the use of these
secret warrants.

The other primary problem is the "library records" provision, Section 215.
This amended a minor section of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, which created a specialized court for the review of spy-hunting
surveillance and search requests. This "business records" section allowed
agents to seize personal records held by certain types of third-parties,
including common carriers and vehicle rental companies. The Patriot Act
made two changes to this relatively limited power: It allowed the seizure
of any "tangible thing" from any third-party record holder (including
medical, library, travel and genetic records); and it removed the
particularized suspicion required in the original statute.

Pre-2001, investigators had to show "specific and articulable facts" -- a
standard much lower than criminal probable cause -- that a target was a spy
or terrorist. Now, that already low standard has been lowered further.
Agents simply certify to the intelligence court that the records desired
are relevant to an investigation -- any investigation -- and the judge has
no real authority to question that assertion, rendering judicial review
meaningless.

Reformers on the left and right want two fixes to this section. First,
reinstall the individualized suspicion requirement. This reflects the
Fourth Amendment notion that the government cannot invade privacy and
gather evidence unless it has reasonable suspicion that one has done wrong.
The proposed "fix" would retain the section's broad "tangible things"
scope, but with a safeguard against abuse. The authorities would still be
able to go to a criminal grand jury to demand the production of the same
records, providing additional flexibility for counterterrorism work.
Second, Congress should require additional reporting requirements.

There are other refinements desired by the Act's critics. The new
definition of domestic terrorism in Section 802 can be used by prosecutors
to turn on an array of invasive new authorities, including broad
asset-forfeiture powers, even when the underlying crime does not rise to
the level of "terrorism." The preferred legislative reform keeps the
definition, but links it to specific crimes like assassination or
kidnapping.

Reasonable critics of the expansive provisions of the Patriot Act, on both
sides of the aisle and in both Houses, have introduced legislation that
would implement these modest changes. Far from gutting the Act, these would
secure the important powers of the law, but place modest limits on their
use. For most of us who voted for the Act, what sealed the deal was the
inclusion of provisions that would require us to take a sober second look
at the most contentious provisions in the Act by the end of 2005, before
r

E-Mail Authentication Will Not End Spam, Panelists Say

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
E-Mail Authentication Will Not End Spam, Panelists Say


By Jonathan Krim
 Washington Post Staff Writer
 Thursday, November 11, 2004; Page E01

 For consumers and businesses increasingly shaken by the growing onslaught
of unwanted e-mail and the computer viruses and other nefarious hacking
spam can bring, any hope for quick relief was soundly dashed yesterday
during a government-hosted gathering of technology experts.

Several executives and academics speaking at a forum sponsored by the
Federal Trade Commission said criminals are already steps ahead of a major
initiative by e-mail providers to counter those problems by creating a
system to verify senders of e-mail.

 In theory, such an authentication system would make it harder for spammers
to disguise their identities and locations in an attempt to avoid being
shut down or prosecuted.

 But a majority of spam is launched by "zombies," or infected personal
computers that are controlled by remote spammers. E-mail from a zombie
looks as if it is coming from a legitimate source -- because it is. The
owner of that source is simply unaware that his or her computer has been
commandeered.

"We'll be lucky if we solve 50 percent of the problem" with e-mail
authentication, said Pavni Diwanji, chairman of MailFrontier Inc., a
Silicon Valley provider of e-mail security systems.

 By some estimates, the problem is rapidly becoming a crisis. In the first
half of this year, an average of 30,000 computers a day were turned into
zombies, according to the computer security firm Symantec Corp. In addition
to serving up unwanted or fraudulent messages, spam is used to deliver
viruses and other malicious software code that can allow hackers to capture
private data such as credit card or bank account numbers from personal
computers.

Hackers and spammers also have been able to exploit a lack of awareness
among many computer users, tricking them into providing their passwords or
account information in response to e-mails that appear to be coming from
legitimate financial institutions or retailers, a tactic known as phishing.

 The information is then rapidly sold on a black market heavily populated
by elements of organized crime in Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

 As incidents of the resulting identity fraud mount, "we're losing consumer
confidence in this medium," said R. David Lewis, vice president of Digital
Impact Inc., which provides bulk e-mail marketing services to large
companies.

 Lewis and others said that if the public reaches a tipping point at which
Internet commerce is no longer trusted, the economic consequences will be
severe.

Despite the authentication effort's shortcomings, none of yesterday's
speakers suggested abandoning it, because it is seen as an essential
building block for other solutions.

 But the forum demonstrated in stark terms the depth and complexity of the
problem.

Any e-mail authentication system, for example, would check that the block
of Internet addresses assigned to an e-mail provider includes the specific
numeric address of a sender of a piece of e-mail.

Thus, a red flag would go up if a message seeming to come from
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is actually not coming from a computer that uses the
xyz-123.net mail service.

 But Scott Chasin, chief technology officer of e-mail security firm MX
Logic Inc., said the underlying Internet system that houses the necessary
data is insecure and can be tricked by hackers. Chasin said the problem has
been known for 10 years, but industry and Internet standard-setters have
been unable or unwilling to fix the problem by encrypting the data.

 Getting agreement on an authentication system has been similarly difficult
and is partly why the FTC held the summit.

 The major e-mail providers, America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo
Inc. and EarthLink Inc., are still testing and pushing various plans. The
Internet group assigned to endorse a standard disbanded recently, unable to
resolve discord and uncertainty over whether licensing rights asserted by
Microsoft would cut out a broad swath of organizations that use so-called
open-source software.

 Chasin and other panelists also said the basic operating systems that
power computers -- the most dominant of which is Microsoft Windows --
remain too vulnerable to hackers.

He said a worm was recently discovered that lodges itself in Windows files
and goes to work when a computer user tries to access the Web site of his
or her bank. The malicious code automatically redirects the Web browser to
a fake page that looks like the real thing.

In this scenario, the user has not been duped by a fake phishing e-mail.
Instead, the vulnerability in the operating system has allowed the code to
redirect the user's browser to a phony page where a hacker can capture the
user's name and password.

Still, panelists insisted authentication is a vital first ste

Calif. settles electronic voting suit against Diebold for $2.6M

[R.A. Hettinga]

Ths San Francisco Chronicle

Calif. settles electronic voting suit against Diebold for $2.6M

RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

(11-10) 15:31 PST SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --

 California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced Wednesday a $2.6
million settlement with Diebold Inc., resolving a lawsuit alleging that the
company sold the state and several counties shoddy voting equipment.

 Although critics characterized the settlement as a slap on the wrist,
Diebold also agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to partially reimburse
Alameda, San Diego and other counties for the cost of paper backup ballots,
ink and other supplies in last week's election. California's secretary of
state banned the use of one type of Diebold machine in May, after problems
with the machines disenfranchised an unknown number of voters in the March
primary.

 Faulty equipment forced at least 6,000 of 316,000 voters in Alameda
County, just east of San Francisco, to use backup paper ballots instead of
the paperless voting terminals. In San Diego County, a power surge resulted
in hundreds of touch-screens that wouldn't start when the polls opened,
forcing election officials to turn voters away from the polls.

 According to the settlement, the North Canton, Ohio-based company must
also upgrade ballot tabulation software that Los Angeles County and others
used Nov. 2. Diebold must also strengthen the security of its paperless
voting machines and computer servers and promise never to connect voting
systems to outside networks.

 "There is no more fundamental right in our democracy than the right to
vote and have your vote counted," Lockyer said in a statement. "In making
false claims about its equipment, Diebold treated that right, and the
taxpayers who bought its machines, cavalierly. This settlement holds
Diebold accountable and helps ensure the future quality and security of its
voting systems."

 The tentative settlement could be approved as soon as Dec. 10.

 The original lawsuit was filed a year ago by Seattle-based electronic
voting critic Bev Harris and Sacramento-based activist Jim March, who
characterized the $2.6 million settlement as "peanuts."

 March, a whistle blower who filed suit on behalf of California taxpayers,
could receive as much as $75,000 because of the settlement. But he said the
terms don't require Diebold to overhaul its election servers -- which have
had problems in Washington's King County and elsewhere -- to guard them
from hackers, software bugs or other failures.

 The former computer system administrator was also upset that the state
announced the deal so quickly. Several activist groups, computer scientists
and federal researchers are analyzing Nov. 2 election data, looking for
evidence of vote rigging or unintentional miscounts in hundreds of counties
nationwide that used touch-screen terminals. Results are expected by early
December.

 "This settlement will shut down a major avenue of investigation before
evidence starts trickling in," March said. "It's very premature."

 A Diebold executive said the settlement would allow the company to spend
more money on improving software and avoid "the distraction and cost of
prolonged litigation." Diebold earnings plunged 5 cents per share in the
third quarter because of the California litigation, which could cost an
additional 1 cent per share in the current quarter.

 Diebold shares closed Wednesday at $53.20, up 1.22 percent from Tuesday in
trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

 "We've worked closely with California officials to come to an agreement
that allows us to continue to move forward," Diebold senior vice president
Thomas W. Swidarski said in a statement. "While we believe Diebold has
strong responses to the claims raised in the suit, we are primarily
interested in building an effective and trusting relationship with
California election officials."


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: This Memorable Day

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 9:00 PM + 11/10/04, ken wrote:
>Be fair. They had a trained and disciplined army. Most of whom
>would obey orders to the death. That's worth a hell of a lot in
>battle.

Yeah, but the zulus had the wrong end of, well, the stick.

Take a look at, again, Hanson's "Carnage and Culture" for a nice discussion
of the Zulus in particular, and exactly why 18 brits in a hastily
constructed breastwork could hold off several thousand, killing most.

Cheers,
RAH
--
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

The Full Chomsky

[R.A. Hettinga]

 MensNewsDaily.com


The Full Chomsky

 November 10, 2004
 by Bernard Chapin

 Question: How could a linguist working as a college professor have
omniscient insight regarding the inner-workings of the American government
and exclusive knowledge concerning the hidden motivations of every
government official in our nation's history?

 Answer: There's no way he could.

 Yet, such common sense does little to refute the fact that Noam Chomsky is
one of the ten most quoted figures in the humanities. He has published
screed after screed deconstructing American foreign policy positions and
never has given any indication that his insinuations may somehow be limited
by lack of connections or first hand evidence (or, in some cases, any
evidence whatsoever). Since the 1960s, he has fully played the role of
Wizard Professor and created an entire library's worth of "pseudo-academic
smog" .

 Until recently, there have been few antidotes for his morass of
accusations and allegations, but now we have The Anti-Chomsky Reader,
edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, which offers purchasers the
service of deconstructing the deconstructor. Once you've finished reading
it, you'll be highly grateful as Chomsky's lies are so pervasive and
counter-intuitive that it's a wonder anyone but the paranoid ever read him
in the first place.

 The Anti-Chomsky Reader is a compilation of essays outlining and refuting
the travesties that the M.I.T. linguist has passed off as truth. It does
not confine itself to politics alone. Substantial space is given to the
analysis of his scholarly publications in linguistics. These are addressed
in two chapters called, "A Corrupted Linguistics" and "Chomsky, Language,
World War II and Me." In the area of his chosen field, many have given him
an intellectual pass but this work does not. His linguistic ideas may be as
spurious as his political tomes. All sources give him initial credit for
his core academic assumption about the "biological basis of grammar," but
it seems that he has engaged in little in the way of scientifically
verifiable work over the course of the last fifty years. Chomsky's creative
terminology dazzles admirers but his new theories inevitably amount to
nothing

 Overall, the compendium leaves no region of his reputation left
unexamined. Anti-Americanism is central to his worldview. He never sees
this nation as being superior to any other. At best, we mirror the
pathologies of totalitarian states. We can discern this clearly in Stephen
Morris's "Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia." The
author sums up Chomsky's fetish for defending the Vietnamese and Democratic
Kampuchea aptly when he argues that,

 "As a radical political ideologue, he is crippled by an intense emotional
commitment to the cause of anti-Americanism. Operating on the principle
that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend,' he wholeheartedly embraced the
struggle of two of the world's most ruthlessly brutal regimes."

 Chomsky's hopes for mankind are vested in murderous revolutionaries and
not in his own nation. It is our nation, and never the Khmer Rouge, which
gives its citizens the freedom to vote, the freedom to trade, and, most
obviously, the freedom to spread the type of sedition that Noam Chomsky has
been disseminating for close to 40 years.

 He does not limit himself to Asia, however. The professor has constantly
minimized the acts of many totalitarian states. Chomsky regarded Soviet
control of eastern Europe, when compared to the American presence in
Vietnam, as being "practically a paradise" We see a man who cares far more
about Holocaust deniers than the six million who were exterminated in gas
chambers or desolate Russian ravines.

 After 9/11, he was more concerned about a fictitious famine in Afghanistan
than about the nearly 3,000 incinerated in The World Trade Center attacks.
He predicted that the toppling of the Taliban would result in 3 to 4
million famine deaths. When no such famine occurred, he did not issue an
apology or retraction. He simply chose to say nothing.

 There is not much about this world famous ideologue that is genuine. He
has ardently defended the right of free speech for anti-Semitic,
Holocaust-denying cranks like Robert Faurisson and Pierre Guillaume but
chose not to say anything, or sign any petitions, supporting Soviet
intellectuals relegated to the gulag due to their ideas.

 Chomsky's self-proclaimed political orientation is preposterous. He is
enthralled with the socialist ideal but describes himself as a libertarian.
If this were true he would be the first libertarian in history who hated
capitalism and the free market. He also claims to be an anarchist but seems
to love nothing more than strong governments which redistribute the wealth
of its citizens and coerce its people into complying with the socialist
ideal. He is so deeply repulsed by our nation, and so entirely lacking in
pers

Re: Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 9:54 AM -0800 11/10/04, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>redirecting

Ah. Yes. *That's* the word I was looking for...



There. That should stop the bandwidth leak...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Why we're a divided nation

[R.A. Hettinga]

This is one of the best arguments for minimal government I've heard. Like
most good arguments, it's blindingly simple.

Cheers,
RAH
---



Townhall.com

Why we're a divided nation
Walter E. Williams (back to web version) | Send

November 10, 2004

Recent elections pointed to deepening divisions among American people, but
has anyone given serious thought to just why? I have part of the answer,
which starts off with a simple example.
 
Different Americans have different and intensive preferences for cars,
food, clothing and entertainment. For example, some Americans love opera
and hate rock and roll. Others have opposite preferences, loving rock and
roll and hating opera. When's the last time you heard of rock-and-roll
lovers in conflict with opera lovers? It seldom, if ever, happens. Why?
Those who love operas get what they want, and those who love rock and roll
get what they want, and both can live in peace with one another.

  Suppose that instead of freedom in the music market, decisions on what
kind of music people could listen to were made in the political arena. It
would be either opera or rock and roll. Rock and rollers would be lined up
against opera lovers. Why? It's simple. If the opera lovers win, rock and
rollers would lose, and the reverse would happen if rock and rollers won.
Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political
arena.

  The prime feature of political decision-making is that it's a zero-sum
game. One person or group's gain is of necessity another person or group's
loss. As such, political allocation of resources is conflict enhancing
while market allocation is conflict reducing. The greater the number of
decisions made in the political arena, the greater is the potential for
conflict.

  There are other implications of political decision-making. Throughout
most of our history, we've lived in relative harmony. That's remarkable
because just about every religion, racial and ethnic group in the world is
represented in our country. These are the very racial/ethnic/religious
groups that have for centuries been trying to slaughter one another in
their home countries, among them: Turks and Armenians, Protestant and
Catholic, Muslim and Jew, Croats and Serbs. While we haven't been a perfect
nation, there have been no cases of the mass genocide and religious wars
that have plagued the globe elsewhere. The closest we've come was the
American Indian/European conflict, which pales by comparison.

  The reason we've been able to live in relative harmony is that for most
of our history government was small. There wasn't much pie to distribute
politically.

  When it's the political arena that determines who gets what goodies, the
most effective coalitions are those with a proven record of being the most
divisive -- those based on race, ethnicity, religion and region. As a
matter of fact, our most costly conflict involved a coalition based upon
region -- namely the War of 1861.

  Many of the issues that divide us, aside from the Iraq war, are those
best described as a zero-sum game, where one group's gain is of necessity
another's loss. Examples are: racial preferences, Social Security, tax
policy, trade restrictions, welfare and a host of other government policies
that benefit one American at the expense of another American. You might be
tempted to think that the brutal domestic conflict seen in other countries
at other times can't happen here. That's nonsense. Americans are not
super-humans; we possess the same frailties of other people in other
places. If there were a severe economic calamity, I can imagine a political
hustler exploiting those frailties here, just as Adolf Hitler did in
Germany, blaming it on the Jews, the blacks, the East Coast, Catholics or
free trade.

 The best thing the president and Congress can do to heal our country is to
reduce the impact of government on our lives. Doing so will not only
produce a less divided country and greater economic efficiency but bear
greater faith and allegiance to the vision of America held by our founders
-- a country of limited government.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Cryptography Research Expands Into Europe

[R.A. Hettinga]

Yahoo! Finance

Press Release
Source: Cryptography Research, Inc.

Cryptography Research Expands Into Europe
Wednesday November 10, 8:09 am ET

Industry Veteran Ken Warren Takes Reins as Smart Card Business Manager

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Recognizing the strategic
significance of Europe in driving the deployment of smart cards,
Cryptography Research, Inc. today announced it has set up operations in the
United Kingdom to provide enhanced support for European licensees of its
recently launched DPA Countermeasures Licensing Program. Cryptography
Research also announced the appointment of smart card industry veteran Ken
Warren to head up the effort as smart card business manager. Warren will
ensure European customers can successfully implement CRI's patented
countermeasures, and he will actively represent CRI in all European smart
card industry activities.

ADVERTISEMENT

Although the smart card market is becoming increasingly global, the
majority of the industry leaders have their headquarters, R&D facilities
and design centers in Europe. By establishing representation in Europe,
Cryptography research is again demonstrating its commitment to the smart
card industry and to providing the necessary support to improve the
security of smart card devices. In his position as smart card business
manager, Ken Warren brings a wealth of industry expertise, and CRI's
European customers will be able to benefit from his support at the local
level.

"With Ken Warren leading our European expansion, Cryptography Research has
achieved a new milestone in its quest to reduce fraud and piracy in the
smart card industry through effective DPA countermeasures," said Paul
Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. "Europe is key to building on
the early success of our DPA Countermeasures Licensing Program, and we are
fortunate to have someone of Ken's stature at the helm and to represent us
to the leaders in the smart card industry."

Ken Warren has extensive experience in the smart card industry, having
worked in a variety of roles for more than 12 years. Before joining CRI,
Ken was group marketing manager at Renesas Technology Europe Ltd, the
world's number-one supplier of microcontrollers and a leader in security IC
products. Prior to that, Ken was smart card business development manager
for Hitachi Europe Ltd. Ken has also held positions at NatWest Bank and
Mondex International where he was responsible for IC security.

"CRI has taken the lead in developing the technologies necessary for
cryptographic device manufacturers, smart card vendors and smart card
issuers to produce more secure, DPA-resistant products, and now we are
bringing them directly to the major industry players in Europe," said Ken
Warren. "I look forward to working with Kit Rodgers, director of licensing,
and the others at CRI, and to supporting the smart card industry in its
efforts to prevent DPA attacks and reduce fraud and piracy."

Differential Power Analysis and related attacks were first discovered at
Cryptography Research by Paul Kocher, Joshua Jaffe and Benjamin Jun. DPA
involves monitoring the fluctuating electrical power consumption of smart
cards and other secure cryptographic devices and applying advanced
statistical methods to extract secret keys and other information. An
attacker who successfully employs DPA can create fraudulent transactions,
generate counterfeit digital cash, or receive unauthorized access to
digital content.

Cryptography Research's DPA-related patents provide the basis for
implementing effective DPA countermeasures in smart cards and other
devices, and a license is required to make, use or sell any DPA-resistant
product. Organizations that join the Cryptography Research DPA
Countermeasures Licensing Program receive priority access to Cryptography
Research's experienced technical staff and research team. Licensees also
gain the right to display the "DPA lock" logo on qualifying products.
Early-adopter terms are being offered for a limited time to provide
competitive advantages to early licensees, including superior pricing and
forgiveness for infringement of CRI's countermeasure patents in
already-deployed products with DPA countermeasures.

About Cryptography Research, Inc.

Cryptography Research, Inc. provides technology to solve complex security
problems. In addition to security evaluation and applied engineering work,
CRI is actively involved in long-term research in areas including tamper
resistance, content protection, network security and financial services.
The company has a broad portfolio of patents covering countermeasures to
differential power analysis and other vulnerabilities, and is committed to
helping companies produce secure smart cards and other tamper resistant
devices.

Security systems designed by Cryptography Research engineers annually
protect more than $60 billion of commerce for wireless, telecommunications,
financial, digital televis

Secession

[R.A. Hettinga]

Townhall.com

Secession
Tony Blankley (back to web version) | Send

November 10, 2004

 I assume the Republican National Committee is busy recording and archiving
the idiotic statements coming out of national Democratic Party leaders and
commentators. There is no doubt that the election has not only yielded a
victory for the Republicans, but also a bumper crop of self-destructive
vitriol and bitterness from the Democrats.

  The opinion pages of the New York Times (that would be pages A-1- D 37
inclusive) have been running articles by prime cut liberals, the general
themes of which have been that conservative Christians are the equivalent
of Islamic terrorists and that the benighted provincials who voted for
President Bush are simply hate-filled bigots who have no place in America.

  The apotheosis of this political dementia was put forward in my very
presence on last week's "McLaughlin Group" by my friend and colleague
Lawrence O'Donnell. Lawrence, in cool blood and in apparent full control of
his senses, asserted that this election will give rise to a serious
consideration of secession from the Union by the blue states.

   I should point out that though Lawrence has been barking more than usual
in this election season's TV commentary, he is a brilliant political
analyst and a serious Democratic Party player. He was the late Sen.
Moynihan's top Senate staffer. He comes from one of the great Democratic
Party families. I believe it was his uncle who was President John Kennedy's
White House chief of staff. He is also the most gifted writer/producer on
the NBC show, "West Wing." He is not one of those no name nitwits who the
cable shows pull from obscurity to recite Democratic Party talking points.

  I elaborate on his enviable pedigree and qualities of mind and experience
because if he says such a thing to a television audience of six million
viewers, it must surely reflect some measurable body of senior Democratic
Party sentiment. And although it is inconceivable that any senior elected
Democratic Party officials would ever repeat or act on such a deranged
notion, it is a measure of how deep is the Democratic Party elite's
contempt of and estrangement from the American public.

  In this regard, I couldn't help thinking of the founding election of the
modern Democratic Party -- the election of 1828, when General Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee defeated John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts by 139,000
votes out of 1.1 million cast.

  That election, which defined the Democratic Party that we have known for
almost two centuries, has been called the first triumph of the common man
in American politics. It pitted the moneyed interests of the Northeast
against the farmers and working free laborers of the South and West. It was
the first election in which almost all of the states (22 of 24) used direct
popular election rather than state legislatures to elect the presidential
electors.

  It was capped with a raucous inaugural celebration during which "rustic"
common people shocked Washington society as they wandered through the White
House celebrating, drinking and shaking President Andy Jackson's hand. And
so started a bond between the Democratic Party and the typical working
American that lasted 176 years -- until last Tuesday.

  It's not that the Democrats lost an election; obviously both parties have
lost numerous elections. But never before in my memory -- which goes back
faintly to 1956 -- has either party in its loss reacted with such venomous
contempt for the American people.

  When we conservatives got shellacked in 1964 -- with Goldwater losing 61
percent-39 percent to Lyndon Johnson -- we knew we had a lot of work ahead
if we were going to educate the public to our views. But I can honestly say
that although I remember thinking that the public was misguided in its
judgment, I never hated or felt contemptuous of the majority electorate --
of my fellow countrymen.

  This dominant sentiment of the Democratic Party elite -- that scores of
millions of Americans are categorically unacceptable as fellow countrymen
-- is evidence of a cancer in the soul of that party. These Democrats,
quite expressly, are asserting that "christers," people who believe in the
teachings of Jesus as described in the inerrant words of the Bible, are
un-American, almost subhuman. Some of these Democrats would rather secede
than stay in the same country with such people. If they were in the
majority with no need to secede, what would they do? Their bigoted and
absolutist view of religious people is at least a second cousin to the Nazi
view of the Jews.

  In Europe, the few remaining people of faith have recently taken to
calling the increasingly more adamant European secularist majority "secular
fundamentalists." While that phrase is unfair to the perfectly respectable
fundamentalist religious sentiment -- it shows how much more harsh and
filled with fear the r

What Next for Libertarians?

[R.A. Hettinga]

Tech Central Station

Ryan H. Sager

What Next for Libertarians?

By Ryan Sager
 Published 
 11/09/2004 


Libertarianism is in a bad way following the 2004 presidential election --
and not just because Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik failed to
overtake Ralph Nader for third place (though, if it's any consolation, he
tied the erstwhile consumer advocate in the Electoral College).

No, the problem is that both parties proved themselves able to ignore
libertarian ideas almost completely this year and are only likely to do so
increasingly going forward.

Now, make no mistake about it, this was an election mainly about foreign
policy (a topic to which libertarian philosophy has traditionally been
difficult to apply). While much has been made of the fact that 22 percent
of voters chose "moral values" as their "most important issue" when asked
in exit polls -- making it the most popular of the options given -- that
was only because "terrorism" and "Iraq" were listed as separate choices.
Together, those foreign-policy topics, inextricably linked in the minds of
many, were the deciding factor for 34 percent of voters.

But the utter irrelevance of libertarian ideas this year can't be written
off simply because of the nation's current foreign-policy concerns. It's
impossible to ignore the fact that the domestic agendas of both parties
this year were based firmly on expanding the power of the state.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign, in its only small-government gambit, opposed
certain provisions of the Patriot Act; but, for fear of looking soft on
terror, that position was, shall we say, deemphasized.

Otherwise, the Democrats pushed a pretty standard, statist line: "rolling
back" tax cuts (otherwise known as "raising taxes," be it only on the
rich), nationalizing health care, leaving Social Security to fester,
spending more on education, increasing the amount of environmental
regulation and putting a flu shot in every pot.

The Bush-Cheney team had its version, a little lighter on economic statism
but heavier on cultural statism: leaving in place its own move toward
socialized medicine (a.k.a., the colossally expensive Medicare prescription
drug benefit), cracking down on "indecency" and banning gay marriage. Tax
cuts were also promised, though not paired with any cuts in programs to pay
for them. Social Security reform may have been the only bright spot.

So, what can we expect from the Republicans going forward? More of the same
-- but worse.

Karl Rove is already out in the press promising President Bush's
evangelical base a renewed push to pass a constitutional amendment banning
gay marriage. And there can be absolutely no doubt that such an amendment,
if not passed soon, will become a central issue in the 2006 midterm
elections, used as a wedge issue to paint any Democratic senator or
congressman who doesn't go along as a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal.

And what can we expect from the Democrats?

It's too soon to tell definitively, of course, but there are really only
two directions the party can move, neither of them terribly favorable to
the libertarian-minded.

The party could begin playing to its liberal base -- MoveOn.org, Michael
Moore, etc. -- but that would only pull it further out of the mainstream,
leaving the Republicans to run the country unchallenged.

More likely, we'll see a serious move by the party to close the "values
gap" that supposedly cost its candidates so dearly this election cycle.
There are any number of ways this could happen.

Suddenly, Democrats in Congress could join Republicans in supporting a
flag-burning amendment. They could suddenly become quite attached to the
words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. They could roll over on the
anti-gay marriage amendment.

And it would be completely unsurprising if Americans woke up suddenly to
find the Democrats initiating new hearings into violence and sex in the
music industry, television, movies, video games, Web pages, comic books or
wherever.

Libertarianism never flourishes during times of war, but that's exactly why
people concerned with economic liberalism and social freedom should be
concerned. With the War on Terror likely to be the defining issue of a
generation, libertarians must begin to grapple with it seriously instead of
pretending it doesn't exist.

The forces of statism in this country have grabbed onto this war to move
the center of gravity in our politics to the left economically and to the
right socially. Karl Rove and the forces of "national-greatness
conservatism" embodied in places such as The Weekly Standard have seen the
chance to create a "permanent Republican majority" -- a platform combining
traditional Republican strength on national security with a radical
expansion of the size of the federal government, designed to rob the
Democrats of their natural constituency.

The Republican Party under Bush, in short, has ceased to be a hospitable
environ

Sunrise in the West

[R.A. Hettinga]

Tech Central Station

Sunrise in the West

By William J. Stuntz
 Published 
 11/09/2004 

The conventional wisdom holds that America is and always has been divided
between North and South. Actually, there is a bigger and deeper divide:
between East and West. The West is winning, hands down.

Consider these facts. Thirteen times since World War II, the country has
elected a President from West of the Mississippi River. Easterners have won
the White House twice in that time, and one of those -- Georgian Jimmy
Carter -- beat another Easterner, Michigan's Gerald Ford, the only Eastern
nominee of his party in the past fifty years. Eight times, an Eastern
candidate squared off against a son of the West. The West won seven out of
eight. Four of the seven victories were landslides. The East's one win --
John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960 -- was a squeaker. In today's
more Western America, it would probably squeak the other way.

The West's growing dominance has a lot to do with the Republican Party's.
Thirteen of its last fifteen nominations have gone to Westerners. Nine of
those candidates won; six won at least forty states. The two Easterners,
New York's Thomas E. Dewey and Ford, both lost. The Democrats have been
more geographically balanced: seven nominees from West of the Mississippi,
eight from the East. Also less successful. Easterners Kennedy and Carter
won, barely; Carter later lost massively to Californian Ronald Reagan. The
other five Eastern Democrats, along with three of the seven Westerners,
lost to Western Republicans.

Another way to measure the country's Western tilt is this: Since World War
II, tickets with two Westerners have run seven times. They won all seven
elections, five by landslides. Tickets with two Easterners have run, and
lost, four times. Six of the seven West-West tickets were Republican. All
four of the all-East tickets were Democratic.

Some of this can be chalked up to geographical coincidence. But not all,
and probably not most. Deep differences of attitude and spirit separate
America's two halves.

Easterners like theory and process. Westerners care more about outcomes
than procedures, and they like whatever works. Easterners are cautious;
Westerners take chances. Easterners like universities, legislatures, and
the U.N. Westerners like businesses, the executive branch, and the Army.
Eastern politicians are more likely to talk down to voters -- think of
Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, or John Kerry -- because they are instinctively
less democratic; they come from a world where social and educational class
matters and where institutions seem to outlast people. (I teach at a
university that is nearly four centuries old.) Western politicians are more
optimistic, believe that problems can be solved and limits surpassed. Also
that institutions are temporary things: they are the creatures; people are
their creators, and creators matter more than the things they create. The
flip side of optimism is rootlessness: if life isn't working out, go
somewhere else and reinvent yourself, like Easterner-turned-Westerner (and
Democrat-turned-Republican) Ronald Reagan. Easterners are more likely to be
defined, and confined, by place. Eastern candidates want to protect a lead
and play it safe -- Dewey, anyone? -- while Westerners roll the dice, not
only in campaigns but in the White House: Reagan's simultaneous tax cuts
and defense buildup (Howard Baker called it "a riverboat gamble," and it
was), Bush's war in Iraq and his decision to wrap his arms around the third
rail of American politics.

The patterns don't always hold. Bob Dole comes from Kansas and is a small-d
democrat to his core, but most of his political instincts are Eastern. The
elder George Bush voted in Texas but lived most of his life in New England
and Washington, D.C., and it shows. John F. Kennedy was Eastern through and
through, but his politics showed a Western optimism: cut taxes and revenues
will rise; promise that we will walk on the moon, then make it happen.
Today, New Yorker Rudy Giuliani is one of the nation's most Western
politicians -- like a New Yorker of the last century who loved the West
(the West loved him back) and had a Giuliani-like executive temperament:
Theodore Roosevelt.

And the regional breakdowns are more complex than first appears. The
Pacific Coast votes with the Northeast in national elections, though it
still has a different political feel: One can hardly imagine Arnold
Schwarzenegger, a classic Westerner, rocketing to the top of Massachusetts
politics. So, too, the South -- including its Eastern seaboard -- usually
lines up with the West in national elections, a pattern that goes back to
William Jennings Bryan, and maybe to Andrew Jackson.

But the West dominates this West-South political alliance, at least in
presidential politics. The current President Bush is a good example. Though
he is sometimes called a Southerner, Bush's orientation is more We

Morgan Stanley website breach

[R.A. Hettinga]

 Guardian |

 Morgan Stanley website breach

Rupert Jones
Wednesday November 10, 2004

The Guardian
A credit card company with more than 1 million customers has closed an
online security loophole that could have allowed people to access account
holders' details and move money about.

 Yesterday it emerged that the Morgan Stanley website had allowed users to
access their credit card information after entering just the first digit of
their credit card number.

 The incident comes four days after internet bank Cahoot closed down its
website for 10 hours following a tip-off that users could view other
customers' private details.

 Cyber crime experts said banks and other companies must take more
responsibility for providing their online customers with security or run
the risk that people will steer clear of these services.

 Morgan Stanley had permitted customers to let their PC "remember" their
password so they only had to enter the first digit of their card number
before the "autocomplete" facility provided the rest.

 This meant that someone using the same computer could potentially access
another's accounts. The Association for Payment Clearing Services (Apacs)
recommends that companies disable the auto function to remove the risk of
this happening.

 The problem was reported to Morgan Stanley by the BBC after a viewer
contacted a programme about the flaw.

 A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman said it had "taken immediate steps to turn
off the auto function to ensure there are no possible security issues".

 "Morgan Stanley has received no customer complaints or calls on this issue
to date, and to our knowledge no accounts have been accessed improperly,"
she said.

 But Philippsohn Crawfords Berwald, a city law firm, said the loophole
"potentially enabled users to shift money across accounts with incredible
ease".

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Mark Shuttleworth Interview: Open source is the business

[R.A. Hettinga]

  

Mail and Guardian Online:

Wednesday, November 10, 2004, 2:39
Africa's first online newspaper est. 1994


 TEN QUESTIONS
Open source is the business



09 November 2004 14:33
Mark Shuttleworth gives a thumbs up for Africa and open source software.
(Photograph: Mikhail Grachyev, AFP)
Open-source software: what difference will it make to my life?

If you're new to computers, then open source is a whole new universe
waiting to be discovered, at no real cost. Almost every kind of application
is freely available as open-source software -- from business applications
such as word processors, presentation software and spreadsheets to
specialist tools such as programming languages and databases.

 Open source is the best way for a student or child to discover the world
of the computer, because there is no limit or restriction on your ability
to learn how the software works, since it comes with full source code.

 So, for new computer users, open source is "the business". If you're in
the software industry, then open source is interesting because all
indications are that it will come to be the default on the desktop, just as
it has come to dominate the server software scene.


Why should I change from Windows, Microsoft Word or Internet Explorer to
open-source products such as Linux and the likes?

If what you have works for you, then I would not recommend changing. If,
however, you are considering an upgrade or buying new computers, then open
source is certainly worth considering.

 If you need to run Windows, then there is a lot of open-source software
for Windows too -- you don't have to switch to a Linux-based operating
system such as Ubuntu to get the benefits of open source. For example, on
my Windows PC I don't have Microsoft Office, I use OpenOffice from
www.openoffice.org, which is freely available and has a word processor,
spreadsheet and presentation package that are compatible with Microsoft
Office.

 I also use the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software, from
www.mozilla.org, which have had very few, if any, virus attacks against
them.

 In general, open-source software is cheaper to acquire and manage,
improves faster, has better support for internationalisation and is more
secure than the older proprietary alternatives.


If open source takes hold, what will our desktops/computers look like in 10
years' time?

Hopefully they'll look pretty familiar! Open-source software looks just
like older proprietary software, it's just produced and licensed freely.
Also, it tends to be easier to get different pieces of open-source software
to talk to one another, because the people who produce it have an interest
in making collaboration happen and using open standards rather than locking
you into their software.

 A big area of innovation in open source is collaborative work, allowing
you to work on a document simultaneously with other people, and I think
this sort of open-source innovation will be the main driver of new products
and concepts in the information technology industry over the next 10 years.


As much as people moan about Microsoft, aren't Microsoft products superior
and easier to use than many open-source programmes available today?

Certainly not. Of course, it depends on the application. For example, the
open-source Apache web server is generally considered to be much better
than any web-server software from Microsoft, and as a result, Apache is the
most widely used web-server software on the internet.

In desktop office applications, I think Microsoft still has an edge, but
the gap is narrowing so fast and innovation in the open-source environment
is so rapid that I am confident any gap will have disappeared in two or
three years. That's why I'm advocating that South Africans embrace open
source now, ahead of the curve.


Is Bill Gates enemy number one?

Not at all -- few people in the world have been effective at managing a
small business and a large business, and Gates has been brilliant
throughout Microsoft's history. In the 1980s, we didn't have the internet,
so a single company was probably the most efficient way to produce software
that worked well together.

 Nowadays, the internet allows collaboration between companies and
volunteers, which has resulted in the rise of open-source software. You
just couldn't make open source work in the 1980s because too few people
were connected, but today it's proving to be the best way to produce
software.


You are a capitalist, yet you preach open-source software? How do you
reconcile that?

The emergence of open source isn't the end of the software industry by any
means, it's just yet another big change in an industry that thrives on
change. I think open source is the way of the future, so I put that into
practice as much through my non-profit foundation work in education as
through my business investments.

 I believe the business model in the software industry wil

A hard case resists a makeover for the new age

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted on Sun, Nov. 07, 2004


Center Square | A hard case resists a makeover for the new age
By Chris Satullo


Guantánamo Bay

Nov. 7

My dear wife,

They are letting me write one letter to let you know that I am alive. I am
at the new Liberal Media Re-Education Camp here at Gitmo; I am not allowed
to see a lawyer or make phone calls.

They are afraid that if I talk to a lawyer, I'll pass a coded message to my
old colleagues on the Editorial Board, telling them to oppose the flat tax
or support Arlen for Judiciary Committee chairman or something. This letter
will be censored, so I have to be careful.

First thing: I am OK. I am not harmed. There has been no torture. Yet.
We're not in those steel cages in the sun or anything. It's a simple
barracks, Spartan but not filthy.

We get three squares a day, though the fare isn't doing much for my South
Beach diet. It's all takeout from Cracker Barrel, Hardees, Bojangles. They
say we've got to learn to eat like real Americans.

You must have been worried sick. I don't know what they told you, but
here's what happened:

Wednesday afternoon, the gang and I were on our way to a mourning lunch at
that French/Arab/gay fusion bistro where we like to go and plot our liberal
propaganda. Suddenly, guys in dark glasses swooped up in black vans and
snatched us. They didn't take the black hoods off our heads until we got to
Gitmo.

I haven't seen Trudy Rubin since we got here. I hear she's being treated as
a "high-value" prisoner. The high values are in a cell block across the
compound. Rumor has it she's in a cell with Molly Ivins and Maureen Dowd.
Word is some torture goes on over there. Bill Moyers supposedly was gagged
and forced to listen to Chris Matthews talk for two hours straight.

Today, the guy next to me at mess, used to be a columnist at the Fresno
Bee, told me they flew Paul Krugman and Michael Moore out of here by
chopper last night. To Pakistan, is what I hear.

Some good news: Bob Shrum, Kerry's campaign consultant, is being held
somewhere in the compound, too. May he rot in his cell, the idiot.

I'm not considered high value, thank God. Just a run-of-the-mill lib-symp.
They chuckle when I explain I'm really a centrist. My "trainer" says nobody
wants to hurt me; as soon as I show I've seen The Light and can cover the
news "objectively," "without bias" and "with proper appreciation for all
the President has done for the nation," I can come home to you.

I'm working on it, my love. But you know those character traits that made
me spend most of high school in detention? They keep coming back.

Like, I'm in this seminar today called "Christian Nation: How the Bible and
the Constitution Are Really One and the Same." And I raise my hand and ask:
"If one candidate is a practicing Catholic who carries a rosary in his
pocket, and the other one is some vague evangelical who doesn't even
freaking go to church on Sunday, why did the Catholic bishops order the
flock to vote for the non-Catholic?"

My trainer was upset with me. So tonight I have to read three Tim LaHaye
novels and write an essay on why George W. Bush is the doorway to the
Rapture. Have to say, these LaHaye books are crisply plotted.

Got in trouble yesterday, too, during a lecture class, "Living in Fear, and
Loving It." Right after the Cheney video, I asked, "How come the states
where terror attacks have actually happened or been planned went big for
Kerry, while the states that Osama bin Laden's never heard of, the ones
with more sheep than people, went for Bush?"

For that, I had to sit through a double session of Remedial NASCAR 101. Did
you know, that, of the 249,982 laps possible in 781 career starts, Terry
Labonte has completed more than 90 percent (226,729)?

I think of you all the time, and the kids. I know I should submit and scour
my brain of the horrible addiction to facts and reality-based analysis that
landed me in this hellhole. If I can do that, maybe I can come home.

I'll have to get a job writing obituaries or jingles or something. They've
made it quite clear my days as a pundit are over. But they tell me that if
I sign the Bush loyalty pledge, my pension is safe. As safe as anybody's,
anyway.

But, hon, there's this guerrilla voice inside my head that just won't shut
up. The Boss keeps singing in my mind: No retreat, no surrender. Even
&%$!#@ Kerry couldn't spoil that song for me.

Sorry, babe. Vive la Resistance!
When not immersed in paranoid fantasy, Chris Satullo is still (he thinks)
editorial page editor of The Inquirer.
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

China's wealthy bypass the banks

[R.A. Hettinga]

 



China's wealthy bypass the banks

By Keith Bradsher The New York Times
 Wednesday, November 10, 2004


WENZHOU, China  The Wenzhou "stir-fry" is not a dish you eat. But it is
giving indigestion to Chinese regulators and could prove troublesome to
many investors worldwide, from New York money managers, Pennsylvania
steelworkers and Midwestern farmers to Australian miners.

 Here in this freewheeling city at the forefront of capitalism in China,
the dish is prepared when a group of wealthy friends pool millions of
dollars' worth of Chinese yuan and put them into a hot investment like
Shanghai real estate, where they are stirred and flipped for a hefty
profit. The friends often lend each other large amounts on the strength of
a handshake and a handwritten IOU.

 Both sides then go to an automated teller machine or bank branch to
transfer the money, which is then withdrawn from the bank. Or sometimes
they do it the old-fashioned way: exchanging burlap sacks stuffed with cash.

 The worry for Chinese regulators is that everyone in China will start
cooking the Wenzhou stir-fry and do it outside the banking system.

 In the last few months, borrowing and lending across the rest of China is
looking more and more like what is taking place in Wenzhou. The growth of
this shadow banking system poses a stiff challenge to China's state-owned
banks, already burdened with bad debt, and makes it harder for the nation's
leaders to steer a fast-growing economy.

 The problem starts with China's low interest rates. More and more families
with savings have been snubbing 2 percent interest on bank deposits for the
double-digit returns from lending large amounts on their own.

 They lend to real estate speculators or to small businesses without the
political connections to obtain loans from the banks.

 Not only is the informal lending rate higher, but the income from that
lending, because it is semilegal at best, is not taxed. For fear of shame,
ostracism and the occasional threat from thugs, borrowers are more likely
to pay back these loans than those from the big banks.

 Tao Dong, chief China economist at Credit Suisse First Boston, calculates
that Chinese citizens withdrew $12 billion to $17 billion from their bank
deposits in August and September.

 The outflow turned into a flood last month, reaching an estimated $120
billion, or more than 3 percent of all deposits at the country's financial
institutions.

 If the bank withdrawals are not stemmed in the months ahead, Tao warned,
"this potentially could be a huge risk for financial stability and even
social stability."

 And with China now accounting for more than a quarter of the world's steel
production and nearly a fifth of soybean production, as well as some of the
largest initial public offerings of stock, any shaking of financial
confidence here could ripple quickly through markets in the United States
and elsewhere.

 For instance, if the steel girders now being lifted into place by hundreds
of tower cranes in big cities across China are no longer needed, that would
produce a worldwide glut of steel and push down prices.

 On Oct. 28, when China's central bank raised interest rates for one-year
loans and deposits by a little more than a quarter of a percentage point,
it cited a need to keep money in the banking system. Higher official rates
should "reduce external cycling of credit funds," the bank said in a
statement.

 Eswar Prasad, the chief of the China division of the International
Monetary Fund, expressed concern about bank withdrawals in a speech in Hong
Kong three days before the central bank acted.

 The main Chinese banks have fairly substantial reserves, but they need
those reserves to cover huge write-offs of bad debts some day.

 The hub of informal lending in China is here in Wenzhou, 370 kilometers,
or 230 miles, south of Shanghai. Some of China's first experiments with the
free market began here in the late 1970s, and the result has been a
flourishing economy together with sometimes questionable business dealings.

 Depending on how raw they like their capitalism, people elsewhere in China
describe Wenzhou as either a center of financial innovation or a den of
loan sharks. But increasingly, Wenzhou is also a microcosm of the kind of
large-scale yet informal financial dealings now going on across the country.

 The withdrawals by depositors and the informal money lending has spread so
swiftly here that it is only in Wenzhou that the Chinese central bank
releases monthly statistics on average rates for direct loans between
individuals or companies. The rate hovered at 1 percent a month for years
until April, when the authorities began limiting the volume of bank loans.

 Borrowers default on nearly half the loans issued by the state-owned
banks, but seldom do so here on money that is usually borrowed from
relatives, neighbors or people in the same industry.

 Res

No mandate for e-voting, computer scientist says

[R.A. Hettinga]

No mandate for e-voting, computer scientist says
11/09/04
By William Jackson,
GCN Staff

Despite wide use in last week's presidential election, direct-recording
electronic voting still is a faulty method of casting ballots, one computer
scientist says.
"Paperless electronic-voting systems are completely unacceptable," said Dan
Wallach, assistant professor of computer science at Rice University.
Assurances about the machines' accuracy and reliability are not based on
verifiable data, Wallach said today at the Computer Security Institute's
annual conference in Washington.
Wallach was one of a team of computer scientists who in 2003 examined
source code for voting machines from Diebold Election Systems Inc. of North
Canton, Ohio, and reported numerous security flaws.
Cryptography implementation and access controls showed an "astonishingly
naive design," he said. "As far as we know, these flaws are still there
today."
Diebold has defended its technology and said the computer scientists
examined an outdated version of the code.
Wallach countered that without access to current code for any voting
machines, it's impossible to verify manufacturers' claims. The proprietary
nature of the code and a lack of government standards for voting technology
also make certification of the hardware and software meaningless, he said.
The IT Association of America hailed the Nov. 2 election as a validation of
direct-recording technology. But Wallach said sporadic problems with the
systems have been reported, and a thorough analysis of Election Day
procedures and results is under way.
Plus, a paper ballot that can be recounted is essential to a reliable
system, he said.
"Probably the best voting system we have today is the optical scan system,
with a precinct-based scanner," Wallach said. "It is very simple, it is
accurate, and it is auditable."
He suggested that a hybrid voting system that produces a verifiable paper
ballot would be as reliable as optical systems and would offer convenience
and accessibility for disabled voters.
A number of states, including California and Nevada, have laws or
legislation pending to require that voting machines produce paper ballots.
Wallach said technical standards that demand transparent certification
processes would go a long way toward increasing voting reliability.
"I think the Common Criteria would be a good place to start," he said,
referring to the set of internationally recognized standards for evaluating
security technology, either against vendor claims or against a set of needs
specified by a user.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 12:17 AM -0500 11/9/04, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
>At 7:11 PM -0800 11/8/04, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>>"&cet" is an HTMl element
>
>Wrong again. Mere hyperlatinate British public school affectation, & = et,
>and, um, all that...

It dawns on me that between Berners-Lee and Hallam-Baker, that the latter,
above, had it's origin in the former?

Naw...

 Now *that's* noise...


Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

[osint] Leftist, Islamic terrorist lawyer cites need for violence

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


To: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thread-Index: AcTGW926BrmmPrOpQHC2HrbnSiYYSw==
From: "Bruce Tefft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 07:58:54 -0500
Subject: [osint] Leftist, Islamic terrorist lawyer cites need for violence
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35232-2004Nov8.html

Lawyer Facing Terror Charge Cites Need for Violence

By Michelle Garcia
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, November 9, 2004; Page A08

A New York lawyer facing charges of supporting terrorism told a federal jury
that she viewed violence as essential to dismantling institutions that
perpetuate "sexism and racism."

As a federal prosecutor questioned her statements and support for a
"people's revolution," Lynne Stewart, 65, testified that her lifelong
philosophy included fighting "entrenched ferocious capitalism that is in
this country today."

Lynne Stewart emphasized that she does not support terrorism.


"I believe that entrenched institutions will not be changed except by
violence," Stewart said. "I believe in the politics that lead to violence
being exerted by people on their own behalf to effectuate change."

Stewart cited the American Revolution and the struggle to end slavery as
such examples but emphasized that she did not support terrorism, saying, "I
do not believe in civilian deaths or wanton massacres."

Federal prosecutors presented Stewart's statements in an effort to show that
Stewart sought to aid a militant group. If convicted, she could face a
40-year sentence.

The case centers on her role in delivering a communique from her client,
blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence after a
jury convicted him in 1995 of seditious conspiracy in a plot to blow up New
York bridges, tunnels and landmarks.

That communication, expressing the sheik's disapproval of a cease-fire
between the Islamic Group and the Egyptian government, is at the heart of
the government's case. Prosecutors say that by conveying the message,
Stewart violated her agreement to special prison rules that restricted the
sheik's communication to the public and allowed him access to his followers
in the Islamic Group, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Her attorney, Michael Tigar, objected to the prosecution's focus on her
beliefs, saying "everyone of us is protected by the First Amendment."

U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said Stewart's view of violence was not
"irrelevant" or "straying into an impermissible area."

U.S. Attorney Andrew Dember methodically recounted the events that led up to
Stewart reading a handwritten statement to a Reuters reporter. Dember
pointed to excerpts from a transcript from taped conversations in which
Stewart referred to Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted
Rahman, as a "devil" and showed that Stewart viewed her relationship with
the government as "adversarial."

At times, Stewart sparred with Dember over terminology. She took issue with
his suggestion that by signing an agreement to the prison rules she had
agreed with their intent. She said she viewed it as necessary to gaining
access to her client. When Dember showed the jury a copy of the agreement
specifying restrictions over mail, she said she understood the term to mean
envelopes delivered by the Postal Service.

Dember asked Stewart to explain her motivation for continuing to visit
Rahman in a Minnesota prison after he had exhausted his appeals.

"I think that our legal system reacts differently to people who are paid
attention to," she said. "I think the worst thing is the way it treats
people who are nobody."



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Re: Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 7:11 PM -0800 11/8/04, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>"&cet" is an HTMl element

Wrong again. Mere hyperlatinate British public school affectation, & = et,
and, um, all that...

At 7:11 PM -0800 11/8/04, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>> Yes, and, apparently, by your inability to parse something that is a
>> rudimentary part of modern culture, you generated it.
>
>Or perhaps it's your lack of command of the modern QWERTY keyboard...

Nope. See above, and, again, thank you for playing.

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Kennedy School: Freedom, not wealth, squelches terrorist violence

[R.A. Hettinga]

Nice to know Camelot High is good for *something*.

Cheers,
RAH
---



Harvard Gazette:

Current Issue:
 November 04, 2004



Alberto Abadie: 'In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link
between terrorism and poverty, but ... when you look at the data, it's not
there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism ... but
... also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of
foreign origin.' (Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)

 Freedom squelches terrorist violence

KSG associate professor researches freedom-terrorism link
By Alvin Powell
 Harvard News Office

 A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the
widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that
terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom.

 Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie examined data on
terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and
ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist
attacks.

 Abadie, whose work was published in the Kennedy School's Faculty Research
Working Paper Series, included both acts of international and domestic
terrorism in his analysis.

 Though after the 9/11 attacks most of the work in this area has focused on
international terrorism, Abadie said terrorism originating within the
country where the attacks occur actually makes up the bulk of terrorist
acts each year. According to statistics from the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge
Base for 2003, which Abadie cites in his analysis, there were 1,536 reports
of domestic terrorism worldwide, compared with just 240 incidents of
international terrorism.

 Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption
that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have
linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected
for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no
significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of
terrorism it experiences.

 "In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism
and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is
true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies
have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of
terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

 Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of
political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though
terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it
was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.

 Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme -
with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low
levels of terrorism.

 Though his study didn't explore the reasons behind the trends he
researched, Abadie said it could be that autocratic nations' tight control
and repressive practices keep terrorist activities in check, while nations
making the transition to more open, democratic governments - such as
currently taking place in Iraq and Russia - may be politically unstable,
which makes them more vulnerable.

 "When you go from an autocratic regime and make the transition to
democracy, you may expect a temporary increase in terrorism," Abadie said.

 Abadie's study also found a strong connection in the data between
terrorism and geographic factors, such as elevation or tropical weather.

 "Failure to eradicate terrorism in some areas of the world has often been
attributed to geographic barriers, like mountainous terrain in Afghanistan
or tropical jungle in Colombia. This study provides empirical evidence of
the link between terrorism and geography," Abadie said.

 In Abadie's opinion, the connection between geography and terrorism is
hardly surprising.

 "Areas of difficult access offer safe haven to terrorist groups,
facilitate training, and provide funding through other illegal activities
like the production and trafficking of cocaine and opiates," Abadie wrote
in the paper.

 A native of Spain's Basque region, Abadie said he has long been interested
in terrorism and related issues. His past research has explored the effect
of terrorism on economic activity, using the Basque country as a case study.

 Abadie is turning his attention to the effect of terrorism on
international capital flows. Some analysts have argued that terrorist
attacks wouldn't have much of an impact on the economy, since unlike a
war's widespread damage, the damage from terrorist attacks tends to be
relatively small or confined to a small area.

 In an era of open international capital markets, however, Abadie said
terrorism may have a greater chilling effect than previously thought, since
even a low risk of damage from a terrorist attack may be enough t

Re: Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 8:20 PM -0800 11/8/04, John Young wrote:
>West Texas is where kids learn to fuck jackrabbits
>by slitting their guts to fashion a pokehole. The jacks'
>death kicking of the cojones is what leaves an urge in
>them as adults to spread the practice to the state, the
>nation, the world, any place to hunt gash.

Spoken like someone with practice?

Or maybe someone from *east* Texas?

;-)

An here yew Yankees thawt all us texins are the say'm...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 6:13 PM -0800 11/8/04, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>> Give me a child until the age of 7, &cet.
>
>'er huh?

Jesuit Maxim. Or Michael Apted film premise. Take your pick. Google is your
friend.

>> Which he spent in Midland, TX.
>>
>> Being the son of a family of West-Texans myself, he comes by his
>> "bidness" honestly, as far as I'm concerned.
>
>I think a little line noise crept in here somewhere. Care to clarify?

Yes, and, apparently, by your inability to parse something that is a
rudimentary part of modern culture, you generated it.

;-).

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 9:41 AM -0800 11/8/04, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>*SIGH* Is it really so hard for people to remember that George W. Bush was
>born and educated in Massachusetts?

Give me a child until the age of 7, &cet.

Which he spent in Midland, TX.

Being the son of a family of West-Texans myself, he comes by his "bidness"
honestly, as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

37 arrested in net gun swoop

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT


37 arrested in net gun swoop
By Tim Richardson (tim.richardson at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 5th November 2004 15:02 GMT

Thirty-seven people have been arrested after the Metropolitan Police seized
more than 100 firearms in a crackdown on weapons traded online. Some 700
addresses have been raided over the last four days as officers mounted the
UK-wide operation.

In all, 86 handguns, ten rifles, three machine guns, seven shotguns, 13
stun guns and a crossbow were nabbed in Operation Bembridge. Class A drugs
were also seized during the raids.

Said Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, Head of the Met's Specialist
Crime Directorate: "This is the climax of a long-term intelligence
operation where we have identified weaponry purchased over the Internet. I
am delighted by its success and the sheer number of firearms, ammunition
and other weapons seized will make London a safer city."

The apparent ease to which guns are available online was highlighted this
week by a Labour MP who compiled a list of handguns he claims were for sale
on internet auction site, eBay.

Steve McCabe, MP for Birmingham Hall Green, has called on eBay to pay
closer attention to goods for sale on its pages after he was able to buy an
air rifle on the auction site last month.

He told the House of Commons: "The other week, it was possible for me to
buy a gun from the eBay internet site. The way in which the sellers work is
simple. They advertise an empty bag or box. The buyer bids for that bag or
box, and when that is done, the seller throws in the gun for free.

"This site is being used to facilitate a trade in illegal weapons," he said
in a call for the Home Secretary to take action.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

How organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT


How organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 5th November 2004 17:21 GMT

Election 2004 Technophobes and luddites won the election for George W Bush
in 2004, not technology-toting bloggers, by turning out the vote. The
giant, self-congratulatory humpfest that is the blogger nation really
didn't do much at all for the Democrats, despite Joe Trippi telling anyone
who'll listen that the internet transformed politics. For voter turn-out
was markedly higher in the states with the lowest broadband penetration.

Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and California
have the highest broadband penetration and all went to Kerry. Meanwhile,
Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico have the lowest
penetration and all went to Bush. But the rise in votes was proportionately
higher in states where the internet doesn't reach so many people.

In blogless Mississippi, Bush received 666,000 votes in 2004 compared to
549,000 in 2000. That's more than a 20 per cent increase in votes. (Somehow
we doubt that P. Diddy threatening youngsters in Mississippi to "Vote or
Die" did much to inspire youth turnout.) Kerry picked up 440,000 in
Mississippi compared to Gore's 400,000 votes - about a 10 per cent
difference.

What about a battleground, internet-wary state like New Mexico? The Land of
Enchantment chucked 370,000 votes Bush's way in 2004 compared to 286,000 in
2000, when Bush lost the state. Kerry picked up 362,000 compared to Gore's
286,000.

These numbers prove little other than that voting totals increased handily
and always in Bush's favor in states largely considered lacking in IT but
strong in Jesus.

In broadband rich Connecticut, Kerry picked up 848,000 votes compared to
Gore's 796,000. That's close to a 6 per cent rise. Bush earned 687,000
votes in 2004 compared to 546,000 in 2000. That's a handy 26 per cent gain.
In New Jersey, the story is similar. Kerry pulled in 1.8m votes compared to
Gore's 1.75m. Bush, however, nabbed 1.6m votes in 2004 versus 1.3m in 2000.

With all those statistics out of the way, we're left with one conclusion. A
year ago we were told
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/14/one_blogger_is_worth_ten/) that
One Blogger is Worth Ten Votes. In reality, however, it may be easier for a
camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for bloggers to deliver you
the election.

This is the most obvious and frivolous takeaway from this year's
election/revival. For months, the internet was buzzed by so-called citizen
journalists - otherwise known as message board tools - who convinced each
other that they were making a difference. They often analyzed their own
convincing and then concluded that they were indeed right.

Then W. won and did so by a larger margin than in 2000. But has anyone told
Joe Trippi?

A long strange Trippi

"What has been amazing this year is the creativity of Generation E's
members to spur and engage more of its generation to become involved and
make a difference," Trippi claims in his blog. And later on,
(http://www.joetrippi.com/node/view/753) he writes -

"Young Americans are awake like never before and studies show the earlier a
voter becomes an active voter the more likely they are to be active voters
throughout their life. Politicians beware. A generational giant has been
awakened."

There are so many things wrong with this, and with Trippi himself, that
it's hard to know where to begin.

Let's at least start by looking at what the droopy god of blog scum was
trying to explain. Trippi questions the numerous analysts who don't believe
the youth vote was all that spectacular this election. There were more
young voters, but there were more voters period as a result of population
increases and shared hatred. Trippi tells us that the pundits are missing
the point. Close to 10 per cent more young voters showed up this time
around, the youngsters "were especially active in battleground states," and
many voted with absentee ballots, meaning they were missed by exit polls.

If, however, more young people did show up, they weren't terribly impressive.

All week long, Joe Trippi dangled his jowls on MSNBC, on the basis of an
unsuccessful campaign, and we seem to remember
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/28/dean_campaign_waves_net_guru/),
for getting himself sacked after boosting his favorite DRM company while
getting the dumb Doc to advocate TCPA: the lock-down computing Microsoft
wants to build into Windows to stop you sharing music. Again and again, he
promised that the internet and bloggers would bring out the youth vote. NPR
gladly repeated this almost every day. And then, like Zogby, he stuck to
his promises despite so much evidence to the contrary. Again and again, he
told America that Kerry had pulled in eight times as much money as 

Did electronic voting pass the test?

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register » Internet and Law » eGovernment »


Did electronic voting pass the test?
By Robin Bloor, Bloor Research (robin.lettice at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 5th November 2004 12:38 GMT

At about the time that Senator John Kerry had accepted defeat and phoned
President Bush to congratulate him, stories were circulating on the
Internet claiming that the electronic voting machines in Florida and Ohio
and some other states might have been rigged for a Bush victory.

The claim stems from the fact that exit polls were indicating a marginal
Kerry victory in those key states, but his apparent exit poll advantage was
not reflected in the total vote count. This indeed was the shape of the
story if you sat through the election night telethon. At first it looked as
though Kerry was doing well, but as the night wore on a Bush victory became
more and more likely.

So what are we to think of the claim? Despite the "conspiracy theory",
there is good reason to believe that it was a genuine Bush victory. First
of all, the final outcome reflected the fact that Bush held a small lead in
the opinion polls right up to election day. Although all of the individual
polls were subject to a margin of error greater than Bush's lead, the
aggregation of the polls was still slightly in favour of Bush (and this
reduces the statistical error margin).

The pollsters had been plagued by suggestions that they were not properly
accounting for the youth vote and most, if not all of them, examined,
re-examined and adjusted their weighting parameters in an attempt to
account for the expected high youth vote for Kerry. The pollsters have a
big self-interest in not being too far wrong.

The indications, on election night itself, were that the level of
disenfranchisement through technology failure, long lines of voting and
voters being turned away from the polls for lack of proper credentials, was
much lower than in 2000 and, although there may have been one or two areas
where there were problems, there is no reason to believe that the election
was skewed by such incidents.

Another straw in the wind was the gambling money - which has historically
provided a reasonable guide to an election's outcome. While it is illegal
for most American's to place bets over the Internet (on anything), many of
them do. Throughout the whole campaign the betting odds were in Bush's
favour - in effect predicting a Bush victory simply by the weight of money
that was gambling on that outcome. The figures for the total bets placed
(on Betfair one of the leading sites for such bets) was $4.2m on Bush and
$1.2m on Kerry.

Finally, the results from Florida and Ohio, which were only marginally in
Bush's favour were not particularly out of line with the voting in the US
as a whole. As it worked out, these results seemed to reflect the mood of
America.

So what are we to think of the electronic voting "conspiracy theory"? Here
too there are reasons to pause for thought. The companies that supply the
machines (Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart
InterCivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems) would destroy their own business if
it were ever discovered that the technology was compromised. Would they
take the risk? I personally doubt it, especially as it would involve
bringing more than one or two people into the "conspiracy", any one of whom
could go public on what was going down.

Also, bending the software to affect the result in a very subtle way (and
get it right) is probably very difficult to achieve. The margin for failure
is high and the whole scheme is very risky.

There is however legitimate cause for concern in the simple fact that many
of the electronic voting machines that were deployed did not have audit
trails that validated the figures they gave. If there were any kind of
malfunction in any of these, there was simply no way to validate the
figures. The justification for complete transparency and validation of
voting technology is not only desirable but necessary. Indeed if ever there
was a case for the open sourcing of program code then this is it.

One hopes that by the time the next major elections in the US come round,
there will be paper audit trails on every voting machine deployed.


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Nerd party needed to replace 'left-wing' Democrats, says area man

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT


Nerd party needed to replace 'left-wing' Democrats, says area man
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 5th November 2004 17:20 GMT

Election 2004 A newspaper columnist has called for the old-fashioned, "left
wing" Democratic Party to be replaced by a new, emergent party of computer
nerds.

Free-marketeer Dan Gillmor of Silicon Valley's San Jose Mercury urges the
Democrats to abandon "old, discredited politics", while an "increasingly
radical middle" needs a new party with some "creative thinking". From where
will this come? In a column
(http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10086652.htm) published the
same day, he tells us.

Writing before the outcome was known, Gillmor enthuses about "the most
exciting development ... the new world of cyber-politics," where the
"expanded horizons" on offer should cancel out the groupthink, which he
briefly acknowledges, and lead to greater accountability and participation.

Such settler rhetoric - "new world", "horizons" - is familiar stuff from
techno utopians. So too is the hope, amongst many intelligent, impatient
people with a reluctance to develop their social skills, that we must be
able to do better. (Bill Gates doesn't have the patience or inclination to
watch TV, and many internet activists don't have the patience or
inclination to persuade a stranger, which is a lot more difficult and
unrewarding.) We briefly heard about "Emergent Democracy" last Spring,
although it disappeared in about the time it takes you to say "Second
Superpower". But we're sure to hear more about this itchy, push-button,
"interactive" version of democracy, a kind of thumbs down at the Roman
Coliseum, in the future. Maybe Dan will become its Arthur Schlesinger.

But for now, how can a computer-savvy nerd party help? We don't see Eliot
Spitzer, the New York attorney general, having trouble being re-elected,
and the man's been described as a "one-man socialist Torquemada." Because
politics is n-dimensional, based on values and not some right-left scale,
his "old fashioned" efforts to remind corporations of their social
responsibilities may well be very popular if put to the public. [*]So it
isn't clear that the Democrats must abandon the idea that we're happier
when the corporations are left to manage themselves. Nor is it clear that
the internet is a net civic good, yet, or that it increased voter turnout
more than other factors did in the 2004 election. So the conclusion that
we're then invited to draw - that the Democrats are doomed because they're
lagging in some kind of technological arms race - doesn't necessarily
follow. But let's take each one of these ideas in turn.

Man machine

Such settler rhetoric flourishes where a sensible grasp of what humans can
do, and what the machines can do, is out of kilter. Wild and improbable
visions often follow.

When something good happens, people are quick to praise the machines. "If
people are more moved than ever to participate, I'm betting that the Net
played a big role," writes Dan. But if something bad happens, we blame
stupid humans for not "getting it". Voters in Texas using machines from
Hart InterCivic, discovered that their votes were nullified when they
browsed the ballot by turning a wheel. "It's not a machine issue," Shafer
said. "It's voters not properly following the instructions." And you might
ask, who's fault is it that the Jim Crow boxes were so badly designed?

(Dan, to his great credit, urged Californian voters to demand an auditable
paper ballot this week, and castigated election officials for not making
voters aware that they had the option.)

But the echo chamber effect won't go away, because it's a defining
characteristic of computer-mediated communications everywhere, and not just
in this deeply polarized country. My colleague Thomas Greene puts it most
succinctly. "You can say something someone disagrees with at a party, and
they'll talk to you. Try doing this online." Where the barriers to
participation are low, the barriers to making a hurried exit are equally
low. There are no social obligations to sticking around, unlike in the real
world.

(There are subtle factors within the overall trend. Today's thin-skinned
ego-driven weblogger may simply have been yesterday's Usenet faint heart,
for example. And well-designed software can encourage better online
participation: the DailyKos abandoned weblog software for the much more
community-orientated Scoop system, and became the Slashdot of politics -
only one where people say interesting things politely.)

The settler iconography is no accident: the idea that everything "old
fashioned" must be discarded, and everything is new again.

"Like the American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was
no politics before they arrived," Will Davies pointed out, in a brilliant
talk at NotCon t

Hedge Funds Are Bringing Democracy to the Financial World

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Wall Street Journal


 November 8, 2004

 BUSINESS EUROPE


Hedge Funds Are Bringing
 Democracy to the Financial World

By JEAN-MICHEL PAUL
November 8, 2004


Assets under management by hedge funds have reached the $1 trillion mark,
having grown at 20% a year since 1990. Hardly a day goes by without a new
hedge fund being set up by a former trader or portfolio manager.

This is the largest single structural change in the financial world since
the coming of age of mutual funds at the beginning of the '80s.

What we are in effect looking at is the beginning of a fundamental shift:
the disintermediation of the role played by investment banks and their
trading floors in particular. As technology allows set-up costs to dwindle
and economies of scale to disappear, successful traders and portfolio
managers, attracted by higher rewards, will continue to leave the large
trading floors to set up shop offering formerly exclusive products to
investors at large. In the process, a new market is being created and
transaction costs decreased. Why and how is this happening?

First and foremost, the hedge-fund revolution has been made possible by new
technology that translated into a lower cost base. The sunk cost of
starting and establishing a new investment and trading platform fund has
literally collapsed -- as day traders well know. The Internet, together
with the ever-increased capabilities of ever-cheaper computers and the
democratization of programming and software skills, are enabling a few
people to team up and create an efficient office at low cost. A team of two
or three with a limited budget can now achieve what it would have taken
dozens of people to do at considerably higher cost.

Second, hedge funds are characterized by their asymmetric payoff. Managers
typically get 2% of management fees and 20% of any performance achieved
over a given benchmark. This incentive encourages the managers to perform,
aligning investors' and managers' interest. It also means that the best
traders will have an irrepressible incentive to set up their own hedge
funds. The best performers will also have every interest in taking in as
much money under management as they can without decreasing their
performance. This means that asset allocation to traders and trading
strategies is democratized and optimized.

Investment banks have responded by embracing what they cannot prevent. They
try to limit the brain drain by creating internal hedge-fund structures and
to limit profitability decline by increasing the trading capital at risk.
But beyond these defensive moves, they are inventing new roles for
themselves as "platform provider," "prime broker" and even "capital
introducers." This further modifies the financial landscape by allowing
hedge funds to capitalize on the banks' distribution networks and customer
access while maintaining their investment-decision independence.

The keys to the banks' old trading-room environments were economies of
scale, high sunk costs -- and professional asset allocation and
supervision. Allocation is about optimal allocation of resources, chiefly
capital, to the different strategies offered by the trading teams as
opportunities come and go as the economic cycle unfolds.

Risk control is about a constant independent review of the traders'
positions, an ongoing assessment of the risk involved in the strategy.
Upstart hedge funds have no risk-management departments but as traders set
up independent hedge funds, risk control and asset allocation have been
taken over by so-called funds of funds. These funds of funds, which receive
funds from institutional investors and private banks, carry out repeated
due diligence on hedge funds, looking for best of breeds. They also make
regular quantitative and qualitative supervision control, so as to monitor
ongoing risk-taking.

Thanks to the expansion of the hedge-fund universe, trades and strategies
that were yesterday the private backyard of investment banks are now,
through hedge funds, available to traditional investors. This in itself
creates for investors at large -- and chief among them pension funds and
insurance -- a seemingly new asset class, that is a set of financial
instruments whose payoff is fundamentally different and decorrelated from
the traditional long-only approach.

But the hedge fund world is not problem free. A question often associated
with the hedge-fund transformation is capacity. By this, it is meant that
the ability of a hedge fund to accommodate new investors while maintaining
returns will diminish. There is no doubt that for "traditional" investments
this is true. Similarly, as more and more "traders" arbitrage the same
inefficiencies, these disappear, together with the arbitrage profits.

This phenomenon explains a significant part of the lackluster results of
the hedge-fund industry as a whole so far this year compared to former
years. But because of

Atlanta will be test site for health card

[R.A. Hettinga]

  MSNBC.com

Atlanta will be test site for health card
Transaction titan First Data will put credit-card machines in doctors' offices
By Justin Rubner
 Atlanta Business Chronicle
Updated: 7:00 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2004


 One of the nation's leading money movers now wants to move your medical
information.

 Denver-based First Data Corp. has picked Atlanta as the first city to test
a beefed-up credit-card machine it hopes will do nothing short of
revolutionize the health-care industry.

 The financial transaction titan (NYSE: FDC) plans to start the pilot in
January after completing several rounds of focus-group studies here during
the next couple of months.

 The machine eventually would allow a doctor to find out everything about a
patient's health benefits -- from claims status to eligibility to co-pay
specifics -- with a swipe of a card. The information could then be printed
out of the terminal, much like a credit-card receipt.

 Currently, a doctor or assistant has to photocopy a patient's insurance
card and then call the patient's insurance company for specific
information, check each insurance provider's Web site for more general
information, or flat-out guess.

 "While the patient is still in care, we can immediately say how much the
doctor needs to collect from the patient and the insurance company," said
Beverly Kennedy, president of First Data's health-care division.

 Many in the health-care industry see an automated, nationwide system to
process payments and transfer medical records as long overdue.

 For one, there's the mountain of paper records associated with the current
way of doing business. Second, there's more complex government regulations,
such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
(HIPAA). Adding to the complexity are increasingly complex health-care
plans.

 Then, the costs of medical administration itself also are rising. Kennedy
said $275 billion is spent each year on such administrative costs.
Eventually, the hope is, an automated system would reduce such expenses.

 First Data wouldn't be the first player to attempt such an ambitious
project. There is a program in Wyoming, North Dakota and Nevada that uses
"smart cards" to store medical records, according to published reports. In
addition, First Data competitor HealthTransaction Network Corp. is pushing
insurance companies to issue debit cards that would be linked to medical
spending accounts.

 But an inclusive nationwide system has been hard to come by, primarily
because of the high number of small, loosely connected doctors' offices.
 Real-time intelligence

 First Data's machine, manufactured by Phoenix-based Hypercom Corp. (NYSE:
HYC), will have smart-chip technology as well as the familiar magnetic
strips. Such chips, which are not being tested in the pilot, allow a
greater amount of information to be passed through and allow that
information to be stored. There are privacy concerns that need to be ironed
out. However, when policy intersects with technology, the terminals will be
ready with the chips, which already have been used in Europe, Kennedy said.

 Insurance companies participating in the program will give their customers
special cards to be used at participating health-care facilities. One of
the state's biggest insurance companies, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of
Georgia Inc., could be one such participant. Spokesman Charlie Harman said
the company is in talks with First Data but declined to give specifics,
saying it was too "proprietary" in nature.

 "This is an important concept," Harman said. "We need to marry technology
to the health-care system."

 Harman said Blue Cross Blue Shield already is on the cutting edge of
technology; for example, it is actively involved with a system that allows
physicians to send prescriptions to pharmacists electronically. Some
hospitals also are involved with "e-prescribing," including Piedmont
Hospital in Atlanta.

 To make it seemingly risk-free for doctors, First Data will give the
terminals away, Kennedy said. But that doesn't mean the company won't make
money -- First Data collects transaction fees, as it owns the network the
information travels over.

 First Data, Western Union Financial Services Inc.'s parent company,
processes all sorts of financial transactions over its network. The company
provides electronic commerce and payment services for approximately 3.1
million merchant locations, 1,400 card issuers and millions of consumers.

 The terminals will plug into the wall just like the current generation of
credit-card terminals and will be easy to use, Kennedy said.

 "It's got to be 'simple-stupid,' " Kennedy said. "It's got to be intuitive."

 Initially, the terminals will be tested in medical doctors' offices and
will offer only eligibility data. The doctors have not yet been chosen.

 Eventually, Kennedy said, officials plan to expand the program nationally
to opticians and dentists

[ISN] Velva Klaessy, government code breaker, dies at 88

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 04:32:09 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISN] Velva Klaessy, government code breaker, dies at 88
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: InfoSec News 
List-Archive: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Subscribe: ,

Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5072390.html

Trudi Hahn
Star Tribune
November 7, 2004

Velva Klaessy, a government cryptanalyst who accomplished some firsts
for female code breakers -- with accompanying problems in the
male-dominated field -- died Sept. 16 in Golden Valley. She was 88.

"She could never talk about it," said her brother Dale Klaessy of
Minnetonka. "It was a lonely, lonely job."

Born to a farm couple in 1915 in Renwick, Iowa, Klaessy got a
scholarship during the Depression to attend what is now Northern Iowa
University. With no money to buy clothes, her father bought her 500
baby chicks to raise. When she sold them, she bought fabric and made
her wardrobe.

She received her degree in math in 1937 and took her first job in a
small town dominated by a Protestant congregation. It decreed that the
public-school teachers weren't allowed to play cards or go to the
movies. After the town protested that she was insulting its sons by
dating a young man from a different town, she left at the end of the
year.

In 1944, she was teaching high school math and science in Cherokee,
Iowa, when a government recruiter came to ask if she had any students
good in math who might want to join the war effort as a cryptologist
in the Army Signal Corps. Her best students were all headed for
college, so she didn't want to recommend them, but she took the job
herself.

After World War II she stayed in the field as the Armed Forces
Security Agency and the National Security Agency (NSA) were formed.
Although much of her work remains classified, information from the
National Cryptologic Museum of the NSA, based at Fort Meade, Md.,
states that she was a member for many years of the highly respected
Technical Consultants group, which assisted other analytic offices
with their most difficult problems.

In the summer of 1953, she and a male officer were posted temporarily
to the Far East to train military personnel. According to oral
tradition, the museum said, female NSA employees had never gotten
temporary posts in that part of the world.

Before she left the consultants group, she was posted temporarily to
the United Kingdom. Her British counterpart threw a welcoming party --
in a men's club from which women were barred, her brother said.

Female NSA employees battled for recognition at home, too. At one
point a supervisor told her that she had earned a promotion but he was
giving it to a male co-worker "because he had a family," her brother
said.

 From 1958 to 1967, Klaessy finally received positions of high
responsibility in sectors dealing with cutting-edge technology, the
museum said, including being named chief in 1964 of the New and
Unidentified Signals Division.

She returned in 1967 to what is now called the extended enterprise
when she was named deputy senior U.S. liaison officer in Ottawa,
Canada. In 1970 she was named senior liaison officer in Ottawa,
becoming the first woman to hold the senior post anywhere in the
world. As senior officer, she represented the U.S. Intelligence Board
and the NSA with appropriate organizations in Canada in all matters
about signal intelligence and communications security.

She returned to Fort Meade in 1975 but retired shortly afterward to
care for ill relatives, her brother said. She was found to have
Parkinson's disease about 1987 and moved to the Twin Cities to be
close to relatives. In addition to her brother Dale, survivors include
another brother, Earl of Spencer, Iowa. Services have been held in
Iowa.



_
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable -
http://www.osvdb.org/

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

[ISN] E-gold Tracks Cisco Code Thief

[R.A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 04:32:34 -0600 (CST)
From: InfoSec News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ISN] E-gold Tracks Cisco Code Thief
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List-Id: InfoSec News 
List-Archive: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Subscribe: ,

Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1713878,00.asp

By Michael Myser
November 5, 2004

The electronic currency site that the Source Code Club said it will
use to accept payment for Cisco Systems Inc.'s firewall source code is
confident it can track down the perpetrators.

Dr. Douglas Jackson, chairman of E-gold Ltd., which runs
www.e-gold.com, said the company is already monitoring accounts it
believes belong to the Source Code Club, and there has been no
activity to date.

"We've got a pretty good shot at getting them in our system," said
Jackson, adding that the company formally investigates 70 to 80
criminal activities a year and has been able to determine the true
identity of users in every case.

On Monday, a member of the Source Code Club posted on a Usenet group
that the group is selling the PIX 6.3.1 firewall firmware for $24,000,
and buyers can purchase anonymously using e-mail, PGP keys and
e-gold.com, which doesn't confirm identities of its users.

"Bad guys think they can cover their tracks in our system, but they
discover otherwise when it comes to an actual investigation," said
Jackson.

The purpose of the e-gold system, which is based on 1.86 metric tons
of gold worth the equivalent of roughly $25 million, is to guarantee
immediate payment, avoid market fluctuations and defaults, and ease
transactions across borders and currencies. There is no credit line,
and payments can only be made if covered by the amount in the account.
Like the Federal Reserve, there is a finite value in the system. There
are currently 1.5 million accounts at e-gold.com, 175,000 of those
Jackson considers "active."

To have value, or e-gold, in an account, users must receive a payment
in e-gold. Often, new account holders will pay cash to existing
account holders in return for e-gold. Or, in the case of SCC, they
will receive payment for a service.

The only way to cash out of the system is to pay another party for a
service or cash trade, which Jackson said creates an increasingly
traceable web of activity.

He did offer a caveat, however: "There is always the risk that they
are clever enough to figure out an angle for offloading their e-gold
in a way that leads to a dead end, but that tends to be much more
difficult than most bad guys think."

This is all assuming the SCC actually receives a payment, or even has
the source code in the first place.

It's the ultimate buyer beware—the code could be made up, tampered
with or may not exist. And because the transaction through e-gold is
instantaneous and guaranteed, there is no way for the buyer to back
out.

Dave Hawkins, technical support engineer with Radware Inc. in Mahwah,
N.J., believes SCC is merely executing a publicity stunt.

"If they had such real code, it's more likely they would have sold it
in underground forums to legitimate hackers rather than broadcasting
the sale on Usenet," he said. "Anyone who did have the actual code
would probably keep it secret, examining it to build private exploits.
By selling it, it could find its way into the public, and all those
juicy vulnerabilities [would] vanish in the next version."

"There's really no way to tell if this is legitimate," said Russ
Cooper, senior scientist with security firm TruSecure Corp. of
Herndon, Va. Cooper, however, believes there may be a market for it
nonetheless. By posting publicly, SCC is able to get the attention of
criminal entities they otherwise might not reach.

"It's advertising from one extortion team to another extortion team,"
he said. "These DDOS [distributed denial of service] extortionists,
who are trying to get betting sites no doubt would like to have more
ways to do that."



_
Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable -
http://www.osvdb.org/

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Dimpled Chips

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Harvard Crimson Online :: Print Article

 Originally published on Monday, November 08, 2004 in the Opinion section
of The Harvard Crimson.


Dimpled Chips
By MATTHEW A. GLINE
MATTHEW A. GLINE



 It seems perfectly reasonable that election officials in Palm Beach
County, Fla. would have wanted a change in their voting equipment after the
2000 election. And touchscreen voting machines seemed like an obvious
choice: Confusing butterfly ballots that had made the state a national
laughing-stock were replaced by clear, well-labeled, brightly colored
buttons; the machines were backed by the latest developments in counting
technology (a field which has, somewhat counter-intuitively, apparently
seen a fair bit of action in recent years); and most importantly of all,
the nearest Chad would now be the one in North Africa.

What the election officials were probably not expecting, however, was the
experience of one particular Palm Springs voter, who after patiently
tapping through screen after screen of national and local officials
fulfilling her civic duty was presented with an unsatisfying message of all
too familiar a form: "Vote save error #1," the machine said, "use back-up
voting procedure."

Voteprotect.org is a website run by a handful of nonprofit organizations
including VerifiedVoting.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation which
collected and organized reports of voting irregularities during last
Tuesday's election. A cursory look at their data on problems related to the
voting machines themselves reveals some interesting trends. The entire
state of Massachusetts, where votes are recorded in large part by older
optical scanning equipment, reported a total of 7 such incidents out of
nearly 3 million ballots-one for every 500,000 or so votes cast. Palm Beach
County had 27 machine related incidents out of their 550,000 votes-each
voter there was roughly three times more likely to report trouble with
their equipment than a voter was here.

These incidents ran the severity gamut. In Georgia, where all voting is
done on touchscreen machines, voters complained of long lines due to
malfunctioning machines or machines with dead batteries. There were
complaints of slow machines, and machines which at first refused to accept
the "smart cards" each voter used to identify themselves. Some machines
crashed or went blank while they were being used.

 Some machines, however, had bigger issues: "Voter's machine defaulted to
Republican candidate each time she voted for a Democrat," one report from
Cobb County, Georgia reads. "She told the precinct supervisor about the
problem. It continued to happen 7 times." Similar incidents occurred in
reasonably large numbers-some voters tried to push a button for Kerry or
Bush and found that the X would appear next to the name of the other
candidate.

 These problems were probably not due to a vast right-wing conspiracy in
the voting machine industry. (Though it's not entirely clear that such a
conspiracy doesn't exist-a board member of Diebold Election Systems, the
company which makes most of the touchscreen voting systems that have been
deployed, did at one point guarantee he would deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004.
The promise sounds even more ominous in hindsight.) Rather, most of the
issues surrounded poor "calibration" of the touchscreen inputs-the machines
would register taps on one part of the screen as if they had been taps at
some slightly different point. There were technicians on hand who could
recalibrate the machines, and this tended to fix the problems for
subsequent voters.

Still, as a result these machines relied on voters' being sufficiently
astute to notice when the confirmation said something different than what
they had chosen, and sufficiently persistent to duke it out with the
machines and complain to overworked officials when things went wrong. And
for all the effort on the part of Florida officials to escape "close calls"
due to fuzzy voting tools, these errors sound a lot like the dimpled chads
they endeavored to replace.

Or they would, were it not for one more disquieting feature of most
touchscreen voting equipment deployed in this election. Senator Kerry
graciously conceded on Wednesday morning. But had he decided to fight it
out and asked for hand recounts, it's not clear what this would mean with
respect to the new machines: They produce no printed receipt. In fact, they
leave no paper trail at all. A lawsuit fought out in the Florida court
system over the past six months tried to change this fact, but election
officials have ultimately refused to deploy such equipment, calling it a
frivolous expense.

I don't mean to doubt that President Bush won this election fairly, and I
don't think touchscreen voting machines, for all their irregularities,
tipped any balances. They even carried some ancillary benefits: Disabled
persons, the blind in particular, were able to vote unassisted in a
pr

Single Field Shapes Quantum Bits

[R.A. Hettinga]

Technology Review  

Single Field Shapes Quantum Bits

November 8, 2005

Quantum computers, which tap the properties of particles like atoms,
photons and electrons to carry out computations, could potentially use a
variety of schemes: individual photons controlled by optical networks,
clouds of atoms linked by laser beams, and electrons trapped in quantum
dots embedded in silicon chips.

 Due to the strange nature of quantum particles, quantum computers are
theoretically much faster than ordinary computers at solving certain large
problems, like cracking secret codes.

Chip-based quantum computers would have a distinct advantage - they could
leverage the manufacturing infrastructure of the semiconductor industry.
Controlling individual electrons, however, is extremely challenging.

Researchers have recently realized that it may be possible to control the
electrons in a quantum computer using a single magnetic field rather than
having to produce extremely small, precisely focused magnetic fields for
each electron.

Researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Wisconsin
at Madison have advanced this idea with a scheme that allows individual
electrons to serve as the quantum bits that store and process computer
information. Electrons have two magnetic orientations, spin up and spin
down, which can represent the 1s and 0s of computing.

The researchers' scheme relies on the interactions of pairs of electrons.
Tiny electrodes positioned near quantum dots -- bits of semiconductor
material that can trap single electrons - can draw neighboring electrons
near enough that they exchange energy.

The researchers' scheme takes a pair of electrons through eleven
incremental steps that involve the electron interaction and a global
magnetic field to flip one of the bits from a 0 to a 1 or vice versa.

 The technique could be used practically in 10 to 20 years, according to
the researchers. The work appeared in the July 15, 2004 issue of Physical
Review Letters.

Technology Research News

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster

[R.A. Hettinga]

Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Report

 Monday 08 November 2004

 Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election debacle, and all of the new
terms it introduced to our political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads,
pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans, Jews for Buchanan
and so forth. It took several weeks, battalions of lawyers and a
questionable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and
the world how messy democracy can be. By any standard, what happened in
Florida during the 2000 Presidential election was a disaster.

 What happened during the Presidential election of 2004, in Florida, in
Ohio, and in a number of other states as well, was worse.

 Some of the problems with this past Tuesday's election will sound all
too familiar. Despite having four years to look into and deal with the
problems that cropped up in Florida in 2000, the 'spoiled vote' chad issue
reared its ugly head again. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, the man
almost singularly responsible for exposing the more egregious examples of
illegitimate deletions of voters from the rolls, described the continued
problems in an article published just before the election, and again in an
article published just after the election.

 Four years later, and none of the Florida problems were fixed. In
fact, by all appearances, they spread from Florida to Ohio, New Mexico,
Michigan and elsewhere. Worse, these problems only scratch the surface of
what appears to have happened in Tuesday's election. The fix that was put
in place to solve these problems - the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002
after the Florida debacle - appears to have gone a long way towards making
things worse by orders of magnitude, for it was the Help America Vote Act
which introduced paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines to
millions of voters across the country.

 At first blush, it seems like a good idea. Forget the chads, the punch
cards, the archaic booths like pianos standing on end with the handles and
the curtains. This is the 21st century, so let's do it with computers. A
simple screen presents straightforward choices, and you touch the spot on
the screen to vote for your candidate. Your vote is recorded by the
machine, and then sent via modem to a central computer which tallies the
votes. Simple, right?

 Not quite.


A Diebold voting machine.
 Is there any evidence that these machines went haywire on Tuesday?
Nationally, there were more than 1,100 reports of electronic voting machine
malfunctions. A few examples:
*In Broward County, Florida, election workers were shocked to
discover that their shiny new machines were counting backwards. "Tallies
should go up as more votes are counted," according to this report. "That's
simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found
the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct.
After that, the system starts counting backward."

*In Franklin County, Ohio, electronic voting machines gave Bush
3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin County's unofficial
results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260
votes in Precinct 1B," according to this report. "Records show only 638
voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the
Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The
other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did
not vote for president."

*In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error on the
electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283 extra votes. "The Elections
Systems and Software equipment," according to this report, "had downloaded
voting information from nine of the county's 26 precincts and as the
absentee ballots were added, the precinct totals were added a second time.
An override, like those occurring when one attempts to save a computer file
that already exists, is supposed to prevent double counting, but did not
function correctly."

*In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500 votes may
be lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer
that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Local
officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting
system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the
limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005 early votes were
stored, but 4,530 were lost."

*In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, the
electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters.
"At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that
the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all
listed an identi

Faith in democracy, not government

[R.A. Hettinga]

The San Francisco Chronicle


Election Fallout
 Faith in democracy, not government
 - Victor Davis Hanson
 Sunday, November 7, 2004


Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were the only two Democrats to be elected
president since 1976. Both were Southerners. Apparently, the only assurance
that the electorate has had that a Democrat was serious about national
security or social sobriety was his drawl. More disturbing still for
liberal Democrats is that George W. Bush is the first Republican Southerner
ever elected to the presidency, another indicator that a majority of the
citizenry no longer finds conservatism and Texas such a scary mix.

 The fate of third-party candidates was also instructive in the election.
Left-wing alternatives like Ralph Nader go nowhere. Conservative populists,
on the other hand, can capture 10 percent or more of the electorate, as
Ross Perot did in 1992 and almost again in 1996. Indeed, Perot's initial
run probably accounts for Clinton's first election, and helped his second
as well. In short, Kerry's 3.5 million shortfall in the popular vote
underestimates the degree to which the country has drifted to the right.
Over a decade ago, it took a third-party candidate, political consultant
Dick Morris' savvy triangulation and Bill Clinton's masterful political
skills to stave off the complete loss of Democratic legislative, executive
and judicial power of the sort that we witnessed last week.

 Something else is going on in the country that has been little remarked
upon. It is not just that an endorsement of a Michael Moore does not
translate into votes or that Rathergate loses viewers for CBS. It has
become perhaps far worse: A Hollywood soiree with a foul-mouthed Whoopee
Goldberg or a Tim Robbins rant can turn toxic for liberal candidates. We
are nearly reaching the point where approval from the New York Times or a
CBS puff-piece hurts a candidate or cause, as do the billions in
contributions from a George Soros.

 Television commentators Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers, Andy Rooney or Ted
Koppel have morphed from their once sober and judicious personas into
highly partisan figures that now carry political weight among most
Americans only to the degree that they harm any cause or candidate with
whom they are associated. Readers do not just disagree with spirited
columns by a Molly Ivins, Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd, but rather are
turned off when they revert to hysterics and condescension. To the degree
that the messages, proposals or endorsements of a delinquent like Ben
Affleck, an incoherent Bruce Springsteen, or a reprobate like Eminem were
comprehensible, John Kerry should have run from them all.

 This election also involved perceived hypocrisy. No one in Bakersfield or
Fresno thinks that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld espouses
views at odds with the privileged lives that they live; they, of course,
unabashedly celebrate and benefit from free enterprise and corporate
capitalism. In contrast, Teresa Heinz Kerry and John Kerry, George Soros or
John Edwards even more so enjoy the fruits of the very system they at times
seem to question.

 Thus, concern for two Americas is not discernable in John Edwards'
multimillion-dollar legal fees, the Kerry jet, or Soros Inc.'s global
financial speculation. It is easy for a Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore to
trash Halliburton, but Red America wonders about the source of university
contracts that subsidize privileged professors' sermons or why corporate
recording, cinema and advertising conglomerates that enrich celebrities are
exempt from Hollywood's Pavlovian censure of big business. That the man who
nearly destroyed the small depositors of Great Britain also fueled
MoveOn.org seemed to say it all.

 Where does this leave us? After landmark legislation of the last 40 years
to ensure equality of opportunity, the public has reached its limit in
using government to press on to enforce an equality of result. In terms of
national security, the Republicans, more so than the Democrats after the
Cold War -- in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq -- oddly are now the party of
democratic change, while liberals are more likely to shrug about the
disturbing status quo abroad. Conservatives have also made the argument
that poverty is evolving into a different phenomenon from what it was
decades ago when outhouses, cold showers and no breakfasts were commonplace
and we were all not awash in cheap Chinese-imported sneakers, cell phones
and televisions.

 Like it or not, the public believes that choices resulting in breaking of
the law, drug use, illegitimate births, illiteracy and victimhood can
induce poverty as much as exploitation, racism or sexism can. After
trillions of dollars of entitlement programs, most voters are unsure that
the answers lie with bureaucrats and social programs, especially when the
elite architects of such polices rarely ex

Tom Wolfe: 'Talk to someone in Cincinnati? Are you crazy?'

[R.A. Hettinga]

My mother's family's name is Sanders. It's Scots-Irish.

Apparently, I like to have my "rock fights" on the net...

:-).

Cheers,
RAH
---



The Times of London


 November 07, 2004

 Focus: US Election Special

'Talk to someone in Cincinnati? Are you crazy?'. . . and so the Democrats
blew it
Tom Wolfe on the elite that got lost in middle America

Over the past few days I've talked to lots of journalists and literary
types in New York. I've grown used to the sound of crushed, hushed voices
on the end of the phone. The weight of George Bush's victory seems almost
too much. But what did they expect, I ask myself.

 They don't like the war and the way the war is going, they don't like Bush
and they don't like what this election says about America. But where's
their sense of reality?

 The liberal elite showed it was way out of touch even before the election.
I was at a dinner party in New York and when everyone was wondering what to
do about Bush I suggested they might do like me and vote for him. There was
silence around the table, as if I'd said "by the way, I haven't mentioned
this before but I'm a child molester".

 Now, like Chicken Licken after an acorn fell on his head, they think the
sky is falling. I have to laugh. It reminds me of Pauline Kael, the film
critic, who said, "I don't know how Reagan won - I don't know a soul who
voted for him." That was a classic and reflects the reaction of New York
intellectuals now. Note my definition of "intellectual" here is what you
often find in this city: not people of intellectual attainment but more
like car salesmen, who take in shipments of ideas and sell them on.

 I think the results in Ohio, the key state this time, tell us everything
we need to know. Overall, the picture of Republican red and Democratic blue
across the country remained almost unchanged since last time. The millions
of dollars spent and miles travelled on the Bush and Kerry campaigns made
no difference at all.

 But look at Ohio and the different voting patterns in Cleveland and
Cincinnati. Cleveland, in the north of the state, is cosmopolitan, what we
would think of as an "eastern" city, and Kerry won by two votes to one.
Cincinnati, in the southeast corner of Ohio, is a long way away both
geographically and culturally. It's Midwestern and that automatically means
"hicksville" to New York intellectuals. There Bush won by a margin of
150,000 votes and it was southern Ohio as a whole that sent him back to the
White House.

 The truth is that my pals, my fellow journos and literary types, would
feel more comfortable going to Baghdad than to Cincinnati. Most couldn't
tell you what state Cincinnati is in and going there would be like being
assigned to a tumbleweed county in Mexico.

 They can talk to sheikhs in Lebanon and esoteric radical groups in
Uzbekistan, but talk to someone in Cincinnati . . . are you crazy? They
have no concept of what America is made of and even now they won't see that.

 So who are the people who voted for Bush? I think the most cogent person
on this is James Webb, the most decorated marine to come out of Vietnam.
Like John Kerry he won the Silver Star, but also the Navy Cross, the
equivalent of our highest honour, the Congressional Medal.

 He served briefly under Reagan as secretary for the navy, but he has since
become a writer. His latest book, Born Fighting, is the most important
piece of ethnography in this country for a long time. It's about that huge
but invisible group, the Scots-Irish. They're all over the Appalachian
mountains and places like southern Ohio and Tennessee.

 Their theme song is country music and when people talk about rednecks,
this is the group they're talking about: this is the group that voted for
Bush.

 Though they've had successes, the Scots-Irish generally haven't done well
economically. They're individualistic, they're stubborn and they value
their way of life more then their financial situation. If a politician
comes out for gun control they take it personally. It's not about guns,
really: if you're against the National Rifle Association you're against
them as a people.

 They take Protestantism seriously. It tickles me when people talk about
"the Christian right". These people aren't right wing, they're just
religious. If you're religious, of course, you're against gay marriage and
abortion. You're against a lot of things that have become part of the
intellectual liberal liturgy.

 Everyone who joins the military here thinks, "Where did all these
Southerners come from?" These people love to fight. During the French and
Indian wars, before there was a United States, recruiters would turn up in
the Carolinas and in the Appalachians and say, "Anyone want to go and fight
Indians?" There was a bunch of boys who were always up for it and they
haven't lost that love of battle.

 My family wasn't Scots-Irish but my father was from the Shenendoah Valley,
in the Bl

Plane passengers shocked by their x-ray scans

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Times of London CLICK HERE TO PRINTCLOSE WINDOW?


 November 07, 2004

 Plane passengers shocked by their x-ray scans
Dipesh Gadher,Transport Correspondent

AN X-RAY machine that sees through air passengers' clothes has been
deployed by security staff at London's Heathrow airport for the first time.

 The device at Terminal 4 produces a "naked" image of passengers by
bouncing X-rays off their skin, enabling staff instantly to spot any hidden
weapons or explosives.

 But the graphic nature of the black and white images it generates -
including revealing outlines of men and women - has raised concerns about
privacy both among travellers and aviation authorities.

 In America, transport officials are refusing to deploy the device until it
can be further refined to "mask" passengers' modesty.

 The Terminal 4 trial - being conducted jointly by the British Airports
Authority and the Department for Transport - became fully operational last
month and is intended to run until the end of the year. Its deployment has
not been reported until now since new security measures at airports are not
normally publicised.

 If the new body scanner is able to cope with large volumes of passengers,
improves detection rates and, crucially, receives public acceptance, it is
likely to be rolled out across all Britain's airports.

 At Heathrow, passengers are picked to go through the body scanner on a
random and voluntary basis. Those who refuse are subjected to an automatic
hand search.

 The scanner, which resembles a tall, grey filing cabinet, operates in a
curtained area and passengers are asked to stand in front of it, adopting
several poses, for their "naked" image to be registered. Once checked, the
images are immediately erased.

 Security officials claim it is a far more effective way of countering
potential terrorists because it detects the outline of any solid object -
such as plastic explosives or ceramic knives - which conventional metal
detectors would miss.

 Managers at Heathrow also say the new technology does away with the need
to subject passengers to potentially intrusive hand searches. However,
travellers who have been screened - and have asked to see the images - have
been surprised by their clarity.

 "I was quite shocked by what I saw," said Gary Cook, 40, a graphic
designer from Shaftesbury, Dorset. "I felt a bit embarrassed looking at the
image.

 A female passenger, who did not want to be named, said: "It was really
horrible. It doesn't leave much to the imagination because you're virtually
naked, but I guess it's less intrusive than being hand searched."

 In a similar trial at Orlando international airport in Florida in 2002,
passengers were shown a dummy image before going through, and at least a
quarter of them refused to volunteer.

 In America last year, Susan Hallowell, director of the US Transportation
Security Administration's (TSA) security laboratory, showed off her own
x-ray image to demonstrate the technology to reporters.

 "It basically makes you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff,"
said Hallowell, who had deliberately hidden a gun and a bomb under her
clothes.

 The TSA has decided not to deploy the device at American airports until
manufacturers can develop an electronic means of masking sensitive body
parts.

Copyright 2004  Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers'  standard Terms and
Conditions . Please read our Privacy Policy . To inquire about a licence to
reproduce material from The Times, visit the  Syndication website .

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Telegraph

 Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 07/11/2004)

The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in
George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And
apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that
instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're
going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating
the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who
attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin',
military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin',
foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave
America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us
and make their land 'free and strong'."

Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely
accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted
for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And
this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister
Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their
gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire
country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.

In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks
have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in
Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You
can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never
pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous
cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were
swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly
Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now
swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border,
where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are
everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up
with.

Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there seem
to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who say, if
you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror headline "How
can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who say, if you
disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James, who told The
Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my
late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and
thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?' "

 Mr James is a clinical psychologist.

If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers indefinitely,
they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing mornings-after in the
2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election, 2010, and beyond: America's
resistance to the conventional wisdom of the rest of the developed world is
likely to intensify in the years ahead. This widening gap is already a
point of pride to the likes of B J Kelly of Killiney, who made the
following observation on Friday's letters page in The Irish Times: "Here in
the EU we objected recently to high office for a man who professed the
belief that abortion and gay marriages are essentially evil. Over in the US
such an outlook could have won him the presidency."

I'm not sure who he means by "we". As with most decisions taken in the
corridors of Europower, the views of Killiney and Knokke and Krakow didn't
come into it one way or the other. B J Kelly is referring to Rocco
Buttiglione, the mooted European commissioner whose views on homosexuality,
single parenthood, etc would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian
Catholic 30 years ago. Now Europe's secular elite has decided they're
beyond the pale and such a man should have no place in public life. And B J
Kelly sees this as evidence of how much more enlightened Europe is than
America.

That's fine. But what happens if the European elite should decide a whole
lot of other stuff is beyond the pale, too, some of it that B J Kelly is
quite partial to? In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11
state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened
Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their
"gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their
betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage
redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors.
That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay
lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from
today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political
correctness en

Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 9:31 AM -0800 11/6/04, James Donald wrote:
>As George Orwell observed, anyone who thinks there is a significant
>difference between nazis and commies is in favor of one or the other.

I'm going to have hunt that one up for my .sig file.

Thank you.

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 8:08 PM +0100 11/6/04, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>Cypherpunks write code.

Right. That's it. Wanna write me a bearer mint? For free?

;-)

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: The Values-Vote Myth

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

At 6:25 PM + 11/6/04, Justin wrote:
>65m/141m = 46% of registered voters voted for Bush

Of course, you can invert the math and say the same about Kerry, plus
Bush's 3-something million margin, I'm afraid. Hell, Rush said
exactly the same thing on Friday. :-). Numerology doesn't win
elections, I'm afraid.


Remember, boys and girls, government itself is the not-so-polite
fiction that the highwayman is acting in our best interest at all
times if we pay him enough to leave us, individually, alone.

So, as Brooks indirectly proves, rather than blathering here, or
elsewhere, about "values", or "equality", or "fairness", or
"justice", or other lofty nonsense, electoral or otherwise, look at
how well a given *culture* and its implicit force-control mechanism,
does *economically* for its citizenry (a parasite doesn't kill its
own host, and all that...), besides just being able to kill more and
better soldiers on the other side of the battlefield is actually
putting the cart before the horse.

The fact that increasing personal liberty results in such higher
per-capita income, and thus the ability to project force than
reducing liberty does isn't necessarily the same level of
metaphysical mystery as the fact that some kinds of mathematics
predict reality, but it's close enough for, heh, government work.

Someday, hopefully, financial cryptography will reduce transaction
costs by actually *increasing* privacy (see math and reality, liberty
and income, above), the *economic* rationale for force-monopoly will
go away, and *then* we can all exhume Lysander Spooner, prop him up,
and talk about constitutions of no authority, or whatever.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: No, Canada!

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 11:42 AM -0800 11/6/04, John Young wrote:
>capitalist

There you go, speaking marxist again...

;-)

Cheers,
RAH
"Capitalism" is totalitarian for "economics"...
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Kerry Kept Money Coming With the Internet as His ATM

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times

November 6, 2004
FUND-RAISING

Kerry Kept Money Coming With the Internet as His ATM
By GLEN JUSTICE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - The power of the Internet in this year's election can
be summed up in the story of Sam Warren, an Alabama voter who had never
made a political contribution before but found himself donating 21 times to
Senator John Kerry - all without opening his checkbook.

Mr. Warren gave when the senator won the Super Tuesday primaries. He gave
when the campaign sent him an e-mail message. He gave during the Democratic
convention. By Election Day, Mr. Warren had given almost $2,000.

 "I surprised even myself," he said. "It's so easy to do. All you do is
click-click with a Visa card."

The emergence of the Internet as a major fund-raising tool is arguably the
largest single change to the campaign finance system to come from this
year's presidential race, allowing thousands of contributors like Mr.
Warren to react instantly to campaign events as they happen.

Although Howard Dean set the pace during the primaries, raising roughly $20
million, no one capitalized more on Internet fund-raising than Mr. Kerry.
With a sophisticated marketing effort to keep people clicking, he emerged
as the largest online fund-raiser in politics, bringing in about $82
million over the Internet - more than the $50 million Al Gore raised from
all individual contributors in 2000.

The Bush campaign, which used its Internet site primarily to organize
voters, raised about $14 million online.

The Internet helped Mr. Kerry cut President Bush's financial lead
substantially. Mr. Bush raised about $273 million, while Mr. Kerry raised
about $249 million. The amount Mr. Kerry raised online virtually ensures
that few presidential and Congressional campaigns will develop in the
future without the Internet in mind.

 "This is arguably the most powerful tool for political engagement we've
ever seen," said Simon Rosenthal, president of the New Democratic Network.
"It made it easier for the average citizen to participate in politics.
Every moment they interact with the campaign can be a direct-response
moment. They can watch a speech on TV, get motivated and give money."

And they did. Though there is no precise tally of how many people gave to
the candidates over the Internet, the amount of cash from people giving
less than $200 increased fourfold from 2000, according to the Campaign
Finance Institute, which studies presidential financing.

Online fund-raising spread quickly, allowing candidates, parties and
advocacy groups a low-cost supplement to big-donor fund-raising.

The Internet pioneer MoveOn.org, which advocated Mr. Bush's defeat, raised
millions. At the popular liberal Web log Daily Kos, its founder, Markos
Moulitsas, directed more than $750,000 to the Democratic party and
candidates from 6,500 contributors. Just a mention on the blog was worth
thousands to a campaign.

 Even Amazon.com got involved, offering links that raised $300,000 for
presidential candidates. "We were happy to make it as easy for people to
contribute as it is to buy the latest Harry Potter book," the company said
in a letter to customers.

It was just four years ago that Senator John McCain made headlines when he
raised more than $1 million online after winning the New Hampshire primary.
This year, Dr. Dean created his entire campaign around the Internet,
relying on it for fund-raising and organization and pioneering many of the
techniques that have become standard practice.

 The campaign posted its fund-raising goals, long a taboo in the political
world, and sent a relentless stream of fund-raising e-mail messages,
liberally sharing information about why it needed the money and what it
would pay for. And it took chances.

"The Dean campaign really experimented a lot," said Nicco Mele, the
campaign's Webmaster. "The Kerry campaign doesn't have that approach."

Mr. Kerry's campaign came late to online fund-raising. He raised just $1.2
million in 2003, with an Internet team in the basement of a Washington
townhouse. But the campaign awoke to the possibilities when Dr. Dean's
fund-raising began to soar.

 Josh Ross, a 32-year-old former Republican with a Silicon Valley
background, came aboard in late November 2003 to marshal the effort, but it
was a period when Mr. Kerry was sagging in the polls and fund-raising had
slowed.

 "Josh was building a car, but he didn't have a whole lot of gas," said
David Thorne, Mr. Kerry's longtime friend and former brother-in-law, who
was instrumental in creating the campaign's Internet program.

The situation turned when Mr. Kerry won in Iowa. The Internet team
persuaded campaign leaders to insert a mention of the Web site in the
victory speech. Mr. Thorne made a late-night run to Kinko's to create a
JohnKerry.com placard for the lectern. When the candidate mentioned the
site, hits shot skyward. "There were ne

'Perilous Times': War of Words

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times

November 7, 2004

'Perilous Times': War of Words
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS


PERILOUS TIMES
 Free Speech in Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.
By Geoffrey R. Stone.
llustrated. 730 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.

OWEVER seductively it may be phrased, the offer of an exchange of liberty
for security has a totalitarian hook sticking out of its protectively
colored bait. Societies that make the trade have very often ended up with
neither liberty nor security. But on the other hand (as Fay Wray entitled
her own memoir of monstrousness in New York) totalitarianism can present a
much more menacing threat from without. I have heard serious people
describe the reign of our pious present attorney general as fascistic.
Given that jihadist armed forces could still be in our midst, that might be
looking for fascism in all the wrong places.

 What this argument has long needed is the discipline of historical
perspective, and Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of law and former dean at
the University of Chicago, has come forward at precisely the right moment
with an imposing book that offers precisely that. In ''Perilous Times: Free
Speech in Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism,''
he shows how the United States has balanced (and unbalanced) the scale of
freedom versus the exigencies of self-defense. And he also demonstrates a
kind of evolutionary learning curve, whereby the courts have distilled some
of our dearly bought experience.

 America's first experiment with a national-security state was at once its
most unambivalently disastrous and its shortest lived. The Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798 were, to begin with, flagrantly partisan. The easiest
proof of this is the exemption of the vice president from the list of
official persons who could be calumniated, simply because the
anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson was at that time the holder of the office.
They also vastly exaggerated the threat from revolutionary France and
flatly negated the spirit and letter of the First Amendment. Editors were
imprisoned; foreign-born friends of America like Thaddeus Kosciusko had
already felt compelled to leave the country. So great was the eventual
revulsion from this that, six and a half decades after the acts were
repealed, President Lincoln had no choice but to read the most viperous
editorials in the Democratic press, describing him as a demented tyrant
bent upon a bloody war of self-aggrandizement.

 Stone's pages on this period are completely absorbing. He shows that
Lincoln did imprison or fine the occasional editor, but with scant relish
for the business, and that wartime censorship was so easily evaded as to be
no censorship at all. The crisis came, rather, over conscription and the
concomitant suspension of habeas corpus. Lincoln's secretary of state,
William Seward, was widely quoted as having told the British minister: ''I
can touch a bell on my right hand and order the arrest of a citizen in
Ohio. I can touch the bell again and order the imprisonment of a citizen of
New York, and no power on earth but that of the president can release them.
Can the queen of England, in her dominions, say as much?'' This boastful
inversion of the original purposes of the American Revolution may have been
overstated for effect, but not by much. Lincoln did order nighttime
arrests, and did ignore Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's ruling that a
president had no power to deny habeas corpus. Taney's position is that the
Constitution reserves such extreme measures only for the Congress. If a
president wants to assume such powers, he cannot do so without at least
resorting to the courts, which Lincoln steadily declined to do.

 Instead, he rather demagogically demanded to know why the law should force
him to shoot ''a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not
touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert.'' The cause
celebre here became that of Clement Vallandigham, a leader of the
Copperheads, northern Democrats sympathetic to the South, who spiritedly
opposed both conscription and emancipation. He was arrested, then exiled
from the Union. I have never seen it argued that this measure had any
influence on the desertion rate (improbable in any case, given that the
thought of the firing squad probably had a greater effect on the mind of
the simple-minded soldier boy). The best that can be said is that Lincoln
seems to have sensed the absurdity of his own logic, and regularly urged
local commanders not to embarrass him by locking up people who merely
uttered anti-Union sentiments.

 The next two wartime crises involved the killing of foreigners rather than
Americans, and in both cases the ''loyalty'' of ethnic or national
minorities was in question. During World War I, the persecution of
German-Americans put H. L. Mencken in a permanent state of alienated 

No, Canada!

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Boston Globe
THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
No, Canada!

You don't want to go there

By Alex Beam, Globe Staff  |  November 6, 2004

You have probably heard the idle chatter: ''I'm thinking of moving to
Canada." You may have received the JPEG Sent 'Round the World, labeling the
northern part of North America -- the right-thinking part, as liberals
would have it -- as the United States of Canada, and the pro-Bush leaning
''red" US states as Jesusland.

It sounds so alluring. Good beer. Cheap Viagra. Hardly any crime. Friendly,
if somewhat ineffectual, people. Terrific, if underappreciated, novelists.
(This means you, Rohinton Mistry.) Secure borders, courtesy of the US
Department of Defense.

But before you pack, consider this: There are plenty of reasons not  to
move to Canada. Let me count the ways.

1. They don't really want you. Canada is full of losers like you. If you're
really rich, or a brain surgeon, maybe. But if you are, say, a newspaper
reporter, be prepared to wait at least a year just to live there legally,
and several more years to become a citizen.

If you have some special qualifications, like a PhD, plus a lot of work
experience, and if you are under 50, you have a better chance of crashing
the gates of Snow Mexico. Or if you're loaded. That's right. If you have a
net worth of $800,000 Canadian or more, and are willing to invest $400,000
of it in Canada, come on in! And you thought George Bush's America was a
plutocracy. . . . Think again.

2. Speaking of brain surgery -- have you tried Buffalo? Here is what John
Kerry didn't tell you: The problem with free, single-payer health care is
that you get what you pay for.

Even the Canadians acknowledge that their health system is in crisis.
(Sound familiar?) They speak about the inequities of their two-tiered
system, where publicly funded patients wait weeks, if not months, to
consult specialists or have routine surgery, while private patients get
quick service. In fact, it's a three-tiered system. The very well-to-do
travel to the United States for some procedures.

We refer you to a recent editorial in The Windsor (Ontario) Star: ''A
growing number of sick and tired Canadians are beginning to look to the US
for ideas on how to improve our failing health-care system. But Kerry,
inexplicably, is looking north for health care ideas."

3. Parlez-vous francais? Somehow I doubt it. And yet if you want to work
for the Canadian government -- the country's largest employer -- chances
are that you have to be bilingual. And the private sector is following
suit. C'est dur, eh?

4. How do you like your free speech -- well chilled? Canada has no First
Amendment and adheres to primitive British-style libel laws.

Here is a hilarious definition of defamation la Canadienne, from the Media
Libel website: ''A defamatory statement exists if the publication tends to
lower the plaintiff's reputation in the estimation of those who are
commonly referred to as 'right thinking' members of society." Allow me to
reiterate my widely known position: Celine Dion is the greatest singer who
ever lived.

Just this year, the Canadian Parliament passed what the religious right has
branded a ''Chill Bill," or ''The Bible as Hate Speech Bill," effectively
preventing churches from using the Bible to preach against homosexuality.
''With the passage of Bill C-250, Canada has now embarked upon a course of
criminalization of dissent," according to a statement released this spring
by the Catholic Civil Rights League.

Fine, you say. Enough gay-bashing by Bible-waving Christian loonies. But
remember John Ashcroft's motto: Your rights are next.

5. It's the black hole of sports fandom. You would seriously consider
leaving the home of North America's greatest baseball team -- ever -- and
of North America's greatest football team, for . . . what? Canadian
football is played on a field that's too long (that's why each team has 12
players), and there are only three downs. Huh?

Fifty percent of Canada's Major League Baseball infrastructure -- les
Montral Expos just decamped for Washington, D.C., because of audience
indifference. Canada's one great sports treasure, professional hockey,
isn't being played this year. You hadn't noticed?

And you can't even name its national sport, can you? What if that question
is on the citizenship application?

6. Have you heard the joke about the Canadian dollar? Not lately. Without
putting too fine a point on this, Canadian currency has been laying a
Euro-style smackdown on the US greenback. What this means to you: less
purchasing power.

Wait, there's more. You think you're living in a high-tax state right now?
Hahahahahaha.

7. The biggest argument against immigrating to Canada is: You're going in
the wrong direction! With all due respect to our northern neighbors, anyone
who is anyone bolted years ago.

Peter Jennings, Mike Myers, Joni Mitchell, Jim Carr

Broward machines count backward

[R.A. Hettinga]

Palm Beach Post

Broward machines count backward

 By Eliot Kleinberg

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Friday, November 05, 2004


FORT LAUDERDALE - It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.

Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a
long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies
should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some
races, the numbers had gone . . . down.


Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes
per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.

Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to
Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone late Wednesday
with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.

Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the
final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals, and
officials are confident they are accurate.

The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward Elections
Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. All were placed in their own precincts and
optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a main computer.

That's where the counting problems surfaced. They affected only votes for
constitutional amendments 4 through 8, because they were on the only page
that was exactly the same on all county absentee ballots. The same software
is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties; Palm Beach and St. Lucie
counties use different companies.

The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said ES&S told her
it had sent software upgrades to the Florida Secretary of State's office,
but that the office kept rejecting the software. The state said that's not
true. Broward elections officials said they had thought the problem was
fixed.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this
system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up
in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward
should have split the absentee ballots into four separate precincts to
avoid that and that a Broward elections employee since has admitted to not
doing that.

But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to the canvassing
board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said occurred."

Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating that it learned of the
problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades would be submitted to
Hood's office next year. The company was working with the counties it
serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity and said no other
counties reported similar problems.

"While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the
ballot and structuring the precincts, we . . . regret any confusion the
discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the statement said.

After several calls to the company during the day were not returned, an
ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she did not know whether ES&S contacted
the secretary of state two years ago or whether the software is designed to
count backward.

While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a different Br oward
elections supervisor and a different secretary of state. Snipes said she
had not known about the 2002 snafu.

Later, Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm not pointing a
finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to be at fault, actions might
include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its contract.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

The Values-Vote Myth

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times
November 6, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Values-Vote Myth
By DAVID BROOKS

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to
explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it
has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they
are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

 In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie
Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of
homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George
Bush over the top.

 This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

 Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out,
there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year.
Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did
in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are
pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all
circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say
they pray daily.

 It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican,
but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us
that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over
the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday,
25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters
supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as
there is on most social issues.

 Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly
worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most
influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral
values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote
on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.

 The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did
better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did
better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's
hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly
in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.

 He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as
president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They
had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most
approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the
war on terror.

 The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for
Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's
policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people
with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

 The red and blue maps that have been popping up in the papers again this
week are certainly striking, but they conceal as much as they reveal. I've
spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of
words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is
no one explanation. It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this
week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro
forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of
dogma and reaction.

 In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within
regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex
layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism,
American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity,
natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

 But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the
rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and
condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why
Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university
town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red
America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely
closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

 What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually
eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are
important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of
the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The
rage of the drowning man.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." 

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

[R.A. Hettinga]

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes
 Email this Story

Nov 5, 11:56 AM (ET)
 


 COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave
President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials
said.

 Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to
Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only
638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

 Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder,
director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus
Dispatch.

 State and county election officials did not immediately respond to
requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system
and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could
have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial
results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging
that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change
the result.

 The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's
total until the county reported the error.

 The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged
since Tuesday's elections.

 In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because
officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically
could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with
custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four
races for county supervisor.

 In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge.
On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in
the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the
malfunction occurred.
(AP) Voters waited up to three hours to cast ballots after one of two
voting machines failed to work at...
Full Image
Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's
Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been
discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this
month, he said.

 The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the
machine.

 Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine
and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the
other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

 Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for
the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three
choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of
first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are
then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.

 When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on
Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes
didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

 "All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the
way it was supposed to."

 A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software,
Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the
problem.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Election with Hunter

[R.A. Hettinga]

Last blue-baiting post, I swear. Gotta love HST, especially after the ether
kicks in...

Cheers,
RAH
---



Aspen Daily News

Friday, November 5, 2004
11/4/04

 Election with Hunter

By Troy Hooper/Aspen Daily News Staff Writer



 WOODY CREEK - It was Bailey's Irish Cream and Royal Salute Scotch Whiskey
at the Thompson household on Election Night. A bottle of Cristal intended
for a John Kerry victory remained uncorked, chilling on ice in a backroom.

 A hungry smell of anticipation hung in the kitchen at Owl Farm, which
morphed into a makeshift Democratic headquarters as Hunter S. Thompson
hunkered down with a small group of friends and manned what seemed like a
global switchboard as calls came pouring in from some of the biggest names
in modern American lore.

 Even a few pollsters dialed up The Good Doctor in search of the most
up-to-minute score. Whether they were calling to ascertain Thompson's
classified political knowledge or gauge his gambler's instinct was unclear.
But without question, his phone was chiming more often than the Liberty
Bell.

 "I don't mean to pop the bad news on you Bubba but John Kerry is getting
beat just like George McGovern did in 1972 - or worse," Thompson proclaimed
to his nephew well before the news networks gave any hint that Bush Nation
was marching toward a second term. "The tide turned so quickly it was
difficult to breathe."

 Actor Sean Penn, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, Kerry press
secretary David Wade and others checked in with Thompson who sat on a chair
inhaling cigarettes and stiff drinks in between bites of breakfast, which
wasn't served to the late-awakening writer until after the sun went down.

 Asked for a candid assessment of the election, Thompson put it plainly to
Penn.

 "I've got the worst possible news. Colorado has gone to hell like all the
other states," Thompson said into the speakerphone. "They must have all
voted the same way they prayed."

 The way Thompson's neighbors voted was far removed from the national
outcome. Bush mustered just 2,750 of Pitkin County's electorate while Kerry
received 6,275.

 Nationally, Bush garnered the highest total number of votes ever, winning
51 percent of the record voter turnout, which preliminary estimates have
put at roughly 117 million. He is the first president to win a majority of
the vote since 1988 when his father beat another Democrat from
Massachusetts: Michael Dukakis.

 "The news is getting logarithmically more horrible," Thompson told another
caller as the night wore on. "They're all committing suicide up in Boston."

 Thompson has always had a keen eye for politics. His best-known work on
the subject is "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" - an up-close
study of South Dakota Senator George McGovern's effort to unseat President
Richard Nixon.

 Over the weekend, McGovern and Thompson discussed the election: The two
old friends suggested Bush might be more dangerous than Nixon. Kerry would
make a fine president, they both agreed, as they noted the similarities
between the two eras.

 This year's Democratic presidential candidate must have seen some
similarities between now and then, too.

 When Kerry visited Aspen last June for a fund-raiser, he brought three
hardcover copies of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" to have
them autographed. Thompson obliged and struck a friendship with Kerry,
serving as his unofficial Aspen tour guide, meeting the candidate on a
rain-soaked tarmac at Sardy Field and riding in a Secret Service procession
up Red Mountain, showing Kerry the sights and conferring with him on
national affairs.

 Now, five months later, Kerry has met the same fate as McGovern.

 "I feel like somebody's died," Thompson lamented as the sun was preparing
to rise early Wednesday morning. "I'm just not sure who it was."

 He deemed the election "another failure of the youth vote."

 "Yeah, we rocked the vote all right. Those little bastards betrayed us again."

 But despite his disappointment, Thompson remained remarkably upbeat.

 "Their army is how much bigger than mine? Three percent? Well shucks,
Bubba. Now is the time to establish a network and an attitude," he said.
"You make friends in moments of defeat. People in defeat tend to bond
because they need each other. We can't take the attitude that it's over and
we give up. We're still here."

 Thompson added: "I'm proud to have known John Kerry."


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

RE: Your source code, for sale

[R.A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

At 10:18 AM -0800 11/5/04, Hal Finney wrote:
>Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have
>a who-goes-first problem.

Whenever we talk about financial applications, where the assets
represented by one bearer certificate are exchanged for those
represented by another, what's really happening is a redeem-reissue
process anyway. Since it's the underwriters' reputations you're
trusting anyway, we've always assumed that there would be
communication between the underwriters in order to execute, clear,
and settle the trade all at once.

For streaming stuff, we figured that since we were streaming cash for
streaming bits, like movies, or content of some kind, you'd just do
tit for tat, one stream (cash, probably signed probabalistically
tested "coins" in the last iteration that we called "Nicko-mint" :-))
against another, the movie, song, etc being streamed. There's the
"missing last 5 minutes" problem, but I think that, in recursive
auction-settled cash market for digital goods like this (Eric Hughes'
institutional 'pirate' scheme, the 'silk road' stuff, whatever), that
there will always be another source to buy what's left from, once the
intellectual property issues solve themselves because of the auction
process.

For things that aren't useful except in their entirety, like code, or
executables, (or storing money :-)), I've always been a fan of the
Mojo/BitTorrent stuff, where you hash the file into bits, ala m-of-n
Shamir secret splitting, and store/buy them from lots of places at
once.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'