-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Today's Lesson From "The Purloined Letter" by Edgar Allan Poe "There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word--the name of a town, river, state, or empire--any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obstrusively and too palpably self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the minister had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it." ===== Nukes R Us Tracking the Suspicions of China's Nuclear Spying by Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner WASHINGTON -- The congressional investigation into China's suspected theft of American technology began as a gleam in Newt Gingrich's eye. Today, a year later, it has become the decade's deepest look into a realm of cloaks and daggers that lives on after the cold war. The resulting report, due to be published on Tuesday after a bitter struggle with the White House over its release, is likely to alter American national security and foreign policy, slow the export of technology and thus reshape the Clinton Administration's commercial diplomacy toward China. While the House was torn asunder over impeachment, the five Republicans and four Democrats on the investigating panel, led by Representative Christopher Cox, secretly and unanimously achieved consensus. They concluded that China has been systematically stealing information on American nuclear warheads and missiles from the 1970's until today, according to officials familiar with their report. Most unusually, they agreed not to divulge their explosive findings -- and kept their word, even as Democrats and Republicans fiercely contested the 1998 election. The Cox committee was never expected to delve so deeply into secrets of state. The panel was created by Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House, to look, among other things, for possible impeachable offenses in the Clinton Administration's policy of encouraging commercial exports to China, which Gingrich called "a threat to the survival of the United States." But last Oct. 15, the investigation took a new turn. The committee was questioning Donald H. Rumsfeld, a former Secretary of Defense and author of a highly classified report on missile threats commissioned by Congress, on the subject of China's missiles. Cox, a California Republican, asked a crucial question: How had the Chinese managed to modernize their nuclear weapons program? The answer was a secret, replied Rumsfeld, so highly classified that the committee could not be told. So Cox went to the Central Intelligence Agency, asking for inside information on China's espionage. And he got it. "The committee started out going through a door, and we came into a room, and there was more in that room than we thought there would be," said Representative Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Cox committee member. In that room, the committee found evidence that relentless espionage, assiduous research and open exchanges with American scientists had saved China incalculable time and money in its drive to build a modern nuclear arsenal, said officials who have been told the contents of the committee's report. It learned of thefts of nuclear weapons information in the mid-1990's -- yet another espionage case still under investigation, whose details the report cannot publicly disclose. It believes that Chinese spying continues at the nation's weapons laboratories. And it concluded that China will field a new generation of nuclear weapons in coming years, based at least in part on stolen information, that could alter the balance of power in Asia, especially regarding Taiwan, which China views as a breakaway province. "This was what Chris Cox stumbled onto as he started peeling the onion layers back," said William Schneider Jr., a Rumsfeld commission member. "The chairman had his eyes opened." The secret files "opened not only Chris's eyes, but all our eyes," said Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and Cox committee member. The committee's members do not argue that the United States is immediately threatened by China's nuclear advances. The American nuclear arsenal overwhelmingly outmatches China's. And while espionage may have propelled a great leap toward modern nuclear forces, China has not yet deployed a weapon based on the stolen data. "Does it make them less dangerous? More dangerous? I don't know," Goss said. Cox said the report "ought not to chill relations" between Beijing and Washington, "for the simple reason that the underlying facts were known to both Governments beforehand." But he said "it should provide the basis for a reassessment of U.S. policy" toward China. The report already has ignited a debate on the balance between science and security at the national laboratories, not to mention spawning 10 more Congressional investigations. Its publication, after a five-month struggle over its declassification, will cap an unusual effort to pierce the shield of secrecy. Overcoming Suspicions and Political Nature In a city where secrets are hard to keep, the committee kept them. They did not leak until after its report was completed and the committee began battling the Clinton Administration over its declassification and release. "We had a sworn pact among the nine of us that we would not divulge information, and for the first time in my career in Congress, that worked," Weldon said. The committee began work in July with a seemingly narrow focus: how American commercial satellite technology leaked to China under export licenses approved by President Clinton and President Bush. It weighed, then dropped, explosive but unproven charges that Chinese military and intelligence officials tried to sway the 1996 elections for the Democrats by buying access to politicians. In the beginning, "Democrats were suspicious because the Republicans had made it clear there were going to be impeachable offenses here," said Representative Norm Dicks of Washington, the committee's ranking Democrat. But those suspicions subsided. Schneider, a State Department official in the Reagan Administration, said: "Cox was seen by the Democrats as a fair guy who was undertaking a narrow investigation into satellite launches. The committee had a fixed life of six months, and Congress would be out of session over much of that time, so they would not be around to do the heavy lifting of reading documents." Cox's staff included some who had served on the Rumsfeld commission, which had uncovered at least one crucial file pointing to Chinese nuclear espionage. The staff went to work in a windowless bunker with 36 cubicles, "burn bags" for classified litter and alarm systems to ward off visitors. Their heavy lifting began in October, when Cox won access to the secret intelligence files. The Director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, "was willing to give us access and to open the doors of the C.I.A.," said Weldon. "That was a sea change, when George offered that openness." The committee was less successful on another front. Cox repeatedly asked the Justice Department for information from Federal grand jury investigations of American companies' exports of satellites, computers and machine tools to China. He was rebuffed. Evidence Begins to Surface In late October, days before the 1998 elections, the committee made its most important discovery. In early 1995, scientists at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory had told Notra Trulock, then intelligence director at the Energy Department, which oversees the national labs, of their fears that China had achieved a remarkable breakthrough in its nuclear tests. At about the same time that those fears were raised, the intelligence files showed, a Chinese agent had handed over a secret document to American officials. The document contained evidence that China had stolen design data on American nuclear warheads and missiles. In 1996, the C.I.A. decided that the agent had been planted by the Chinese intelligence service, to send a message whose meaning is debated to this day. But the agency determined that the document he had delivered contained at least a measure of truth -- that American secrets had been stolen. This should have set off alarm bells at the national weapons laboratories. But that didn't happen, said Trulock, who became the Cox committee's star witness. He secretly testified that he had tried to raise warnings about espionage at the labs, but had been thwarted by his superiors at the Energy Department. In late October, at a White House meeting, Bill Richardson, the new Energy Secretary, pulled aside Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser, said a senior Administration official. Richardson said, in so many words: We're starting to get requests for information from the Cox committee, and this China stuff is a problem, the official said. The White House knew what the committee wanted to know. President Clinton had been told about the problems at the weapons laboratories, but no earlier than July 1997 and possibly as late as February 1998, according to the varied recollections of Berger. The Democrats said they feared the information about the Chinese espionage would leak and damage them politically on the eve of the November 1998 elections. It did not. As the storm of impeachment gathered over the Capitol, the nine members of the committee struggled to finish their report, which was approaching the length of a Russian novel. On Dec. 16, they took their last testimony from Trulock, a self-described whistle-blower. On Dec. 19, the House impeached the President. The Cox committee report was completed on Dec. 30, after less than six months of intense work. It would take nearly five months more to declassify it. In consultation with the committee, the White House declassified the panel's 32 recommendations, including tightening security at the labs, toughening export controls and sharing intelligence information between Government agencies. The White House, without consulting the committee, released the Cox recommendations, along with its own responses, to selected reporters on Feb. 1. "They were hoping to spin the report," Weldon said. A few days later, Cox and Dicks asked to meet with President Clinton to discuss their findings. The White House did not respond for weeks. For more than a month, President Clinton did not have much to say in public about the report's findings; some had already appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. On March 19, at a press conference, Clinton assured the public that "there has been no espionage at the labs since I have been President" and "no one has reported to me that they suspect such a thing has occurred." Assessing Damage From Espionage Throughout March and April, the White House and the committee fought over how to declassify the report. Nearly a third of its findings will remain secret at the behest of American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, Cox said. As the fight dragged on, the C.I.A., at the committee's recommendation, pulled together an analysis of the impact of the spying, reflecting the consensus of American intelligence officials. On April 21, the C.I.A. published its findings. It did not highlight espionage as a critical element of China's effort to improve its nuclear capabilities. It could not determine the relative importance of espionage, openly available information and home-grown Chinese know-how. "The bottom line," said a senior intelligence official, "is we don't know." Neither did they know, the official said, "whether any weapon design documentation or blueprints were stolen." The Cox committee said China may have obtained such documents, officials said. Nevertheless, the C.I.A. report agreed with the Cox committee's central conclusion: Stolen American nuclear secrets had accelerated the Chinese drive toward a modern arsenal. On April 22, the day after the C.I.A. report was published, Cox and Dicks got their meeting with the President and discussed the findings of their report. Ever since, Clinton has not repeated his earlier statements that he was unaware of suspicions of Chinese espionage on his watch. The New York Times, May 23, 1999 Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia NATO Gets a Clue! Bombs KLA! Way to Go NATO! Kill 'em ALL. Let CNN sort 'em out. NATO yesterday admitted hitting a Kosovo Liberation Army base in one of the worst blunders of the two-month bombing campaign. Even more embarrassingly, the rebels claimed to have been providing regular intelligence to Nato from the base. The KLA captured the barracks in the vilage of Kosare from the Yugoslav Army more than a month ago and it had been visited by a series of British journalists and television crews, including a team from the BBC's Nine O'Clock News who were told the base was in regular satellite phone contact with Nato. Jamie Shea, the Nato spokesman, said: "The target Focus: War in the Balkans which was struck by Nato was done so on the assumption that it was still in the hands of the Yugoslav army. Subsequently it appears to have been taken over by the KLA." Asked about the KLA's claims to have been furnishing information about Serb positions, he replied: "You're ahead of me on this." Mr Shea suggested the raid may have been the result of a spelling mistake. He admitted that military commanders identified the target as Kosani rather than Kosare. The blunder overshadowed the announcement that President Clinton is backing the doubling of the Nato force massing on the borders of Kosovo to 50,000 in a move which could pave the way for the eventual use of ground troops. KLA officials in Albania said last night that seven of their men were killed and 25 wounded in the Nato attack on Kosare, a former Yugoslav border post on a hilltop near the northern Albanian town of Tropoja. The barracks is a key staging point in a logistics route opened by KLA guerrillas last month, used for smuggling fighters and weapons into Kosovo. It appeared on the BBC news on Wednesday night with fighters assembling, resting and cooking at the base, while Serb gunfire echoed in the valley. Although Nato does not officially support the KLA, the rebels are thought to have been working closely with the alliance. However, the attack raises questions about the extent of this collaboration. Gen Charles Ward, the Pentagon's Director of Strategic Planning, insisted last night, "there is no coordination militarily with the KLA that I know of". The mistake came on the heaviest night of Nato bombing and amid growing criticism of its targeting strategy following the strike on the Chinese embassy. Nato admitted it was using outdated maps when it hit the embassy, killing three people. Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister, led new calls for Nato to re-evaluate its tactics after an attack on Thursday night on Belgrade damaged residences of the Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, Hungarian and Swiss ambassadors. Washington's announcement of extra troops will increase pressure on Slobodan Milosevic to cave in to the alliance's key demands. Mr Clinton will this week urge Nato's European members, including Britain, to deploy quickly the extra units needed to bring the total to 50,000. Although their role is described as peacekeeping, both the President and the Pentagon have indicated over the past few days that the US is willing to contemplate ordering troops into Kosovo before a formal deal with Belgrade - implying the possibility of combat against pockets of Serb resistance. The unexpectedly swift American endorsement of a plan which only cleared Nato's military committee on Friday is a sign that Washington's resolve has stiffened under pressure from Gen Wesley Clark, the alliance's supreme commander in Europe, and from Britain. Meanwhile Kosovar refugees continued to stream across the border, including a group arriving in Macedonia claiming to have been herded into a field and told to "wait for Nato" to bomb them. The London Telegraph, May 23, 1999 Digital Society The Five Worst Predictions of the Internet Age by Evan Schwartz As long as we're now so many years into our fascination with the Web (which hit most people's radar screens all the way back in, oh, 1995), the editors at Context decided to pull together a list of the five dumbest ideas of the Internet Age. To be at least slightly politic, let's call them the Five Worst Predictions. We don't mean to be cruel about this—oh, maybe a little. We mainly wanted to make the point that, as the great Yogi Berra once said, an accurate prediction is very difficult to make, especially when it's about the future. Predictions about technology have always been especially ticklish. Why, Bill Gates himself once assured us that 640 kilobytes of random-access memory was all that PC users would ever require—many PCs now have 200 times that much memory. The prediction business has become tougher since the Web burst on the scene. The half-life of prophecies has become so short that some of the boldest predictions go awry almost as soon as they are uttered. It'd be nice to be able to just sit around and laugh at the gurus, and sometimes we do. But the unpredictability of the Web is a serious problem for anyone trying to do business on-line—which, these days, means just about everybody. How can you build a long-term business plan when the generally accepted "truths" about the Internet are overthrown so rapidly in favor of new ones? You can't, at least not with any certainty. But how can you avoid trying? It seems to us that you have to try. But if our Worst Predictions are any guide, you should rely less on the pundits and more on your own experience. You have to test all the ideas, all the technologies, and all the business models for yourself so you're ready if they hit—while spending carefully enough that you don't look silly if they bust. Let's get started. We'll begin with: No. 5: Digital cash, whose proponents helped to convince the world that consumers wouldn't use credit cards to buy over the Internet because of fears about security. With fear of hackers widespread in 1995 and 1996, companies rushed to develop complex, highly secure payment systems. Companies with names such as Cybercash, First Virtual, and DigiCash sprang up with solutions. Some required all shoppers to download special "wallet" software that would store specially encrypted digital money. Others required merchants to install special storefront applications that would know how to translate these digital debits into dollars and cents. For a while, these digital cash systems were treated as a given, as a necessity if electronic commerce were to ever reach critical mass. In 1996, MasterCard Senior Vice President Edward Hogan said that electronic cash "will be a multibillion-dollar market" by the turn of the century. A January 1997 report from consulting firm Killen & Associates forecast eight billion e-cash transactions on the Internet in the year 2000. It was not to be. Hordes of consumers began ordering books, CDs, airline tickets, computers, and the like over the Web, paying simply by typing in their credit-card numbers. Encryption programs bundled right into Web browser programs scrambled the card numbers as they traveled in packets over the Internet. In the process, the stocks of First Virtual and Cybercash lost more than 80% of their value. The marketers of the digital cash concept ended up burning through tens of millions of dollars before they phased out their products and began searching for Plan B, an entirely different business to enter. No. 4: The doomsaying about America Online, which, again, was wildly far off. The predictions carried consequences because many marketers, at their peril, ignored it as a way of reaching customers and didn't foresee the potential for reaching customers through high-traffic "portal" sites like AOL. In 1995, industry analysts sounded the death knell for America Online because, the thinking went, the explosion in use of the World Wide Web meant that people would no longer need to pay AOL for its information services or even its chat capabilities. "All of the proprietary on-line services are really on a march to extinction," Forrester Research analyst Mary Modahl said. Sure enough, in the fall of 1996, after AOL surpassed five million members, the company seemed to hit a wall. While the number of users of the Web grew exponentially, AOL couldn't seem to keep up. Busy signals greeted users who dialed into the network. Anyone who managed to get on-line encountered painfully slow response times. Ms. Modahl foresaw consumers deserting. But within a year, AOL's membership more than doubled, to 12 million customers, and it has continued to rise. Nowadays, AOL is often cited by analysts as the media empire to beat in the 21st century and the only company with the market clout and staying power to challenge Microsoft's dominance in the digital economy. "I was completely wrong," Ms. Modahl has said of her 1995 prediction. No. 3: The "network PC," which made it seem that the Internet's success depended on the coming of a technology breakthrough that, in fact, wasn't necessary. Back in 1995, Larry Ellison, the billionaire chairman of Oracle, declared that the Wintel (Windows/Intel) personal computer was "ridiculous"—too complicated to use and too expensive for the average user. "The price of PCs has been constant for 15 years because Microsoft insists on sticking more and more junk in them," Mr. Ellison said. Instead of $2,500 machines with huge hard drives and bloated software applications, his new, disk-less "network computers," or Net PCs, would sell for less than $500 and run simple "applets"—small applications written in the Java language from Sun Microsystems. The new Network PCs didn't hit the market until 1997, and by then there was little demand for them. Even as PCs had become more powerful, prices had fallen to around $1,200, closing the price gap. Prices soon headed well below $1,000. Besides, people were so accustomed to the familiar design that switching to a Net PC was out of the question. Oracle soon disbanded its Net PC division and took a big write-down. No. 2: The various predictions on the number of users of the Internet, which have consistently underestimated the speed with which the new medium would gather steam. Now, we acknowledge that predictions about violent change are treacherous. But estimates are supposed to be high. Everybody knows that technology forecasters get overly optimistic about the speed of change. Because, with the Internet, the estimates were so low, they allowed many companies to think they could afford to wait to form on-line strategies. In 1995, for instance, Forrester Research projected that the Internet would have a worldwide user population of 34.9 million people by 1998. Notice the precision. Not 35 million, but 34.9 million. The real number ended up being in excess of 100 million users. Researchers also grossly underestimated the size of the electronic commerce marketplace. In 1995, Jupiter Communications projected $3.1 billion in annual business-to-consumer revenue for e-commerce by 1998. Forrester predicted $2.3 billion. The real number turned out to be more than $13 billion. No. 1: Drum roll, please. We made "push" technology No. 1 on our list of Worst Predictions partly because its proponents confused so many people into thinking that the Web would be a broadcast medium, much like television—but mainly because the hype was so deliciously flagrant. The idea got rolling back in late 1996, when the start-up PointCast reported that more than one million users had downloaded its free "push" software. The media saw a crystal-clear vision of the future. Instead of having to troll the Web and retrieve, or pull, news and information, people could use software from PointCast and others that would push to their screens exactly what they wanted—accompanied, of course, by paid advertisements. The media went into hysterics. Business Week heralded an age of "Webcasting" in a February 1997 cover story. "I see push creating almost a second Internet," said Halsey Minor, chief executive officer of C/Net, a leading Web news service. "We're huge believers," said Bruce Judson, then Time Inc.'s chief of new media. "Kiss your browser goodbye," the editors of Wired magazine wrote in a cover story, titled "PUSH!" Based on nothing more than press releases and early product demos, the media anointed a former midlevel Sun Microsystems executive named Kim Polese of Marimba as the "queen of push" and the Web's new "It Girl." For a start-up with few real customers, Marimba received perhaps an unprecedented flurry of press coverage. She became part of a small group that advises Vice President Al Gore on technology policy. The delirium culminated when Time magazine named Ms. Polese one of the 25 most influential people in America for 1997. We all know what happened next. PointCast users found the visual presentation annoying, and corporations realized that all the pushed content clogged their networks. Users disabled or deleted the software. Less than a year after the push hype reached its zenith, companies such as Marimba disassociated themselves from the very concept of push and began looking for new applications for their software. Several predictions that didn't make our list deserve honorable mentions: •There was the talk of Apple's demise, which, while not all that significant a factor for companies setting Internet strategies, was just so far off....In 1997, a Business Week cover featured the Apple logo on a black background, speaking about Apple in a wistful past tense. But when co-founder Steve Jobs returned as chief executive, he orchestrated a remarkable return to profitability. •There was also the speculation that Yahoo and Amazon.com, among others, would flame out. Yahoo was supposed to face many of the same pressures as AOL. Amazon was supposed to have trouble sustaining its phenomenal growth. In fact, we at Context share some of the skepticism about Amazon. But, as of this writing, Amazon carried a $17 billion stock market value, Yahoo a $31 billion value. Not bad for a couple of failures. •There was all the talk about how the Java programming language would remove the need for operating systems such as Windows and could put Microsoft out of business. George Gilder, for instance, wrote in a 1997 column in the Wall Street Journal that "Java has the power to break Microsoft's lockin of applications profits and lockout of rival operating systems." Java's claim to fame was that programs written in that language would be able to run unaltered on every computer. But the last we checked, any given Java applet would run on about half the computers in the world. And Microsoft had added more than $200 billion in market capitalization since the Gilder column ran, making it the most valuable company in the world. There are some lessons to be learned by looking at the common threads running through many of the predictions that turned out to be off the money. The ones that cause their makers to look back and wince seemed mainly to underestimate the twin forces of inertia and simplicity. The sheer fact that lots of people use a certain technology creates momentum that is extremely difficult to stop. In addition, the history of technology shows that, when faced with two choices, customers will almost always opt for the simpler solution. AOL, for instance, had both forces going for it: the inertia of the largest on-line user population, plus the fact that AOL was the simplest way for novices to get on the Internet. Push, meanwhile, was fighting both forces. It faced complex technology and business issues; plus, it required breaking the surfing habits of tens of millions of Web users. Likewise, while Net PCs seemed to have simplicity on their side, they actually had some complex technology issues to overcome. The infrastructure necessary to serve software to millions of users and to store gigabytes of data on far-flung networks was quite troublesome. Net PCs were also fighting the inertia of years of PC purchases. The real lesson, though, is that predictions are hard—something to keep in mind when experts say that they have now seen the future and it is...portals. Perhaps we should pay less attention to the actual predictions and just focus on their entertainment value. Push technology? "It will be replaced by Poke technology, allowing users to play Three Stooges with people at remote locations," says cartoonist and amateur futurist Scott Adams. He was also among the first to foresee Intel's collapse into bankruptcy. "I give them two months, tops," Mr. Adams said not long ago. Now that's a good prediction. Mr. Schwartz is the author of Webonomics and of the forthcoming Digital Darwinism, to be published in June. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Context, May 23, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
