-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 Bernard Baruch by James Grant The [New York Stock Exchange] trading floor was expanded by 60 percent ..., more light and ventilation were provided, a new safe of 776 tons was built and on Broad Street, above six Corinthian columns, a group of marble statuary was mounted of which the central figure symbolized Integrity. For the members' convenience a complete emergency hospital was established on the fourth floor and baths were provided for the basement. On the day of the grand opening, April 23, 1903, confetti and ticker tape fluttered from the windows of the buildings nearby. At the Stock Exchange, the new boardroom was decked in palms and floral pieces and American flags. Just after 11 a.m., to general applause, J.P. Morgan made his way through the crowd to the speaker's platform. The Reverend Dr. Morgan Dix of Trinity Church offered the invocation--"The silver is Thine and the gold is Thine, O Lord of Hosts . . ."--and Rudolph Keppler, president of the Exchange, described the construction as a feature of national destiny. It was, he said, "... but one of the many astounding changes that typify our onward march toward supremacy, and give lasting and monumental expression to the unexampled progress and prosperity with which our beloved country has been blessed." A congratulatory statement from the oldest member was read, and with that, three cheers were given, Morgan being in especially strong voice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Ghost of Homepage Past End of Ordinary Money, Part 1 End of Ordinary Money, Part 2 NSA, Crypto AG, and the Iran-Iraq War Crypto AG: NSA's Trojan Whore? Charles Hayes: A Prison Interview Is the FBI Railroading Charles Hayes? Michael Riconosciuto on Encryption ECHELON: Global Surveillance ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Laissez Faire City Times In the Current Issue: •Cyberwar Against the Feds, by Don Lobo Tiggre •How the Constitution Aids Federal Power-Grabbers, by Sunni Maravillosa •Chaos and Fractals in Financial Markets, Part 2, by J. Orlin Grabbe •Witch Hunt: a True Story, by Lauren Bain •Save the Whales?, by Peter Topolewski ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Today's News Links International Cryptography FreedomCode & instruction on cryptology. Report on Echelon and Communications SpyingEuropean parliament: "Interception Capabilities 2000".Top-Secret Docs from Bill GertzIt's okay to give them to foreigners. Just don't let Americans see them.The Redacted Cox ReportAll material implicating Clinton was classified by White House.The Jack Parsons StoryA more accurate view of the origin of the Chinese missile program.Buffy the Vampire Slayer Goes Underground Digitized version of final episode hits the Internet.Hijacking the HolocaustWarmonger Bill Clinton & his lying analogies.The Clinton Death ListAll those wacky coincidences.NSA vs. Congress over EchelonNSA invokes "attorney-client" privilege to keep docs secret.Child-Adult Sex Study"Hi, Mom. What's for dinner?"Need Target Practice?Send away for free California photo.Cryptography & Liberty 1999EPIC's survey of crytography freedom around the world.Rep. Weldon Adds to Cox ReportA refutation of the White House spin.Geeks Not Worried About Y2KThe geeks don't like no freaks.Can Government Gold Be Put to Better Use?Sell it or lend it all now. Today's News Articles Foreign Exchange Market Yen Won't Rise, Sakakibara Says Keep Flooding the Money Market Japan will continue to intervene to prevent any sharp appreciation of the yen in the wake of last week's strong growth figures, and is determined to keep interest rates low. Promising these moves, Eisuke Sakakibara, vice-minister of finance for international affairs, said yesterday: "Too strong a yen is not desirable. We would like to halt any premature appreciation." Mr Sakakibara confirmed that the Bank of Japan stepped in yesterday to stop the yen's rise for the second time in three trading days. Following the intervention, the yen weakened to close at about ¥120 to the dollar in Tokyo - about ¥3 weaker than levels touched during late trading in New York on Friday. The currency has been under strong upward pressure since Thursday's publication of gross domestic product data showing the economy grew by 1.9 per cent between the fourth quarter of 1998 and first quarter of 1999 - faster than analysts had expected. Some economists suspect the figures were distorted because other indicators such as retail store sales and investment spending figures have been depressed. They say the figures were flattered by a wave of public spending at the start of this year that will run out in the autumn. But Mr Sakakibara said the Japanese economy had "got out of hospital and is in a convalescence period". Data on private spending failed to capture new fashions such as the use of mobile telephones and the internet, he said. Japanese consumers had been forsaking traditional department stores in favour of supermarkets and out-of-town discount stores, while official figures failed to pick up investment activity among small and medium-sized companies. Mr Sakakibara said the better economic trend would not force up interest rates in spite of the government's heavy financing needs. With gross public debt more than 100 per cent of gross domestic product, the prospect of higher government bond yields has become one of the biggest medium-term concerns of Japanese financial markets. Though issuance of Japanese government bonds was rising, the government planned to spread the burden by introducing five-year JGBs in the autumn. He pledged the Trust Fund Bureau, a finance ministry body, would keep buying government bonds "for at least the next year or two". In Japan, the ministry of finance decides foreign exchange policy, but the Bank of Japan implements it. Mr Sakakibara called on the Bank of Japan to continue flooding the money markets with liquidity. "As long as the recovery is unclear, it should continue this policy," he said. The Bank's nine-member policy board held its monthly meeting yesterday and later announced it had left monetary policy unchanged. International Herald Tribune, June 14, 1999 Biological Warfare The Computers Are Sick And what's more, NSA computers are on drugs SAN FRANCISCO -- The implications of the malicious software program that wove its way around the globe last week struck home for Bernardo Huberman, a physicist at Xerox, in the form of a terse voice mail he received at work on Thursday. "Our computer system administrators sent me a message saying, 'The worm has hit Xerox, but we've hunted it down and killed it,'" he recalled. To Huberman, a researcher who has studied the behavior of computer networks for more than a decade, the biological allusions were an apt and perhaps chilling reminder that the explosive growth of the Internet has numerous parallels to natural systems -- and many are not reassuring. "I believe that we are indeed living in a computational ecosystem which is more and more globally cross-linked," he said. Or to put it more simply, "It's an amazing system, and it's very vulnerable." In a world where computers, once isolated work tools, are increasingly the very engine driving modern business life, computer researchers say they are detecting an ominous trend toward programs that mimic viruses and pestilence in the physical world. The latest focus of concern is a program known among computer researchers as a worm. The recent one was apparently conceived in Israel and quickly spread to Europe and the United States, mailing itself from computer to computer and destroying its victims' files along the way. Called Explore.exe -- for the name of the file it contained that setoff the damage -- the worm has affected thousands of computers worldwide and forced a number of corporations to abruptly shut their e-mail systems, in a frantic effort to control the spread of the infection. Like biological diseases, which exploit the most basic mechanism of life-- the power of DNA to replicate itself -- a subculture of modern virus-writing now manipulates that same power of replication within the world of interconnected computers. While the dominance of a single computing environment -- the one powered by Microsoft software and Intel chips -- offers the benefits of compatibility among machines, some say it may share the vulnerabilities of fields planted with just one crop. "The analogies are extremely close," said Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University. "When you make machines that are capable of [obeying] instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites." Some computer scientists believe that in the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, society has struck a Faustian bargain -- gaining the potential of robotic software agents, which can flit from computer to computer to do their masters' bidding almost intelligently, but accepting as well the darker prospect of software infections that can sow the destruction of cybernetic plagues. "This may simply be the price you will have to pay for having the flexibility, adaptability, autonomy of this new networked world," said Kevin Kelly, author of "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" (Addison Wesley, 1994). Biological metaphors used to describe the hostile software are only that, and the analogies do break down because the so-called computer viruses are man-made, not natural, and are frequently designed to be destructive. But some researchers assert that such diseases are a direct outgrowth of the remarkable complexity emerging in the realm of networked computers. Increasingly, they say, Internet viral issues will come to resemble the modern world's perpetual public health crisis. "You need to look at this the way the Centers for Disease Control approach things," said Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist at San Diego State University. "There are always new problems on their threat board." Computer scientists have known about these risks since the first worm programs were written by researchers at the Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s. Experimenting with the power of networked computers, scientists fashioned a wide variety of helpful programs, ranging from "vampire" worms that kept the network's computers laboring late at night to "diagnostic" worms that efficiently spread software repairs around the research center. But a software error in one of the lab's early worms caused the program to run amok, crashing computers everywhere in the building. Today computer researchers debate what distinguishes worms from viruses, both metaphors drawn from science fiction. The term "worm" first appeared in John Brunner's 1975 novel "Shockwave Rider" (DelRey Books) while "virus" first appeared in a computer context in David Gerrold's "When Harley Was One" (Ballantine, 1972). Traditionally, the term "virus" has been used to describe software codes that infect computers by attaching themselves to documents or programs that are passed along. "Worms," by contrast, have been self-propelling, that is, a program sent within the attachment can then send itself along without any action by the person who receives it. But the most recent generation of malicious programs -- like the Melissa virus, which spread rapidly around the world in late March, and Explore.exe, the worm that emerged in Israel last Monday – blend aspects of both. The world of computer networks has not yet produced the most telling biological analogy -- evolution. But a particular class of hostile programs known as polymorphic viruses has been designed since 1993, with the ability to mutate to evade the pattern detection capabilities of modern antivirus scanning programs. Increasingly, antivirus researchers are also turning to biological solutions to face down hostile software codes. For example, last month the Intel Corp., IBM and the Symantec Corp. jointly released a new antivirus software technology they call a "Digital Immune System." Just as a biological immune system offers a systemic approach to illness, the new software shifts the antivirus response from the PC to an entire corporation's network, automatically relaying suspect programs for inspection and directly immunizing individual computers. There have been other attempts to build systems that are immune from security threats. For example, the original intent of the Java programming language was to prohibit the kind of file destruction wreaked last week by creating a "sandbox" that limits a program's destructive capabilities. Strikingly, the rapid spread of last week's outbreak was made possible because most of the world's users of personal computers now run Microsoft software. The destructive program was written to destroy documents written in widely used Microsoft applications like Word, Excel and Power Point and certain programming files. "This is the classic result of a computer monoculture," said W. Daniel Hillis, a computer scientist at Walt Disney's Imagineering unit. Like agricultural ecologies that become fragile and unstable when relying on only one or a few different crops, so the modern computer world is vulnerable to the degree it relies on Microsoft's software. Noting that the worm had attacked large American military contractors, including Boeing and General Electric, Art Amolsch, editor of FTC Watch, a Washington policy newsletter, suggested that the government should insure software diversity among its agencies and contractors. "I propose that no government agency be allowed to run more than 34 percent of its personal computers on one proprietary operating system by a date certain," he said. To Hillis, who in the 1980s experimented with advances in software programs using "evolutionary" techniques in which the programs adapt to their environment, a transition is under way in which computers will be viewed less like mechanical devices and more like biological organisms, which more easily accommodate imprecision and failure. "Today we have the fragility of an engineered system where every part works" but the system itself can fail, he said. "But in the future we're going to engineer systems with the expectation that everything is broken all the time. That's how we treat biological systems today." The New York Times, June 14, 1999 Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia It's the Russians, Stupid Milosevic keeps G-8 Agreement; NATO violates it Summary: NATO continued its policy of trying to turn a compromise into a victory. In order to do that, it has been necessary to treat Russia as if its role was peripheral. It was a policy bound to anger Russia. It was not a bad policy, if NATO were ready and able to slay the bear. But goading a wounded bear when you are not in a position to kill him is a dangerous game. On Saturday morning, the bear struck back. NATO still hasn't gotten him back in his cage. Analysis: President Bill Clinton had a sign taped to his desk at the beginning of his first term in office that read, "It's the Economy, Stupid." He should have taped one on his desk at the beginning of the Kosovo affair that said, "It's the Russians, Stupid." From the beginning to the end of this crisis, it has been the Russians, not the Serbs, who were the real issue facing NATO. The Kosovo crisis began in December 1998 in Iraq. When the United States decided to bomb Iraq for four days in December, in spite of Russian opposition and without consulting them, the Russians became furious. In their view, the United States completely ignored them and had now reduced them to a third-world power - discounting completely Russia's ability to respond. The senior military was particularly disgruntled. It was this Russian mood, carefully read by Slobodan Milosevic, which led him to conclude that it was the appropriate time to challenge the West in Kosovo. It was clear to Milosevic that the Russians would not permit themselves to be humiliated a second time. He was right. When the war broke out, the Russians were not only furious again, but provided open political support to Serbia. There was, in late April and early May, an urgent feeling inside of NATO that some sort of compromise was needed. The feeling was an outgrowth of the fact that the air war alone would not achieve the desired political goals, and that a ground war was not an option. At about the same time, it became clear that only the Russians had enough influence in Belgrade to bring them to a satisfactory compromise. The Russians, however, were extremely reluctant to begin mediation. The Russians made it clear that they would only engage in a mediation effort if there were a prior negotiation between NATO and Russia in which the basic outlines of a settlement were established. The resulting agreement was the G-8 accords. The two most important elements of the G-8 agreement were unwritten, but they were at the heart of the agreement. The first was that Russia was to be treated as a great power by NATO, and not as its messenger boy. The second was that any settlement that was reached had to be viewed as a compromise and not as a NATO victory. This was not only for Milosevic's sake, but it was also for Yeltsin's. Following his humiliation in Iraq, Yeltsin could not afford to be seen as simply giving in to NATO. If that were to happen, powerful anti-Western, anti-reform and anti-Yeltsin forces would be triggered. Yeltsin tried very hard to convey to NATO that far more than Kosovo was at stake. NATO didn't seem to listen. Thus, the entire point of the G-8 agreements was that there would be a compromise in which NATO achieved what it wanted while Yugoslavia retained what it wanted. A foreign presence would enter Kosovo, including NATO troops. Russian troops would also be present. These Russian troops would be used to guarantee the behavior of NATO troops in relation to Serbs, in regard to disarming the KLA, and in guaranteeing Serbia's long-term rights in Kosovo. The presence of Russian troops in Kosovo either under a joint UN command or as an independent force was the essential element of the G-8. Many long hours were spent in Bonn and elsewhere negotiating this agreement. Over the course of a month, the Russians pressured Milosevic to accept these agreements. Finally, in a meeting attended by the EU's Martti Ahtisaari and Moscow's Viktor Chernomyrdin, Milosevic accepted the compromise. Milosevic did not accept the agreements because of the bombing campaign. It hurt, but never crippled him. Milosevic accepted the agreements because the Russians wanted them and because they guaranteed that they would be present as independent observers to make certain that NATO did not overstep its bounds. This is the key: it was the Russians, not the bombing campaign that delivered the Serbs. NATO violated that understanding from the instant the announcement came from Belgrade. NATO deliberately and very publicly attacked the foundations of the accords by trumpeting them as a unilateral victory for NATO's air campaign and the de-facto surrender of Serbia. Serbia, which had thought it had agreed to a compromise under Russian guarantees, found that NATO and the Western media were treating this announcement as a surrender. Serb generals were absolutely shocked when, in meeting with their NATO counterparts, they were given non-negotiable demands by NATO. They not only refused to sign, but they apparently contacted their Russian military counterparts directly, reporting NATO's position. A Russian general arrived at the negotiations and apparently presided over their collapse. Throughout last week, NATO was in the bizarre position of claiming victory over the Serbs while trying to convince them to let NATO move into Kosovo. The irony of the situation of course escaped NATO. Serbia had agreed to the G-8 agreements and it was sticking by them. NATO's demand that Serbia accept non-negotiable terms was simply rejected, precisely because Serbia had not been defeated. The key issue was the Russian role. Everything else was trivial. Serbia had been promised an independent Russian presence. The G-8 agreements had said that any unified command would be answerable to the Security Council. That wasn't happening. The Serbs weren't signing. NATO's attempt to dictate terms by right of victory fell flat on its face. For a week, NATO troops milled a round, waiting for Serb permission to move in. The Russians proposed a second compromise. If everyone would not be under UN command, they would accept responsibility for their own zone. NATO rejected this stating Russia could come into Kosovo under NATO command or not at all. This not only violated the principles that had governed the G-8 negotiations, by removing the protection of Serb interests against NATO, but it also put the Russians into an impossible position in Belgrade and in Moscow. The negotiators appeared to be either fools or dupes of the West. Chernomyrdin and Ivanov worked hard to save the agreements, and perhaps even their own careers. NATO, for reasons that escape us, gave no ground. They hung the negotiators out to dry by giving them no room for maneuver. Under NATO terms, Kosovo would become exactly what Serbia had rejected at Rambouillet: a NATO protectorate. And now it was Russia, Serbia's ally, that delivered them to NATO. By the end of the week, something snapped in Moscow. It is not clear whether it was Yeltsin who himself ordered that Russian troops move into Pristina or whether the Russian General Staff itself gave the order. What is clear is that Yeltsin promoted the Russian general who, along with his troops, rolled into Pristina. It is also clear that although Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov had claimed that the whole affair was an accident and promised that the troops would be withdrawn immediately, no troops have been removed. Talbott then flew back to Moscow. Clinton got to speak with Yeltsin after a 24-hour delay, but the conversation went nowhere. Meanwhile, Albright is declaring that the Russians must come under NATO command and that's final. The situation has become more complex. NATO has prevailed on Hungary and Ukraine to forbid Russian aircraft from crossing their airspace with troops bound for Kosovo. Now Hungary is part of NATO. Ukraine is not. NATO is now driving home the fact that Russia is surrounded, isolated and helpless. It is also putting Ukraine into the position of directly thwarting fundamental Russian strategic needs. Since NATO is in no position to defend Ukraine and since there is substantial, if not overwhelming, pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, NATO is driving an important point home to the Russians: the current geopolitical reality is unacceptable from the Russian point of view. By Sunday, Russian pressure had caused Ukraine to change its policy. But the lesson was not lost on Russia's military. Here is the problem as Stratfor sees it. NATO and the United States have been dealing with men like Viktor Chernomyrdin. These men have had their primary focus, for the past decade, on trying to create a capitalist Russia. They have not only failed, but their failure is now manifest throughout Russia. Their credibility there is nil. In negotiating with the West, they operate from two imperatives. First, they are seeking whatever economic concessions they can secure in the hope of sparking an economic miracle. Second, like Gorbachev before them, they have more credibility with the people with whom they are negotiating than the people they are negotiating for. That tends to make them malleable. NATO has been confusing the malleability of a declining cadre of Russian leaders with the genuine condition inside of Russia. Clearly, Albright, Berger, Talbott, and Clinton decided that they could roll Ivanov and Chernomyrdrin into whatever agreement they wanted. In that they were right. Where they were terribly wrong was about the men they were not negotiating with, but whose power and credibility was growing daily. These faceless hard-liners in the military finally snapped at the humiliation NATO inflicted on their public leaders. Yeltsin, ever shrewd, ever a survivor, tacked with the wind. Russia, for the first time since the Cold War, has accepted a low-level military confrontation with NATO. NATO's attempts to minimize it notwithstanding, this is a defining moment in post-Cold War history. NATO attempted to dictate terms to Russia and Russia made a military response. NATO then used its diplomatic leverage to isolate Kosovo from follow-on forces. It has forced Russia to face the fact that in the event of a crisis, Ukraine will be neither neutral nor pro-Russian. It will be pro-NATO. That means that, paperwork aside, NATO has already expanded into Ukraine. To the Russians who triggered this crisis in Pristina, that is an unacceptable circumstance. They will take steps to rectify that problem. NATO does not have the military or diplomatic ability to protect Ukraine. Russia, however, has an interest in what happens within what is clearly its sphere of influence. We do not know what is happening politically in Moscow, but the straws in the wind point to a much more assertive Russian foreign policy. There is an interesting fantasy current in the West, which is that Russia's economic problems prevent military actions. That is as silly an observation as believing that the U.S. will beat Vietnam because it is richer, or that Athenians will beat the poorer Spartans. Wealth does not directly correlate with military power, particularly when dealing with Russia, as both Napoleon and Hitler discovered. Moreover, all economic figures on Russia are meaningless. So much of the Russian economy is "off the books" that no one knows how it is doing. The trick is to get the informal economy back on the books. That, we should all remember, is something that the Russians are masters at. It should also be remembered that the fact that Russia's military is in a state of disrepair simply means that there is repair work to be done. Not only is that true, but the process of repairing the Russian economy is itself an economic tonic, solving short and long term problems. Military adventures are a psychological, economic and political boon for ailing economies. Machiavelli teaches the importance of never wounding your adversaries. It is much better to kill them. Wounding them and then ridiculing and tormenting them is the worst possible strategy. Russia is certainly wounded. It is far from dead. NATO's strategy in Kosovo has been to goad a wounded bear. That is not smart unless you are preparing to slay him. Since no one in NATO wants to go bear hunting, treating Russia with the breathtaking contempt that NATO has shown it in the past few weeks is not wise. It seems to us that Clinton and Blair are so intent on the very minor matter of Kosovo that they have actually been oblivious to the effect their behavior is having in Moscow. They just can't get it into their heads that it's not about Kosovo. It is not about humanitarianism or making ourselves the kind of people we want to be. It's about the Russians, stupid! And about China and about the global balance of power. Statfor's Global Intelligence Update, June 14, 1999 (see Kosovo links at top of page) ----- 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
