-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 69 - October, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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Contents:
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--The Great Privacy Swindle
--Prison workers encroach on free-market jobs
--High Tech Prison Reform
--Prefabricated Jail Cell Market
--Nation's Prosperity Linked to Global Engagement
--Media Firms Buy Their Way To Political Access
--Reading Your Body
--reader commentary
re: Surveillance and Repression: Remedies not Rumors [RT #59]
Linked stories:
*Extreme Weather On The Rise As Greenhouse Gases Drive Climate
*Cubicle Blues Blamed on IT
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Begin stories:
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The Great Privacy Swindle
<http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=9830>
September 25, 2000
Jim Hightower
To get a job these days, chances are you'll have to pee in a bottle. Your
intimate medical history can be laid out in front of just about anyone
willing to pay to take a peek. Every company with a credit card, store card,
or Web site -- or even a clerk who asks you nosy questions at the check-out
counter -- is looking to peddle "data" about your buying habits. In many
states you have to hand over your fingerprints to renew your driver's
license. Public and private spaces alike are constantly scanned by
ever-more-observant surveillance cameras.
When we're asked for our Social Security number to rent a video, many of us
simply shrug our shoulders rather than raising hell. And if we happen to be
poorer than a video-renter -- a footloose kid hanging on a street corner or
an unemployed motorist guilty of "driving while black," for example -- we're
liable to be locked up and lost in a vast criminal "justice" system that
considers itself not responsible for any rights, especially privacy rights.
Invasion of our privacy has become a way of life, so that when you stand up
and demand to be left alone, you're likely to be pegged as a quaint holdover
from days gone by, a whiner, or, more likely, someone with something to
hide -- maybe even a terrorist! We're living in a culture in which
individual rights have been sold and subjugated, all for database marketing
and to keep the lid on the unruly masses.
This is an issue that has fallen off the political radar. What are the
chances that privacy rights will engage the mighty intellects of George W.
Bush or Al Gore? Last I looked, the only people in Washington overly
concerned with privacy were the corporate check-writers and their pet
politicians, eager to cover the tracks of their own financial quid pro quos.
The Data Market
Behind the shiny glass doors of your not-so-friendly, not-so-neighborhood
bank, everything they know about you is for sale -- your account numbers,
bank balance, loan history, address, credit history, Social Security number.
The checks you write and receive, the invoices you pay, and the investments
you make reveal as much about you as a personal diary; but instead of banks
keeping your information under lock and key, they collect it,
cross-reference it, collate it, and sell it -- mostly to companies
determined to sell you something else. The banks get 20 percent to 25
percent of the sales revenue generated by the marketers who buy the
information.
In the brave new culture built around the marketplace, both corporate and
government sectors have deemed private and personal information to be just
another commodity.
Things got worse with the passage by Congress of last year's "financial
modernization" bill. This new deal for the bankers was written with the help
of banking-industry lobbyists, and it allows banks to merge with insurance
companies and brokerage firms, creating financial conglomerates that can
conglomerate what they know about you, without so much as a courtesy call to
ask your permission. The only "protection" now is that if a bank wants to
share information from a credit report or loan application, it first must
send you a notice with the chance to say no, a so-called "opt-out"
provision.
But why is the burden on us to opt out of an agreement that lets someone
else sell something that rightfully belongs to us? Before such an agreement
can even be considered, they should be required to get our permission in
advance -- to ask us to "opt in," and to take it as "no" if they don't hear
from us. That was the proposal put forward by a coalition of
consumer-interest groups when the bank legislation was being debated. It was
defeated by a majority of members of Congress, who took in a total of $87
million in soft money, PAC, and individual contributions from the financial
industry in the last election cycle. The industry also anted up to the tune
of $260 million in lobbying expenditures during the same time period. (New
"opt-in" bills have been introduced again this year in the House and
Senate.)
Selling Your Medical Secrets
While the finance guys are padding their fortunes by telling each other what
we buy, where we buy it, and on whose credit, there's another booming trade
going on in selling our personal medical secrets.
Our health histories are for our eyes (and our doctor's eyes) only, right?
Wrong. This precious data is likewise on the market and up for grabs by
whoever's interested in buying. Employers can check out prospective
employees to make sure they don't get stuck with someone whose health
problems are going to run up the company's insurance premiums. And
health-care firms can fill your mailbox with sales pitches promoting the
latest drugs or devices to treat whatever it was that you went to the doctor
for.
The Kennedy-Kassebaum health care reform law of 1996 was supposed to give us
a measure of federal protection. But that has yet to happen, and in the
meantime, the Clinton administration's stop-gap suggestions are lame:
Medical information could not be disclosed for commercial reasons, but the
government could still access our data for other reasons. Law-enforcement
agencies, under Clinton's plan, would have virtually unlimited access to
medical records, making them a vast police database to be used like mug
shots or fingerprints -- except that the cops wouldn't have to arrest you
before accessing your private health history.
The Identity Market
Already, our Social Security cards, which were never meant to a tool for
anything but our security, have become a basic means of keeping track of us,
for both marketers and the police.
But now, driven by dreams of a citizen databank available to government at
every level, public officials are falling over each other with new proposals
for keeping us tabbed. The International Association of Chiefs of Police
wants DNA samples from anyone who is arrested for any reason (as opposed to
tried and convicted), while New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wants to take
DNA samples from all newborns.
Filing our DNA in a government databank is about the ultimate in
unreasonable search and seizure. How far we have come from the days of
Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who said, in his famous dissent in
Olmstead v. United States (1928): "The makers of our Constitution ... sought
to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and
their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be
let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most
valued by civilized men."
DNA tracking is not just an assault on the principles embodied in our
Constitution -- it has very real, and frightening implications: Employers
could deny you a job because your genes include a tendency toward certain
diseases or health defects, and insurers might use DNA-derived information
to impose limits on your health-care coverage.
Not to be outdone, governments are not just compiling these databases to
keep tabs on us unruly ones, they're selling the data alongside the
corporate vendors. One estimate is that federal, state and local governments
are making tens of millions a year selling public records to junk mailers
and other businesses.
Big Daddy Is Watching
If Corporate America has been playing the role of Big Brother, our
government is Big Daddy. The feds have a history of routinely spying on us
citizens via surveillance cameras and questionable wiretaps. Now come new
Federal Communications Commission rules that will enable the FBI to dictate
the design of much of this nation's communications infrastructure. If
finally enacted, these rules will allow the FBI to track the physical
location of cellular phone users, as well as to monitor Internet traffic,
opening up brave new avenues for government interception of digital
communication.
As it turns out, that's only the half of it. In recent weeks, says The Wall
Street Journal, the FBI unveiled a powerful new "data-sniffing" Internet
wiretap dubbed "Carnivore" -- it's called that because of its ability to
sniff out "meat" as it stalks through the Internet's data jungles.
"Carnivore" was developed over a year ago and has already been used to
monitor an unspecified number of e-mail communications.
Plugged directly into an Internet service provider's computer network,
"Carnivore" can, in the words of the Wall Street Journal article, give the
government "the ability to eavesdrop on all ... digital communication from
e-mail to online banking to Web surfing."
While "Carnivore" stinks as bad as a T-bone after two days in the trash can,
it's the Little Brother to the infamous Project Echelon, the
still-plausibly-deniable satellite surveillance system erected by the U.S.
government and select NATO allies during the Cold War. Echelon, which only
came to light in the American press after the story was first broken in New
Zealand, keeps humming along all these years after the Cold War, just so our
spooks can eavesdrop on us private citizens. This global surveillance system
uses the Echelon satellite as a giant cyber-vacuum in the sky, sucking up
communications traffic, which is then checked for certain words and phrases
to provide various intelligence agencies with whatever information they've
happened to request. And it's not just being done to protect national
security; these days, corporate customers are being fed information about
their foreign competitors in the name of global trade!
Cyberspying
Corporations are getting into the act on the home front, too.
Consider this come-on by an Internet detective agency: "The place to find,
locate and track down anybody! ... Discover the secrets of the people with
whom you associate." All they required, reports Jeff Barbian in the San
Francisco/Bay Area Computer User, was a name.
Barbian tells of a man named John who entered his own name and got back 82
pages featuring the photo off his driver's license, his Social Security
number, height, weight, religion, the make and year of his car, the value of
his house, his son's name, age, school, and teacher's name; his job and
salary, his employment over the past 10 years, every address he'd ever had,
his neighbors' names (with addresses and phone numbers), his military
records, cellphone number and bank account number; his mother's maiden name,
credit-card debts, traffic violation history, dental records, pharmaceutical
prescriptions, the 20 e-mail addresses he uses most often, the Web sites he
frequents, and "how much he lost in Las Vegas last spring."
Virtual snoops are also invading our schools and gathering information on
kids without their parents knowing about it, much less being asked
permission. The ZapMe! Corporation, an Internet provider that's backed by
such giants as Microsoft and Dell Computer, is a case in point. ZapMe!
already has contracts with 6,000 schools and, on the surface, the contracts
look great: The company provides computers, Internet access, maintenance,
and support services free of charge. What the company gets in return,
however, is an agreement that their computers will constantly flash ads at
the bottom of the screen, for the four hours a day the students are supposed
to be online. Plus the schools must agree to hand out sponsors' promotional
materials for the kids to take home. Plus ZapMe! tracks where the students
go on the Web and delivers that as demographic information to its
sponsors -- with no control over how the information is used or to whom it
can be sold. ZapMe!, just in case any of this worries you, calls itself a
"champion of students' privacy rights" and swears that it would never misuse
any personal information.
Ah, for the simpler days of 1984, when George Orwell imagined that all this
high-tech snooping and file-gathering would be used to spot and snuff out
society's troublemakers and dissenters before they threatened the system.
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Prison workers encroach on free-market jobs
Sunday, August 15, 1999
By GORDON LAFER
When most of us think of convicts at work, we picture them banging out
license plates or digging ditches. Today's prison laborers, however, are
more likely to be taking reservations for TWA, packing and shipping Windows
software for Microsoft, or stocking the shelves for the next day's customers
at Toys 'R' Us. And while at present only about 80,000 inmates are employed
in such commercial enterprises, the high cost of incarcerating a rapidly
growing prison population suggests there will soon be many more.
It's not hard to figure out what corporations like about prison labor: It's
vastly cheaper than free labor. In Ohio, for example, a Honda supplier paid
its prison workers $2 an hour for the same work for which the United Auto
Workers had fought for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour. Konica has
hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50 cents an hour.
Furthermore, employers pay no health or unemployment insurance for prison
labor, no payroll or Social Security taxes, no workers' compensation, no
vacation time, sick leave or overtime.
To the extent that prisoners have such "benefits" as health insurance, the
state picks up the tab. Prison workers can be hired, fired or reassigned at
will. Not only do they have no right to organize or strike; they also have
no means of filing a grievance or voicing any kind of complaint whatsoever.
For the corporation, this may be the ultimate flexible and disciplined work
force. But for workers -- not just those inside the prison, but also those
outside -- prison labor can be devastating.
In Oregon, for example, voters approved a ballot measure in 1994 that
requires all prisoners to work 40 hours per week and requires the state to
actively market prison labor to private employers. Already thousands of
public-sector jobs have been filled by convicts, while in the private
sector, unionized laundry workers, construction workers and others have been
laid off by firms that have lost contracts to enterprises using prisoners.
Convict labor not only takes decently paid jobs out of the economy; it also
undermines the living standards of those who remain employed by forcing
their employers to compete with firms that use prisoners. The need to
compete with poverty-level wages in the Third World already has undermined
the bargaining power of America's manufacturing workers. But until now,
service workers whose jobs are very difficult to transport overseas, have
not faced the same squeeze. Once service jobs can be done at home for Third
World wages, all that changes. Proponents of prison labor are chartering
what amounts to a chain of maquiladoras across America.
These anti-labor consequences are no accident. The activists behind Oregon's
prison labor initiative knew just what they were doing. The campaign was
almost entirely paid for by a group of conservative businessmen who have
promoted a host of antiworker initiatives over the past decade -- from
proposals to cut unemployment benefits and public employee pensions to
measures prohibiting the use of union dues for political action.
Yet across the country, fiscal pressures are making prison labor proposals
harder and harder to resist. State after state has adopted tough-on-crime
mandatory sentencing laws, which are clogging the prisons with inmates who
are not even violent criminals. As a result, America's prison population is
now nearly four times what it was in 1980, and it is still growing. Elected
officials will either have to allow the ballooning prisons to consume a huge
share of their state's budget or find ways to make incarceration cheaper --
like by hiring out their prisoners.
To counter those pressures, opponents of prison labor have to get to the
root of the problem. To date, they have focused primarily on the potential
dangers posed by convicts working outside prisons. But as prison industries
work out the kinks in their operations, security problems will be
diminished.
For instance, if Louisiana Pacific -- one of the financial backers of the
Oregon prison labor initiative -- decides to lay off union workers and
construct a saw mill on prison grounds, there is no security argument that
could prevent the project from going forward.
A consensus against prison labor needs to be built on the simple principle
that a "free market" economy ought to have no place for a vast army of
prisoners undermining the wages of working people. Ultimately, we will have
to build a consensus, as well, against the mandatory sentencing laws that
are driving the states into prison labor programs.
----
Gordon Lafer is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon's Labor
Education and Research Center. This article is adapted from the
September-October issue of The American Prospect magazine.
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High Tech Prison Reform
Austin American-Statesman (10/06/00) P. H1; Moore, Charlotte
A heartbeat monitor is among the first technological
investments that the Texas Department of Corrections has made
under the newly formed Technology Review Team (TRT). These
investments are made, in part, to reduce the time it takes to
perform menial tasks, such as the one for which the heartbeat
monitor was created. Trucks take decomposed food from
correctional facilities to farmers to feed their pigs. The
heartbeat monitor reads the contents of the truckbed to
prevent a prisoner from hiding in the slop when the truck
leaves. Without the monitor, a guard would prod a stick or rod
through the slop. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County's Twin Towers
Correctional Facility puts the latest technology to practical
use. The $400 million project boasts of glass doors in the
maximum security facility; automatic locks equipped with
manual override; state-of-the-art camera equipment placed
throughout the building; intercom systems that allow officers
to communicate easily; climate controlled inmate cells; and
fingerprint scanning. Numerous United States prisons are
piloting a PepperBall Launcher, thermal images to detect heat
sources, ionspectometry devices to detect narcotics and the
B.O.S.S. (Body Orifice Security Scanner) to find metal objects
hidden in body cavities.
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Prefabricated Jail Cell Market
"CompuDyne Enters Prefabricated Jail Cell Market; Norment
Introduces Unique Approach to Jail Cell Design; Potential
Market Described as 'Enormous'"
PR Newswire (10/06/00)
The Norment Security Group, a subsidiary of CompuDyne, is
using factory prefabrication technology to offer
fully-outfitted, concrete-filled steel modular jail cells. The
efficiency in constructing and installing the MaxWall Modular
Cell System should make it competitively priced against
traditional building methods. CompuDyne chairman and chief
executive officer Martin Roenigk believes that the system
performs better than a conventional masonry cell. Roenigk
indicates that CompuDyne, the corrections industry's biggest
provider of security products, software products, and other
services, strives to capitalize on its market leading
positions by widening its participation in those markets. The
cell-building segment of the 2.4 billion spend annually on
erecting new jails and prisons in the United States is as big
as Norment's whole current product offering, according to
President Jon Lucynski. He would like to see his company
generate 2001 sales of more than $12 million for the MaxWall
system and anticipates even greater sales in the future.
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Nation's Prosperity Linked to Global Engagement
By Linda D. Kozaryn
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12, 2000 -- International security is to
economic interest as oxygen is to the body, according to
Walt Slocombe.
"You don't notice it when it is there, but you cannot live
without it and you feel it immediately when you run short,"
he said, quoting Harvard's Joe Nye, a former assistant
defense secretary for International Security Affairs.
Slocombe, undersecretary of defense for policy, has led
DoD's international security engagement for more than six
years. Since the early 1970s, the Rhodes scholar and
Harvard Law School summa cum laude graduate has served in
national security and senior defense positions. He first
came to the Pentagon in January 1977 as deputy assistant
defense secretary for international security affairs.
The policy expert recently shared his views on the role
American service members play in safeguarding U.S.
economic, political, cultural and strategic interests in an
address here at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He pointed
out that today's armed forces are vitally involved in "more
cooperative military activities -- exercises and exchanges
-- with more countries in more corners of the world than
ever before.
"Engagement in international affairs is not a favor we do
the rest of the world," he stressed to about 300 corporate
leaders Oct. 5. "It is a matter of cold-blooded protection
of our own interests."
Slocombe spoke at the Military Quality of Life Summit, the
first of proposed annual meetings of senior military and
business leaders aimed at strengthening military and
corporate partnerships. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen
and his wife, Janet Langhart Cohen, initiated the event,
calling on Slocombe to highlight the special role the
military plays in America's international efforts.
"In an increasingly interdependent world, our concern with
other nations cannot be limited to securing our borders or
even to protecting our trade," he said. "Without security
and stability on a broader scale, neither our safety nor
our prosperity can be assured.
"Investments in our military are not just investments in
deterring and winning future war," he said. "Our armed
forces play an important role by engaging with other
countries to increase our security and build bridges of
understanding."
Today's security challenges are very different from those
of the past, Slocombe said. The end of the Cold War lifted
the specter of global nuclear war, but there are still
"real security problems, ranging from seemingly isolated
conflicts, often bred of ethnic or religious hatred that
threaten to spread, to the growing dangers of weapons of
mass destruction and terrorism."
"Without security against these threats as well as against
the classic threat of invasion," Slocombe stressed, "the
promise of a new century free of the horrors of the last
will prove hollow."
The military's primary purpose is to be ready to defeat the
nation's enemies in combat, he said. That requires
maintaining quality people, ensuring they have the
equipment, the respect and the rewards they need to fulfill
that mission, he said.
Maintaining powerful, ready forces is expensive in terms of
money and the burdens placed on service members and their
families, Slocombe noted. If the nation is to protect its
interests, he said, it must bear these costs.
Since joining the defense leadership team, he said, he's
found it inspiring to work with the military's men and
women "because of the dedication they always display and
their willingness to take risks -- sometimes putting their
lives on the line -- for their country and for freedom."
Industry plays a valued role in supporting the military, he
added, by helping to ensure U.S. forces maintain
technological superiority and that potential adversaries do
not have access to technologies and capabilities that can
be used against them.
"All Americans," Slocombe said, "need to join together to
support our men and women in uniform in bearing the burdens
and risks that their service entails."
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Media Firms Buy Their Way To Political Access
Full story here --> <http://www.public-i.org/story_01_092600.htm>
by Bill Allison
(Washington, Sept. 27) The largest media firms have gained the kind of access
to the political process that only money can buy, according to a new report
from the Center for Public Integrity. "Off the Record: What Media
Corporations Don't Tell You About Their Legislative Agendas" documents the
influence that the large broadcasting, cable and publishing conglomerates
wield in Washington.
In all, media corporations have pumped $75 million into the coffers of
federal candidates and parties since 1993. Since 1996, they've spent $111.3
million lobbying lawmakers and federal regulators. They've lobbied on issues
ranging from protecting intellectual property to eliminating the estate tax.
They've fought against restrictions on tobacco advertising in print and
alcohol advertising on the air, for eliminating the Federal Communications
Commission's rules designed to prevent the concentration of the public
airwaves and the press in too few hands. They've fought against campaign
finance reform measures. They've even blocked non-binding resolutions
expressing the sense of Congress that television programming featuring
graphic violence shouldn't be aired when young children are likely to be
watching.
Deepest pockets: Time Warner
Time Warner Inc. has the deepest pockets, the Center found. The company spent
nearly $4.1 million for lobbying last year, and since 1993, Time Warner and
its employees have contributed $4.6 million to congressional and presidential
candidates and the two political parties. On Nov. 17, 1999, to great fanfare,
the company announced it would no longer make "soft money" contributions to
the political parties.
(In the broadest sense, "soft money" is raised through party committees,
interest groups, corporations, labor unions or the wealthy. It is supplied in
limitless chunks, and is beyond Federal Election Commission regulation.)
Apparently, Time Warner's top executives felt no need to follow their
company's new line. Last Feb. 28, Timothy Boggs, the company's senior vice
president for global public policy, gave $20,000 to the Democratic National
Committee, Federal Election Commission records show. On April 28, Robert A.
Daly, an executive with the company's Warner Brothers subsidiary, gave the
DNC $50,000. On June 30, Richard Parsons, the company's president, gave
$50,000 to the Republican National Committee.
The second heaviest media spender in Washington is the Walt Disney Co., which
paid $3.3 million for lobbying and just under $4.1 million in political
donations during the same times. Disney's top executives have been cozy with
Vice President Al Gore, who was a guest of Michael Eisner, the company's
chairman and chief executive officer, at a 1994 screening of The Lion King.
In 1995, staffers for Gore and his wife, Tipper, requested and received two
"Beauty and the Beast" costumes worth $8,600, custom-made in Los Angeles to
the Gores' precise measurements, for their annual Halloween party. The day
before the event, the costumes arrived in Washington, along with a makeup
artist to apply the mask that the vice president would wear. At the time,
Disney was awaiting Justice Department and FCC approval of its $19 billion
acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which owned the American Broadcasting
Co. (The deal was approved months later.) Disney is among Gore's most
generous media supporters, having contributed $68,000 over the course of the
politician's career.
Media gave $1 million each to Bush, Gore
Regardless of who wins in November, the next president will have gotten to
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with more than $1 million in political donations from
media interests, the Center found. Gore has taken in $1.16 million; Texas
Gov. George W. Bush has received $1.07 million. Gore's media money comes
mostly from the larger media conglomerates, such as Disney, Time Warner and
Viacom Inc.; Bush draws more heavily from smaller, regional broadcast and
cable companies.
Topping the list of Bush's media patrons is AMFM Inc., owned by Hicks, Muse,
Tate & Furst, Inc., of Dallas, a firm that specializes in leveraged buyouts.
AMFM, the nation's largest chain of radio stations, and its various
subsidiaries have contributed $80,250 to Bush's presidential campaign.
Thomas Hicks, the firm's chairman, bought the Texas Rangers baseball team for
$250 million in 1998 from the ownership group that included Bush. (The high
sale price for the relatively small-market team was due in no small part to
the taxpayer-financed stadium, the Ballpark at Arlington, which was built for
the team while Bush, whose portion of the profit on the sale was $14.3
million, was an owner.) The Rangers aren't Hicks' only sports property — he
also owns a hockey team, the Dallas Stars. In 1997, Gov. Bush shepherded a
bill through the state legislature that allowed a sales tax increase to fund
a new arena for the team, as well as for the city's NBA franchise, the Dallas
Mavericks.
Media have wide influence
The close ties of media firms to the top two presidential candidates are just
one measure of their clout in Washington, as documented by the Center. On
virtually every issue of concern to the industry, from oversight by the FCC
to the allocation of the digital spectrum, from regulating violent content on
the airwaves to campaign finance reform, the media wield tremendous
influence, the Center found.
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Reading Your Body
Toronto Star (10/02/00); Garfinkel, Simson
The use of computerized biometrics--systems that read
individual body measurements or patterns such as fingerprints,
voices, iris prints, or facial features--is gaining widespread
use. From banks' experiments with iris scanners to the U.S.
Army's massive biometric database, different sectors are
dabbling in this technology. Indeed, experts project the
commercial biometrics market to increase tenfold in the next
three years. The technology dates back more than 100 years to
Argentina, where police began documenting fingerprints at the
scenes of crimes. The idea caught on quickly with U.S. police
departments and the FBI; but as the files grew, it became
increasingly difficult to manually match prints from a crime
scene to those in the system. Computerized fingerprint
databases facilitated this and created the possibility for
computers to be used in other settings, such as offices. "The
biggest applications are the 'log in' process," says William
H. Saito, president and CEO of I/O Software, a California firm
that markets software for biometrics recognition systems.
Employees simply use a "single sign-on," typically a
fingerprint, for different computer systems, rather than
having to remember dozens of passwords. Fingerprints might
find themselves in the realm of the new E-sign legislation
President Clinton recently approved as well. Some experts warn
that despite its potential, commercial biometrics has been
known to disappoint in the past. Systems are designed to match
templates with a person's measurements. Even if the
measurement is not from the proper person, the computer may
determine a match based on approximation. Some programs are
utilizing iris prints from a person's eye, because they are a
thousand times more distinctive than whorls on a fingerprint.
Several banks have incorporated iris-scan technology to
replace ATM cards because they can read without a person's
knowledge and require no special action. Facial recognition
takes the iris-scanning concept one step further; and while it
is prone to error, it is even more discrete. The emerging
technology raises issues of security and personal privacy, and
there currently is no legislation concerning the use of
biometric information.
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reader commentary
re: Surveillance and Repression: Remedies not Rumors [RT #59]
From: Mitzi Waltz
> Re: Frank Morales, Report on Federal Anti-Activist Intelligence, in
> Covertaction Quarterly (June 2000), online at URL:
> <http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/Sustainable_Development/Fins-SD2-02.txt>
and Berlet's statement that:
> Repression against political activists is a serious topic, but the article
> circulated on the internet as a "Report on Federal Anti-Activist
> Intelligence Network" is neither informative nor constructive. This article
> is primarily a rewrite of a speculative newsletter article based on an
> unnamed source. In short, it is rumor. Furthermore, it leaves the impression
> that the US government has a vast domestic intelligence operation that is
> able to spy on every activist, which is false and could scare people away
> from activism.
I'd rebut what Berlet has to say by offering up an article I wrote for
Covert Action Quarterly 3 years ago, "Policing Activists: Think Global, Spy
Local," which I feel was carefully sourced. It's online in lots of places.
One that includes photos and some Web links is at:
<http://www.caq.com/CAQ/caq61/caq61spylocal.html>
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Linked stories:
********************
Extreme Weather On The Rise As Greenhouse Gases Drive Climate
<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/10/001006154052.htm>
Expect hotter days, warmer nights, heavier rain and snowfall
events, and more floods over the next century, says a new study
published September 22 in the journal Science.
********************
Cubicle Blues Blamed on IT
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39406,00.html?tw=wn20001012>
A survey from a United Nations group says that technology overload is
causing high levels of worker depression. Pressure to keep up with the
latest innovation and read all that email is accelerating burnout.
********************
======================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
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