I'm going to be in a hip hop video being shot next week by Ryan Junell. The song is called Under Surveillence by the group Variable Unit.
By a strange coincidence, that very same day I was recruited for the video, Billy Jam sent me this story, which details a situation where Dave Paul, owner of San Francisco's tiny Independent BOMB Hip Hop record label, was questioned by two Secret Service Agents who were responding to a tip from Cheaptickets.com, who claimed Paul had made threatening statements about the Shrub while purchasing tickets over the phone.
Check it out:
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Hip Hop Record Label Owner Dave Paul Interrogated By Secret Service Under Suspicion Of Being Threat To President George W. Bush by Billy Jam for HipHopSlam.com |
"The Secret Service showed up at my door. I was not here. They had told my mom that I had said some stuff on the phone and that I needed to answer to it. So I called the agent on his phone and he claimed that cheaptickets.com had reported to them that I had said some things about George W. Bush when I was on the phone working on my flight. I assured them that I said absolutely nothing and they wanted to come over and interview me in person, which they did with two agents. And they even wanted to come in and take a look around my room to make sure that there were no photos of "so-called person" with a target drawn on it or something to that effect. I don't know if it's someone at cheaptickets lying or maybe the Secret Service just used that as an excuse to investigate since the name of the record company.... I even gave them a flyer for tonight's show but they didn't look like they were too interested. I invited them down. They were pretty nice about it. I think just because when you're making flight reservations and the company name is what it is and that's what on your credit card and it shows four people going to Oklahoma City that I'm sure someone at cheaptickets pulled a red flag on it."Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad: http://www.hiphopslam.com/news/hhs_news_service_020a.html • SPECIAL REPORT! — Bomb Hip Hop owner Dave Paul Interrogated by The Secret Service HIP HOP RECORD LABEL OWNER DAVE PAUL INTERROGATED BY SECRET SERVICE UNDER SUSPICION OF BEING THREAT TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH by Billy Jam exclusive to HipHopSlam.com On October 22nd, in what has to be one of the weirdest turn of events in post September 11th America, Dave Paul, the owner of San Francisco's tiny independent BOMB Hip Hop record label was paid an unexpected visit by two US Secret Service agents. The two government agents were reportedly following up on a tip from a source that claimed Paul had made a threatening statement about US President Bush while buying airline tickets to Oklahoma City for himself and three other DJs (Pone, Quest, T-Rock) who were all flying out very late that night on tour to celebrate the recently released "Return of the DJ Vol. 5". Immediately after the federal investigators left the Noe Valley home that Paul shares with his mother, he talked with HipHopSlam.Com NEWS from his home office phone. During that phone conversation he appeared unusually guarded and self edited. Later that evening at club MILK, scene of the hometown concert for the new DJ album, the still shaken DJ/label owner explained that he didn't want to use particular words over the phone because he believed it may be bugged: noting that he had been noticing unusual "clicking sounds" for several days but - up until then - had made nothing of it. During that phone conversation we asked him to explain exactly what had transpired? His response: "The Secret Service showed up at my door. I was not here. They had told my mom that I had said some stuff on the phone and that I needed to answer to it. So I called the agent on his phone and he claimed that cheaptickets.com had reported to them that I had said some things about George W. Bush when I was on the phone working on my flight. I assured them that I said absolutely nothing and they wanted to come over and interview me in person, which they did with two agents. And they even wanted to come in and take a look around my room to make sure that there were no photos of "so-called person" with a target drawn on it or something to that effect. I don't know if it's someone at cheaptickets lying or maybe the Secret Service just used that as an excuse to investigate since the name of the record company.... I even gave them a flyer for tonight's show but they didn't look like they were too interested. I invited them down. They were pretty nice about it. I think just because when you're making flight reservations and the company name is what it is and that's what on your credit card and it shows four people going to Oklahoma City that I'm sure someone at cheaptickets pulled a red flag on it." One of the words avoided by Paul was that of Bush's and also his label's name, BOMB, which as we know is a no-no to utter in any airport. And apparently now just to say it over the phone while buying tickets is also a no-no. Later that evening Paul said that he figured that the whole incident was just some random check and that there would most likely be nothing more to it. However after doing some research and investigations of our own at HipHopSlam we uncovered something interesting: the fact that on the 1995 BOMB album, Return of the DJ at the very end of the *Invisible Scratch Pickles' track that there was sample of a news reporter saying "After the bombing, police in Oklahoma City issued an all points bulletin for three men - at least two of them described as being of middle eastern origin. This in response to an eyewitness who claims to have seen them at the scene. Federal officials say they have leads but no suspects." Coincidence or implication that the Feds have been studying old BOMB compilations in their "homeland security" efforts? On October 26th we caught up with Dave Paul, who was in Texas en route to the Houston show that evening, and asked him if he thought the Secret Service had been researching this deeply and uncovered this news bite (sampled incidentally by QBert)? He said he doubted it but that it was an uncanny coincidence. Again he reiterated that he figured the Secret Service were probably just doing a routine check and that most likely he wouldn't hear from them again. So would he consider changing the name of his record label from BOMB to something else for fear of future repeat scenarios? "No!" - he said. The BOMB Hip Hop DJs Dave Paul, Quest, T-Rock, and Pone will play Dallas on Monday, October 27th and be back in California by October 29th. For more info on the tour or music visit: www.bombhiphop.com *NOTE: Early spelling of the Piklz name when the crew was a trio feat. Qbert, Shortkut, and Disk. This same track also appeared with the sample intact on Bill Laswell's "Altered Beats" compilation when the crew was billed a quartet with Mixmaster Mike added
Note: As with any effective Dictatorship, this time around, the public will not be informed as to which airlines will be implementing the CAPPS II program. Such information will be kept secret from American citizens.
Soon passengers will be receiving one of three "color codings" based on things like who you're traveling with and where you're going. (What's that got to do with your risk? Your guess is as good as mine.)
I wonder if wearing one of John Gilmore's "Suspected Terrorist" buttons bumps up your rating a notch? :-)
Here's the Washington Post story on it, and a video clip from KRON news in San Francisco.
In the most aggressive -- and, some say, invasive -- step yet to protect air travelers, the federal government and the airlines will phase in a computer system next year to measure the risk posed by every passenger on every flight in the United States.The new Transportation Security Administration system seeks to probe deeper into each passenger's identity than is currently possible, comparing personal information against criminal records and intelligence information. Passengers will be assigned a color code -- green, yellow or red -- based in part on their city of departure, destination, traveling companions and date of ticket purchase.
Most people will be coded green and sail through. But up to 8 percent of passengers who board the nation's 26,000 daily flights will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening at the checkpoint, according to people familiar with the program. An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers also will face police questioning and may be arrested...
The new system, called Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II (CAPPS II), has sparked so much controversy among both liberal and conservative groups that the TSA has struggled to get it going. Delta Air Lines backed out of a testing program with the agency earlier this year, and now the TSA will not reveal which airlines will participate when it tests a prototype early next year. If all goes as planned, the TSA will begin the new computer screening of some passengers as early as next summer and eventually it will be used for all domestic travelers.
"This system is going to be replete with errors," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program. "You could be falsely arrested. You could be delayed. You could lose your ability to travel."
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45434-2003Sep8.html
washingtonpost.com
Fliers to Be Rated for Risk Level
New System Will Scrutinize Each Passenger, Assign Color Code
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; Page A01
In the most aggressive -- and, some say, invasive -- step yet to protect air travelers, the federal government and the airlines will phase in a computer system next year to measure the risk posed by every passenger on every flight in the United States.
The new Transportation Security Administration system seeks to probe deeper into each passenger's identity than is currently possible, comparing personal information against criminal records and intelligence information. Passengers will be assigned a color code -- green, yellow or red -- based in part on their city of departure, destination, traveling companions and date of ticket purchase.
Most people will be coded green and sail through. But up to 8 percent of passengers who board the nation's 26,000 daily flights will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening at the checkpoint, according to people familiar with the program. An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers also will face police questioning and may be arrested.
The system "will provide protections for the flying public," said TSA spokesman Brian Turmail. "Not only should we keep passengers from sitting next to a terrorist, we should keep them from sitting next to wanted ax murderers."
The new system, called Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II (CAPPS II), has sparked so much controversy among both liberal and conservative groups that the TSA has struggled to get it going. Delta Air Lines backed out of a testing program with the agency earlier this year, and now the TSA will not reveal which airlines will participate when it tests a prototype early next year. If all goes as planned, the TSA will begin the new computer screening of some passengers as early as next summer and eventually it will be used for all domestic travelers.
"This system is going to be replete with errors," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program. "You could be falsely arrested. You could be delayed. You could lose your ability to travel."
In the two years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijackings, air security has taken a high priority, and the government has spent $9 billion on improvements. Thousands of explosives-detection machines now scan checked luggage at airports across the nation. A new force of federal airport screeners staffs checkpoints, though next year some airports may revert to private screeners. Cockpit doors have been reinforced, and hundreds of airline pilots now carry guns. In addition, the force of undercover air marshals has been expanded, and as many as 5,000 federal immigration and customs agents will be trained to bolster the force on a temporary basis when the government perceives a heightened threat.
Still, many holes in security persist. Airports and aircraft still appear easy to penetrate, illustrated last month by an accidental landing of several boaters on the airfield at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Air cargo remains vulnerable, as virtually none of the items stowed alongside luggage in the aircraft hold are screened for explosives. Government officials continue to assess how best to respond to the possibility of a shoulder-fired missile attack at a commercial airliner, which they maintain is a serious threat.
In the coming months, major airports in Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver and Dallas will embark on extensive construction projects to build explosives-detection machines into conveyor-belt systems that sort checked luggage being loaded onto planes. (Other airports, including Washington's, are waiting in line for hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding.)
Clearly, the TSA says, the job of protecting the nation's skies is not done.
"Given the dynamic nature of the threat we deal with, it would be impossible to predict when the work would be finished" on air security, said TSA spokesman Robert Johnson. "We don't think it will ever end."
The government says the most significant change in security is still to come in the form of CAPPS II. The current computer screener program was developed by U.S. airlines in the mid-1990s in response to government and public pressure to improve air security after terrorists blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
The existing system identifies certain passengers as risky based on a set of assumptions about how terrorists travel. For instance, passengers are flagged for additional screening if they bought a one-way airline ticket, or if they paid with cash instead of a credit card. Passengers who present a threat under these and other criteria are issued boarding passes that bear a coding of "SSS" or "***."
But the TSA, recognizing that the system is outdated and easy to fool, wants to replace it and put the government in the role now played by the airlines in making security assessments.
Under the new program, the airline will send information about everyone who books a flight to the TSA, including full name, home address, home telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. If the computer system identifies a threat, the TSA will notify federal or local law enforcement authorities. The agency has not indicated the number or type of personnel needed to oversee the program.
The TSA will check each passenger in two steps. The first will match the passenger's name and information against databases of private companies that collect information on people for commercial reasons, such as their shopping habits. This process will generate a numerical score that will indicate the likelihood that the passenger is who he says he is. Passengers will not be informed of their color code or their numerical score. The second step matches passenger information against government intelligence combined with local and state outstanding warrants for violent felonies.
Airlines like the system because they think it will reduce time passengers spend at security checkpoints and lower the likelihood that they will be delayed for their flights. The TSA said the program is expected to flag fewer people than the current computer screening system. The agency intends to test the program in several phases to ensure that it works as promised.
"If it delivers the way it's envisioned, it's going to be a significant, positive change," the TSA's Johnson said. "It's going to be a lot fewer people [flagged], but we think it will be the right people."
David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, worries that the computer screening program will go beyond its original goals. "This system is not designed just to get potential terrorists," Keene said. "It's a law enforcement tool. The wider the net you cast, the more people you bring in."
As the government takes a new, large role in one aspect of screening, it is rolling back its presence in another. By late 2004, some airports are expected to replace the federal screening force with private screeners. A security law passed after the terrorist attacks allows airports to "opt out" of the government's federal screening workforce in November 2004. Many airports, frustrated with the staffing cuts and the inability to control the number of screeners at each station, believe they might have more control over the operations if a private company were in charge.
"I've been in various meetings with many airport managers who are saying, 'We don't want as much government control around,' " said James McNeil, chief executive of McNeil Technologies Inc., which provides security screeners at the airport in Rochester, N.Y., one of five test airports that employ private screeners. McNeil said he has talked to 20 to 30 airports that are interested in his services. A large association of the nation's airports estimates that many small airports will opt out of government screeners next year because their limited flight schedules require that screeners work flexible hours. The government will still have a role in security because the private screening companies will operate under contracts managed by the TSA.
If many airports, particularly large hubs that handle a major portion of the nation's 30,000 daily flights, choose to revert to the private screening force, some aviation industry leaders have wondered what that will mean for the TSA.
The agency, created just months after the terrorist attacks, has already seen some of its authority stripped. The Federal Air Marshal Service has moved to a law enforcement division within the Department of Homeland Security, as has the agency's explosives unit. Some of its security directors claim they are still out of the loop on some of the agency's latest intelligence on air security.
Johnson, the TSA spokesman, hinted that the agency's future is unclear.
"We've got a department-level organization now created for that sole purpose [of fighting terrorism] and it only makes sense, where necessary, to economize and coordinate," Johnson said. "There will always be a need to provide the best aviation security possible at airports. Whether it's under one flag or another, it really makes no difference."
Protecting privacy from the 'new spam'
By Peter Swire for the Boston Globe.
Overlooked in the heated rhetoric has been a victim of the RIAA's campaign - the privacy of all those who surf the Internet or send e-mail. On the RIAA view, your sensitive personal information on the Web would be available to anyone who can fill out a one-page form. Congress can and should step in to fix this problem immediately.The problem began in late 2002, when the RIAA demanded that Verizon Online, an Internet service provider, identify one of its customers based on an accusation that the person may have violated copyright laws by swapping files.
Verizon declined, citing the threats to customer privacy, due process, and the First Amendment. Was Verizon overreacting? No.
The new process starts when any website operator, recipient of an e-mail, or participant in a P2P network learns the Internet Protocol address of the home user. These IP addresses are automatically communicated by the nature of the Net, but until now only the ISP could usually match an IP address with a user's identity.
When a copyright holder fills out a one-page form, however, a federal court clerk must now immediately issue a subpoena. That subpoena orders the ISP to turn over the name, home address, and phone number that matches the IP address.
This procedure violates due process. There is no judicial oversight and only the flimsiest showing of cause. Furthermore, Internet service providers risk large penalties if they even question the validity of a subpoena.
Privacy is destroyed because it becomes so easy to reveal the identity of Internet users. The First Amendment is undermined because of the chilling effect if every e-mail and every post to a Web page can be quickly tracked back to a home address and phone number.
The early use of these subpoenas has shown startling mistakes by copyright holders. One recording industry subpoena this spring - based on a patently incorrect allegation - nearly closed down a college astronomy department's Web server in the middle of exam week. A major studio has sought a subpoena based on the careless assertion that a tiny computer file was a copy of a Harry Potter movie. (It was a child's book report instead.)An even greater risk is putting this subpoena power in the hands of anyone willing to pretend to have a copyright claim. These fraudulent requests will be impossible to distinguish from legitimate ones.
This flood of legally sanctioned harassment will quickly become the ''new spam,'' with the kinds of abuses as limitless as the Internet itself:
The most common use may be that of website operators who want to identify their visitors for marketing purposes or for more nefarious reasons, including identity theft, fraud, or stalking.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/208/oped/Protecting_privacy_from_the_new_spam_+.shtml
Protecting privacy from the 'new spam'
By Peter Swire, 7/27/2003
THE BATTLE is heating up between the recording industry and those who download copies of their favorite music. the Recording Industry Association of America is bringing hundreds of lawsuits nationwide against home users of peer-to-peer (P2P) software, including students at Boston College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah recently used a Senate hearing to suggest that copyright owners should be able to warn home users once or twice, and then actually destroy the computers if the apparently infringing songs were not removed.
Overlooked in the heated rhetoric has been a victim of the RIAA's campaign - the privacy of all those who surf the Internet or send e-mail. On the RIAA view, your sensitive personal information on the Web would be available to anyone who can fill out a one-page form. Congress can and should step in to fix this problem immediately.
The problem began in late 2002, when the RIAA demanded that Verizon Online, an Internet service provider, identify one of its customers based on an accusation that the person may have violated copyright laws by swapping files.
Verizon declined, citing the threats to customer privacy, due process, and the First Amendment. Was Verizon overreacting? No.
The new process starts when any website operator, recipient of an e-mail, or participant in a P2P network learns the Internet Protocol address of the home user. These IP addresses are automatically communicated by the nature of the Net, but until now only the ISP could usually match an IP address with a user's identity.
When a copyright holder fills out a one-page form, however, a federal court clerk must now immediately issue a subpoena. That subpoena orders the ISP to turn over the name, home address, and phone number that matches the IP address.
This procedure violates due process. There is no judicial oversight and only the flimsiest showing of cause. Furthermore, Internet service providers risk large penalties if they even question the validity of a subpoena.
Privacy is destroyed because it becomes so easy to reveal the identity of Internet users. The First Amendment is undermined because of the chilling effect if every e-mail and every post to a Web page can be quickly tracked back to a home address and phone number.
The early use of these subpoenas has shown startling mistakes by copyright holders. One recording industry subpoena this spring - based on a patently incorrect allegation - nearly closed down a college astronomy department's Web server in the middle of exam week. A major studio has sought a subpoena based on the careless assertion that a tiny computer file was a copy of a Harry Potter movie. (It was a child's book report instead.)
An even greater risk is putting this subpoena power in the hands of anyone willing to pretend to have a copyright claim. These fraudulent requests will be impossible to distinguish from legitimate ones.
This flood of legally sanctioned harassment will quickly become the ''new spam,'' with the kinds of abuses as limitless as the Internet itself:
The most common use may be that of website operators who want to identify their visitors for marketing purposes or for more nefarious reasons, including identity theft, fraud, or stalking.
Porn sites and gambling sites could track down visitors and demand payment not to reveal the user's identity, all under the pretext of enforcing the site's ''copyright.''
Private investigators will gain an unstoppable way to turn an e-mail address into a person's name and physical address.
Fortunately, a better alternative is clear. Courts have already used ''John Doe'' procedures where one party tries to learn the name of an anonymous Internet user. In these cases, users can object (anonymously) to having their identity revealed. The judge looks at the facts. If the person is engaged in illegal piracy, then the judge reveals the name and orders effective sanctions. If the copyright holder or scam artist does not have a winning case, then the user names remain private.
John Doe legislation of this sort is being considered now in California and should become a priority in Congress as well. The RIAA lawsuits against users are beginning now, long before the appeal of the Verizon proceeding will be decided.
Before the ''new spam'' proliferates, we should have fair procedures in place that will protect intellectual property while protecting privacy, free speech, and due process as well.
Peter Swire is professor at the Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University, and was the Clinton Administration's chief privacy counselor.
This story ran on page E11 of the Boston Globe on 7/27/2003
This story, which features Emerald Yeh, aired sometime last week on San Francisco's KRON Channel 4.
The stills below provide most of the important information.
KRON On The Do Not Call Registry (Small - 6 MB)
A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics
By John Markoff for the NY Times.
In an effort to retain the original open PC environment, the Microsoft plan offers the computer user two separate computing partitions in a future version of Windows. Beyond changing the appearance and control of Windows, the system will also require a new generation of computer hardware, not only replacing the computer logic board but also peripherals like mice, keyboards and video cards..."This will kill innovation," said Ross Anderson, a computer security expert at Cambridge University, who is organizing opposition to the industry plans. "They're doing this to increase customer lock-in. It will mean that fewer software businesses succeed and those who do succeed will be large companies."
Critics complain that the mainstream computer hardware and software designers, under pressure from Hollywood, are turning the PC into something that would resemble video game players, cable TV and cellphones, with manufacturers or service providers in control of which applications run on their systems.
In the new encrypted computing world, even the most mundane word-processing document or e-mail message would be accompanied by a software security guard controlling who can view it, where it can be sent and even when it will be erased. Also, the secure PC is specifically intended to protect digital movies and music from online piracy.
But while beneficial to the entertainment industry and corporate operations, the new systems will not necessarily be immune to computer viruses or unwanted spam e-mail messages, the two most severe irritants to PC users.
"Microsoft's use of the term `trusted computing' is a great piece of doublespeak," said Dan Sokol, a computer engineer based in San Jose, Calif., who was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computing Club, the pioneering PC group. "What they're really saying is, `We don't trust you, the user of this computer.' "
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/technology/30SECU.html
June 30, 2003 A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, June 29 - Your next personal computer may well come with its own digital chaperon.
As PC makers prepare a new generation of desktop computers with built-in hardware controls to protect data and digital entertainment from illegal copying, the industry is also promising to keep information safe from tampering and help users avoid troublemakers in cyberspace.
Silicon Valley - led by Microsoft and Intel - calls the concept "trusted computing." The companies, joined by I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices and others, argue that the new systems are necessary to protect entertainment content as well as safeguard corporate data and personal privacy against identity theft. Without such built-in controls, they say, Hollywood and the music business will refuse to make their products available online.
But by entwining PC software and data in an impenetrable layer of encryption, critics argue, the companies may be destroying the very openness that has been at the heart of computing in the three decades since the PC was introduced. There are simpler, less intrusive ways to prevent illicit file swapping over the Internet, they say, than girding software in so much armor that new types of programs from upstart companies may have trouble working with it.
"This will kill innovation," said Ross Anderson, a computer security expert at Cambridge University, who is organizing opposition to the industry plans. "They're doing this to increase customer lock-in. It will mean that fewer software businesses succeed and those who do succeed will be large companies."
Critics complain that the mainstream computer hardware and software designers, under pressure from Hollywood, are turning the PC into something that would resemble video game players, cable TV and cellphones, with manufacturers or service providers in control of which applications run on their systems.
In the new encrypted computing world, even the most mundane word-processing document or e-mail message would be accompanied by a software security guard controlling who can view it, where it can be sent and even when it will be erased. Also, the secure PC is specifically intended to protect digital movies and music from online piracy.
But while beneficial to the entertainment industry and corporate operations, the new systems will not necessarily be immune to computer viruses or unwanted spam e-mail messages, the two most severe irritants to PC users.
"Microsoft's use of the term `trusted computing' is a great piece of doublespeak," said Dan Sokol, a computer engineer based in San Jose, Calif., who was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computing Club, the pioneering PC group. "What they're really saying is, `We don't trust you, the user of this computer.' "
The advocates of trusted computing argue that the new technology is absolutely necessary to protect the privacy of users and to prevent the theft of valuable intellectual property, a reaction to the fact that making a perfect digital copy is almost as easy as clicking a mouse button.
"It's like having a little safe inside your computer," said Bob Meinschein, an Intel security architect. "On the corporate side the value is much clearer," he added, "but over time the consumer value of this technology will become clear as well" as more people shop and do other business transactions online.
Industry leaders also contend that none of this will stifle innovation. Instead, they say, it will help preserve and expand general-purpose computing in the Internet age.
"We think this is a huge innovation story," said Mario Juarez, Microsoft's group product manager for the company's security business unit. "This is just an extension of the way the current version of Windows has provided innovation for players up and down the broad landscape of computing."
The initiative is based on a new specification for personal computer hardware, first introduced in 2000 and backed by a group of companies called the Trusted Computing Group. It also revolves around a separate Microsoft plan, now called the Next Generation Secure Computing Base, that specifies a tamper-proof portion of the Windows operating system.
The hardware system is contained in a set of separate electronics that are linked to the personal computer's microprocessor chip, known as the Trusted Platform Module, or T.P.M. The device includes secret digital keys - large binary numbers - that cannot easily be altered. The Trusted Computing Group is attempting to persuade other industries, like the mobile phone industry and the makers of personal digital assistants, to standardize on the technology as well.
The plans reflect a shift by key elements of the personal computer industry, which in the past had resisted going along with the entertainment industry and what some said they feared would be draconian controls that would greatly curtail the power of digital consumer products.
Industry executives now argue that by embedding the digital keys directly in the hardware of the PC, tampering will be much more difficult. But they acknowledge that no security system is perfect.
The hardware standard is actually the second effort by Intel to build security directly into the circuitry of the PC. The first effort ended in a public relations disaster for Intel in 1999 when consumers and civil liberties groups revolted against the idea. The groups coined the slogan "Big Brother Inside," and charged that the technology could be used to violate user privacy.
"We don't like to make the connection," said Mr. Meinschein. "But we did learn from it."
He said the new T.P.M. design requires the computer owner to switch on the new technology voluntarily and that it contains elaborate safeguards for protecting individual identity.
The first computers based on the hardware design have just begun to appear from I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard for corporate customers. Consumer-oriented computer makers like Dell Computer and Gateway are being urged to go along but have not yet endorsed the new approach.
How consumers will react to the new technology is a thorny question for PC makers because the new industry design stands in striking contrast to the approach being taken by Apple Computer.
Apple has developed the popular iTunes digital music store relying exclusively on software to restrict the sharing of digital songs over the Internet. Apple's system, which has drawn the support of the recording industry, permits consumers to share songs freely among up to three Macintoshes and an iPod portable music player.
Apple only has a tiny share of the personal computer market. But it continues to tweak the industry leaders with its innovations; last week, Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, demonstrated a feature of the company's newest version of its OS X operating system called FileVault, designed to protect a user's documents without the need for modifying computer hardware.
Mr. Jobs argued that elaborate hardware-software schemes like the one being pursued by the Trusted Computing Group will not achieve their purpose.
"It's a falsehood," he said. "You can prove to yourself that that hardware doesn't make it more secure."
That is not Microsoft's view. The company has begun showing a test copy of a variation of its Windows operating system that was originally named Palladium. The name was changed last year after a trademark dispute.
In an effort to retain the original open PC environment, the Microsoft plan offers the computer user two separate computing partitions in a future version of Windows. Beyond changing the appearance and control of Windows, the system will also require a new generation of computer hardware, not only replacing the computer logic board but also peripherals like mice, keyboards and video cards.
Executives at Microsoft say they tentatively plan to include the technology in the next version of Windows - code-named Longhorn - now due in 2005.
The company is dealing with both technical and marketing challenges presented by the new software security system. For example, Mr. Juarez, the Microsoft executive, said that if the company created a more secure side to its operating system software, customers might draw the conclusion that its current software is not as safe to use.
Software developers and computer security experts, however, said they were not confident that Microsoft would retain its commitment to the open half of what is planned to be a two-sided operating system.
"My hackles went up when I read Microsoft describing the trusted part of the operating system as an option," said Mitchell D. Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, and a longtime Microsoft competitor. "I don't think that's a trustworthy statement."
One possibility, Mr. Kapor argued, is that Microsoft could release versions of applications like its Office suite of programs that would only run on the secure part of the operating system, forcing users to do their work in the more restricted environment.
Microsoft denies that it is hatching an elaborate scheme to deploy an ultra-secret hardware system simply to protect its software and Hollywood's digital content. The company also says the new system can help counter global cybercrime without creating the repressive "Big Brother" society imagined by George Orwell in "1984."
Microsoft is committed to "working with the government and the entire industry to build a more secure computing infrastructure here and around the world," Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told a technology conference in Washington on Wednesday. "This technology can make our country more secure and prevent the nightmare vision of George Orwell at the same time."
The critics are worried, however, that the rush to create more secure PC's may have unintended consequences. Paradoxically, they say, the efforts to lock up data safely against piracy could serve to make it easier for pirates to operate covertly.
Indeed, the effectiveness of the effort to protect intellectual property like music and movies has been challenged in two independent research papers. One was distributed last year by a group of Microsoft computer security researchers; a second paper was released last month by Harvard researchers.
The research papers state that computer users who share files might use the new hardware-based security systems to create a "Darknet," a secure, but illegal network for sharing digital movies and music or other illicit information that could be exceptionally hard for security experts to crack.
"This is a Pandora's box and I don't think there has been much thought about what can go wrong," said Stuart Schechter, a Harvard researcher who is an author of one of the papers. "This is one of those rare times we can prevent something that will do more harm than good."
a.k.a. Register In The "No Call" Registry (and It's Illegal For Telemarketers To Call You)
A few months ago, I got all hot and bothered about the news that our cell phone numbers would soon be made available to telemarketers via 411 info.
One solution to this is to sign up for the "Do Not Call Registry."
Most telemarketers cannot call your telephone number if it is in the National Do Not Call Registry. You can register your home and mobile phone numbers for free. Your registration will be effective for five years.
If a telemarketer calls you during that time, you can file a complaint.
It just took me less than a minute to register my home and cell phone numbers.
This is a follow up to my earlier post regarding cellphone numbers being added to 411 lists, which I still think, as it stands, is a really bad idea.
There's more at stake here than the (I believe, still valid) concern of actually be charged money by your phone company every time you are contacted by a telemarketer, which would also be horrible and unfair to consumers, but isn't nearly as worrisome as establishing a practice of charging people extra if they don't want their personal information sold.
If discounts are offered to people that are willing to allow their number to be included in a directory, that's one thing. But again, it would need to be properly represented to the consumer that they were trading something valuable -- their personal information -- for a discount.
That said, it's not only about telemarketers. It's about privacy. If I want someone to have my cell phone number, I'll give it to them. Otherwise, they can email me and request it, and if I want to give it to them, I will.
In general, I would rather be emailed than called on the phone -- especially from people I'm not expecting.
The way it is now, I have a little control over who calls me on my already too busy telephone. I should not have to pay money to have my number remain unlisted. It is a right, not a privilege, in my opinion.
This is the wrong direction for these kinds of services to go -- making people opt-out of having their information made public. They should always have to explicitly opt-in to such services. This is dangerous if giving up one's personal information in order to participate in a basic communications service, such as cell phones, becomes the exception, and not the rule.
Hope this clarifies my broader privacy concerns surrounding these types of policies.
Commercial interests are gearing up to benefit from making our personal cell phone information to the public.
Soon 411 will be able to sell your cell phone number to make extra money from its service. You'll have to pay extra if you want to keep your number unlisted.
I think this is horrible news -- A directory service for cell phones only makes sense if you have to opt-in to it, not if the burden is on you to not only opt-out of it, but pay for the privilege.
Now we'll have to pay to be unlisted!
This seems more like a service you should have to pay to be included in, not the other way around.
Cell phone's are largely "private" lines. If someone wants their business line listed, they can take the time to list it. The average person shouldn't have to take up their time and valuable resources to make sure they've opted out.
Also, one mistake and the average person will have to foot the cost of getting a new phone number, so they can "try again" at protecting their privacy.
Please let me know if anyone knows how this can:
1) be stopped.
2) changed from an "opt-out" policy to an "opt-in" policy where the burden will be placed on the people who want to participate, not the people who want to protect their privacy.
3) be "opted out" of, at NO CHARGE, with confirmation IN WRITING, so a company can be taken to court if a mistake is made, and far enough (like a year) in advance of the roll out that we can no for sure that our privacy will be protected.
4) be made a built-in requirement for customers to be provided with a freely-available opt-out option at the same time they purchase a cell phone to make it as easy has possible to protect their privacy.
Privacy needs to be the default -- not the paid-for exception.
Please keep an eye out for developments on this front and let me know about them! Thanks!
Wireless numbers to be added to 411
Large cell phone carriers on board with plan, source says
The centralized database of wireless numbers would be off limits to telemarketers, and consumers would be able to choose whether to have their numbers listed or unlisted, according to people familiar with the process.Individual carriers would determine whether subscribers would have to pay to be unlisted.
Other privacy options are possible, too.
For example, wireless phone users might choose to be unlisted but willing to receive a short text message, sent through the directory service, from someone trying to contact them.
The nation’s largest carriers are on board with the plan, according to an industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. Their support makes sense: If carriers charged a dollar or so for 411 requests for a wireless number that could be a huge revenue boost for an industry struggling with high debts and tough competition.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/887175.asp?cp1=1
Wireless numbers to be added to 411
Large cell phone carriers on board with plan, source says
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW ORLEANS, March 18 — Looking for a friend but don’t have her phone number with you? For now, you can call directory assistance for her home number, but her wireless digits are off limits from 411. That’s about to change, however. After years of hesitation, cellular providers are getting close to making wireless numbers available to 411 callers.
The database of wireless numbers would be off limits to telemarketers, and consumers would be able to choose whether to have their numbers listed or unlisted.
ALTHOUGH THE INFORMATION service probably won’t be available until next year at the earliest, some details already are clear.
The centralized database of wireless numbers would be off limits to telemarketers, and consumers would be able to choose whether to have their numbers listed or unlisted, according to people familiar with the process.
Individual carriers would determine whether subscribers would have to pay to be unlisted.
Other privacy options are possible, too.
For example, wireless phone users might choose to be unlisted but willing to receive a short text message, sent through the directory service, from someone trying to contact them.
The nation’s largest carriers are on board with the plan, according to an industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. Their support makes sense: If carriers charged a dollar or so for 411 requests for a wireless number that could be a huge revenue boost for an industry struggling with high debts and tough competition.
About 5 percent of U.S. households have gone totally wireless and eliminated traditional landlines, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, which is hosting a huge industry trade show in New Orleans this week.
WIFI ROAMING REMAINS DISTANT
While the industry quietly moves toward establishing wireless 411, that kind of consensus and cooperation has been absent at the CTIA show when it comes to the explosion of the wireless Internet access technology known as WiFi.
Because WiFi uses unlicensed airwave frequencies to inexpensively radiate Internet connectivity over short distances, every day brings news of aggressive plans to deploy WiFi “hot spots.”
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IBM Corp. said this week it would work with two technology companies to infuse 1,000 truck stops with WiFi access. Toshiba and Accenture are touting a package of hot spot gear and network management software.
But analysts, WiFi providers and companies thinking about joining the fray say the technology will be hindered unless the industry lets users seamlessly roam from one WiFi network to another.
No one really wants to buy access in one airport, only to have to pull out the credit card again and sign up anew at a downtown cafe.
“We need universal roaming across hot spots more than we ever needed it with cellular,” said Sky Dayton, founder of Boingo Wireless, a company working to link WiFi hot spots with each other — and with the slower data networks that send information to wireless phones.
But while some companies say they can facilitate aspects of WiFi roaming, WiFi operators and would-be providers say big issues have yet to be worked out — including how to link billing systems and assure a consistent quality of service among hot spots.
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David Chamberlain, an analyst with Probe Research, said wireless phone carriers might be in the best position to bring about WiFi roaming because they already have relationships with millions of customers and billing software for cellular roaming.
But that day doesn’t seem near.
Nextel Communications CEO Tim Donahue said Tuesday that WiFi is not “ready for prime time yet.” Sprint PCS chief Len Lauer said he’s discouraged to see free WiFi hot spots popping up in hotels and other public places because that might make it difficult for anyone to profit off it.
“The cellular operators,” said Lawrence Brilliant, chief of WiFi wholesaler Cometa Networks, “have got to decide whether they see it as friend or foe.”
Ashcroft Out of Control
Ominous Sequel to USA Patriot Act
By Nat Hentoff for the Village Voice.
Under the proposed Ashcroft bill reversing that court decision, for the first time in U.S. history, secret arrests will be specifically permitted. That section of bill is flatly titled: "Prohibition of Disclosure of Terrorism Investigation Detainee Information." In Argentina, those secretly taken away were known as "the disappeared."Moving on, under Section 501 of the blandly titled Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, an American citizen can be stripped of citizenship if he or she "becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a 'terrorist organization,' if that group is engaged in hostilities against the United States."
Until now, in our law, an American could only lose his or her citizenship by declaring a clear intent to abandon it. But~Wand read this carefully from the new bill - "the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct." (Emphasis added).
Who will do the "inferring"? A member of the Justice Department. Not to worry. As John Ashcroft's spokeswoman, Barbara Comstock, says of objections to this draft bill: "The [Justice] department's deliberations are always undertaken with the strongest commitment to our Constitution and civil liberties." (This is a faith- based administration.)
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0310/hentoff.php
Ashcroft Out of Control
Ominous Sequel to USA Patriot Act
By Nat Hentoff
Village Voice
Friday 28 February 2003
Many of the new security measures proposed by our government in the name of fighting the "war on terror" are not temporary. They are permanent changes to our laws. Even the measures that, on the surface, appear to have been adopted only as long as the war on terror lasts, could be with us indefinitely. Because, as Homeland Security director Tom Ridge himself has warned, terrorism is a "permanent condition to which America must . . . adjust." - American Civil Liberties Union, January 29
Since September 11, 2001, a number of us at the Voice have been detailing the Bush administration's accelerating war on the Bill of Rights - and the rising resistance around the country. This battle to protect the Constitution, and us, has entered a new and more dangerous dimension.
On February 7, Charles Lewis, head of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, received a secret, but not classified, Justice Department draft of a bill that would expand the already unprecedented government powers to restrict civil liberties authorized by the USA Patriot Act. This new bill is called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Lewis, in an act of patriotism - since this still is a constitutional democracy - put the 86-page draft on the center's Web site, where it still remains (http://www.publicintegrity.org/).
On the evening of February 7, Charles Lewis discussed this new assault on our fundamental liberties on Bill Moyers's PBS program, Now.
Three days later, on the editorial page of the daily New York Sun, primarily a conservative newspaper, Errol Louis wrote: "[The] document is a catalog of authoritarianism that runs counter to the basic tenets of modern democracy."
I have the entire draft of the bill. Section 201 would overturn a federal court decision that ordered the Bush administration to reveal the identities of those it has detained (imprisoned) since 9-11. This sequel to the USA Patriot Act states that "the government need not disclose information about individuals detained in investigations of terrorism until . . . the initiation of criminal charges."
Many of the prisoners caught in the Justice Department's initial dragnet were held for months without charges or contact with their families, who didn't know where they were. And these prisoners were often abused and out of reach of their lawyers - if they'd been able to find a lawyer before being shifted among various prisons. When, after much pressure, the Justice Department released the numbers of the imprisoned, there were no names attached, until a lower court decided otherwise.
Under the proposed Ashcroft bill reversing that court decision, for the first time in U.S. history, secret arrests will be specifically permitted. That section of bill is flatly titled: "Prohibition of Disclosure of Terrorism Investigation Detainee Information." In Argentina, those secretly taken away were known as "the disappeared."
Moving on, under Section 501 of the blandly titled Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, an American citizen can be stripped of citizenship if he or she "becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a 'terrorist organization,' if that group is engaged in hostilities against the United States."
Until now, in our law, an American could only lose his or her citizenship by declaring a clear intent to abandon it. But~Wand read this carefully from the new bill - "the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct." (Emphasis added).
Who will do the "inferring"? A member of the Justice Department. Not to worry. As John Ashcroft's spokeswoman, Barbara Comstock, says of objections to this draft bill: "The [Justice] department's deliberations are always undertaken with the strongest commitment to our Constitution and civil liberties." (This is a faith- based administration.)
What this section of the bill actually means is that if you provide "material support" to an organization by sending a check for its legal activities~Wnot knowing that it has been designated a "terrorist" group for other things it does - you can be stripped of your citizenship and be detained indefinitely as an alien. While South Africa was ruled by an apartheid government, certain activities of the African National Congress were categorized as "terrorist," but many Americans provided support to the legal anti-apartheid work of that organization.
Under Section 302 of John Ashcroft's design for our future during the indefinite war on terrorism, there is another change in our legal system. Under current law, the FBI can collect DNA identification records of persons convicted of various crimes. But under the USA Patriot Act II, the "Attorney General or Secretary of Defense" will be able to "collect, analyze, and maintain DNA samples" of "suspected terrorists." And as Georgetown law professor David Cole notes - "mere association" will be enough to involve you with suspected terrorist groups. What does "association" mean? For one thing, "material support," under which you could lose your citizenship.
In reaction to the stealth with which the Justice Department has been crafting this invasion of the Bill of Rights, Democratic senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on February 10: "The early signals from the administration about its intentions for this bill are ominous. . . .
"For months, and as recently as just last week, Justice Department officials have denied to members of the Judiciary Committee that they were drafting another anti-terrorism package. There still has not been any hint from them about their draft bill."
Leahy continued: "The contents of this proposal should be carefully reviewed, and the public must be allowed to freely engage in any debate about the merits of any new government powers the administration may seek."
But where is the debate in Congress or in the media? After a few initial press stories about the USA Patriot Act II, there has been little follow-up. To be continued here.
Arrest Me By William Rivers Pitt for truthout.
Crazy, right?Ask Andrew J. O'Conner of Santa Fe, New Mexico if it sounds crazy. Mr. O'Conner, a former public defender from Santa Fe, was arrested in a public library and interrogated by Secret Service agents for five hours on February 13th.
His crime?
He said "Bush is out of control" on an internet chat room, and was arrested for threatening the President.
Ask Bernadette Devlin McAliskey of Ireland if it sounds crazy. She was recently passing through Chicago from Dublin, where she passed security, when she heard her name called over a loudspeaker. When she went up to the ticket counter, three men and one woman surrounded her and grabbed her passport. McAliskey was informed that she had been reported to be a "potential or real threat to the United States."
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey has spent the better part of her life struggling for the Irish nationalist cause. She did not lob Molotov cocktails at police. Instead, she became a member of British Parliament at age 21, the youngest person ever elected to that post. In 1981 she and her husband were shot by a loyalist death squad in their home. She has traveled to America on a regular basis for the last thirty years, and has been given the keys to the cities of San Francisco and New York.
Upon her detention in Chicago last month, McAliskey was fingerprinted and photographed. One of the men holding her told her that he was going to throw her in prison. When she snapped back that she had rights, she was told not to make the boss angry, because he shoots people. "After 9/11," said one officer, "nobody has any rights."
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://truthout.org/docs_03/030503A.shtml
Arrest Me
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 4 March 2003
George W. Bush is out of control.
I'll say it again.
George W. Bush is out of control.
I'm waiting for the black government cars to come squealing up in front of my house, for the thump of leather on my stairs, for the sound of knuckles on my door, for the feel of steel braceleting my wrists, for the smell of urine in some dank Federal holding cell as I listen to questions from men who no longer feel the constricting boundaries of constitutional law abutting their duties.
Sounds paranoid, doesn't it? Straight out of the Turner Diaries, maybe. Sounds like I'm waiting for the ominous whop-whop-whop of the blades on a black helicopter churning the air over my home. Sounds like I'm waiting to find a laser dot on my chest above my heart before the glass breaks and the bullet pushes my guts out past my spine.
Crazy, right?
Ask Andrew J. O'Conner of Santa Fe, New Mexico if it sounds crazy. Mr. O'Conner, a former public defender from Santa Fe, was arrested in a public library and interrogated by Secret Service agents for five hours on February 13th.
His crime?
He said "Bush is out of control" on an internet chat room, and was arrested for threatening the President.
Ask Bernadette Devlin McAliskey of Ireland if it sounds crazy. She was recently passing through Chicago from Dublin, where she passed security, when she heard her name called over a loudspeaker. When she went up to the ticket counter, three men and one woman surrounded her and grabbed her passport. McAliskey was informed that she had been reported to be a "potential or real threat to the United States."
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey has spent the better part of her life struggling for the Irish nationalist cause. She did not lob Molotov cocktails at police. Instead, she became a member of British Parliament at age 21, the youngest person ever elected to that post. In 1981 she and her husband were shot by a loyalist death squad in their home. She has traveled to America on a regular basis for the last thirty years, and has been given the keys to the cities of San Francisco and New York.
Upon her detention in Chicago last month, McAliskey was fingerprinted and photographed. One of the men holding her told her that he was going to throw her in prison. When she snapped back that she had rights, she was told not to make the boss angry, because he shoots people. "After 9/11," said one officer, "nobody has any rights."
"You've evaded us before," said the officer before McAliskey was deported back to Ireland, "but you're not going to do it now." She never found out for sure how she was a threat to the United States, and is currently filing a formal complaint with the U.S. consulate in Dublin.
There are those who will brush these incidents off. Andrew O'Conner has been an activist for years, and has not hidden his disdain for this looming war in Iraq. Bernadette McAliskey is a world-famous fighter for her people. Some will say the opinions and freedoms of people like this do not matter in the grand scheme. Others will wave these incidents away as random examples of thoughtless action by petty dictators who were foolishly given badges and authority.
I don't.
It is ironic, in a grisly sort of way. Hard-right conservatives spent the entirety of the Clinton administration baying to anyone fearful enough to listen that the President was coming for their freedoms, that it was only a matter of time before the Bill of Rights was destroyed. The myth of the black helicopters, the apocalyptic views of the Turner Diaries, and a smoking crater in Oklahoma City all testified to the brittle paranoia these people promulgated in those years.
Now, those same people have representatives with parallel views on virtually every domestic and foreign policy idea in control of the House, the Senate, the White House, the Supreme Court, the intelligence services and the United States military. These are the people who brought us the Patriot Act, versions 1.0 and 2.0, the people who are responsible for the most incredible constitutional redactions in our history.
Ask Mr. O'Conner and Ms. McAliskey about it. They can tell you what happens to undesirables these days.
When you murder peaceful dissent in America, you murder America itself. When you harass innocent people for their past and present views, you spread fear within an already terrified nation. This is not about some fool of a Secret Service agent jumping the gun on an innocuous online comment, or an airline security officer with a penchant for bullyragging 55 year old women. This is a failure from the top down, an empowerment - by the man charged with defending our constitution - of lesser jackasses with large badges who do not understand nor care for the importance of their positions. This is about failed leadership, and the despoiling of everything that makes this place precious and unique and sacred.
In other words, Bush is out of control.
Bush is out of control.
Bush is out of control.
Come and get me.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times bestselling author of two books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available in May 2003 from Pluto Press. He teaches high school in Boston, MA.
Suitcase surprise: Rebuke written on inspection notice
By Susan Gilmore for the Seattle Times.
Seth Goldberg says that when he opened his suitcase in San Diego after a flight from Seattle this month, the two "No Iraq War" signs he'd picked up at the Pike Place Market were still nestled among his clothes.But there was a third sign, he said, that shocked him. Tucked in his luggage was a card from the Transportation Security Administration notifying him that his bags had been opened and inspected at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Handwritten on the side of the card was a note, "Don't appreciate your anti-American attitude!"
"I found it chilling and a little Orwellian to have received this message," said Goldberg, 41, a New Jersey resident who was in Seattle visiting longtime friend Davis Oldham, a University of Washington instructor.
Goldberg says that when he took his suitcase off the airplane in San Diego, the zipper pulls were sealed with nylon straps, which indicated TSA had inspected the luggage. It would be hard, he said, for anyone else to have gotten inside his bags.
TSA officials say they are looking into the incident. "We do not condone our employees making any kind of political comments or personal comments to any travelers," TSA spokeswoman Heather Rosenker told Reuters. "That is not acceptable."
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134653764_tsasign15m.html
Saturday, March 15, 2003 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Suitcase surprise: Rebuke written on inspection notice
By Susan Gilmore
Seattle Times staff reporter
Seth Goldberg says he found this notice — and note — in his luggage after it was inspected earlier this month at Sea-Tac Airport.
Seth Goldberg says that when he opened his suitcase in San Diego after a flight from Seattle this month, the two "No Iraq War" signs he'd picked up at the Pike Place Market were still nestled among his clothes.
But there was a third sign, he said, that shocked him. Tucked in his luggage was a card from the Transportation Security Administration notifying him that his bags had been opened and inspected at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Handwritten on the side of the card was a note, "Don't appreciate your anti-American attitude!"
"I found it chilling and a little Orwellian to have received this message," said Goldberg, 41, a New Jersey resident who was in Seattle visiting longtime friend Davis Oldham, a University of Washington instructor.
Goldberg says that when he took his suitcase off the airplane in San Diego, the zipper pulls were sealed with nylon straps, which indicated TSA had inspected the luggage. It would be hard, he said, for anyone else to have gotten inside his bags.
TSA officials say they are looking into the incident. "We do not condone our employees making any kind of political comments or personal comments to any travelers," TSA spokeswoman Heather Rosenker told Reuters. "That is not acceptable."
Goldberg, who is restoring a historic home in New Jersey, said he picked up the "No Iraq War" signs because he hadn't seen them in New Jersey and wanted to put them up at his house.
"In New Jersey there's very little in the way of protest and when I got to Seattle I was amazed how many anti-war signs were up in front of houses," he said. "I'm not a political activist but was distressed by the way the country was rolling off to war."
Goldberg said he checked two bags at Sea-Tac on March 2 and traveled to San Diego on Alaska Airlines. The TSA station was adjacent to the Alaska check-in counter.
Nico Melendez, western regional spokesman for the TSA, said the note in Goldberg's luggage will be investigated, but he said there's no proof that a TSA employee wrote it. "It's a leap to say it was a TSA screener," Melendez said.
But Goldberg said, "It seems a little far-fetched to think people are running around the airport writing messages on TSA literature and slipping them into people's bags."
He says TSA should take responsibility and refocus its training "so TSA employees around the country are not trampling people's civil rights, not intimidating or harassing travelers. That's an important issue."
Oldham, the UW instructor, said he was so upset by the incident he wrote members of Congress. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., has asked TSA for a response.
"The Senator certainly agrees with you that it is completely inappropriate for a public employee to write their opinion of your or your friend's political opinion," said Jay Pearson, aide to Cantwell, in a letter to Oldham. He said he expects it may take a month or more to hear back from the TSA.
"I just thought it was outrageous," Oldham said. "It's one of many things happening recently where the government is outstepping its bounds in the midst of paranoia."
Susan Gilmore: 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com
Today I saw this article on BoingBoing and my friend Cam and I were discussing it while riding in a Taxicab to downtown Austin. (I'm still here for SXSW 2003.)
I mentioned that cab companies around the country already keep information on every pick-up and drop off that takes place, and that the information is already available to the cops without a subpoena or anything. The cops often need a witness or something when a crime has been committed, and can then ask whatever cabby might have been in the area at that time (like in Law and Order). (I gleaned these facts some time ago from my cabbies back home in San Francisco.)
Our Austin cab driver told us that they've had black boxes in Austin for years. That the cops know exactly where every driver is at all times within 10 feet (theoretically), and that they can tell everytime the meter is started or paused, idling, etc., and when the engine turns off and on, etc.
The only way to drive anonymously is to turn everything off inside the car: the meter, blackbloxes, gps, etc. None of the other devices will work without the black box on. (Note: the car itself will operate without the monitoring equipment on.)
Of course, if you turn everything else off, then that in itself looks suspicious (we all mused).
It would appear that the devices currently installed within all of the cabs in Austin, TX already go far above and beyond those described in this WSJ article.
Here's the WSJ article on the subject written by William M. Bulkeley:
Taxis Soon May Acquire Their Own 'Black Boxes'
The devices, somewhat like the "black boxes" in commercial airliners, will sense a crash and automatically report data on speed, location, brake pressure and number of passengers to a crash-records depository run by International Business Machines Corp., Armonk, N.Y.Ralph Bisceglia, director of American Transit, said it expects to get "important feedback on auto-safety features," and to combat fraud. For example, if a cab driver claims he "was under the speed limit and the passenger claims he was speeding, the box will tell you," he said.
The program illustrates the growing interest of insurers and fleet owners in using "telematics" in vehicles to remotely monitor what drivers do, where they go and how the vehicle is performing.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104752623581462300,00.html?mod=telecommunications%5Fprimary%5Fhs
Taxis Soon May Acquire
Their Own 'Black Boxes'
By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Crash-prone New York taxi drivers could soon confront a new witness when explaining accidents to insurers: a black box connected to their car's controls that senses precrash speed and other factors.
Closely held American Transit Insurance Co., New York, which insures 80% of the taxis and limousines in the Big Apple, said the devices will be installed late this summer. The company plans to offer $300 insurance discounts to induce owners of as many as 1,500 cabs to take part.
The devices, somewhat like the "black boxes" in commercial airliners, will sense a crash and automatically report data on speed, location, brake pressure and number of passengers to a crash-records depository run by International Business Machines Corp., Armonk, N.Y.
Ralph Bisceglia, director of American Transit, said it expects to get "important feedback on auto-safety features," and to combat fraud. For example, if a cab driver claims he "was under the speed limit and the passenger claims he was speeding, the box will tell you," he said.
The program illustrates the growing interest of insurers and fleet owners in using "telematics" in vehicles to remotely monitor what drivers do, where they go and how the vehicle is performing.
Wednesday, IBM and Norwich Union, a car-insurance unit of Britain's Aviva PLC, announced plans to put black boxes in 5,000 volunteers' cars. The aim is to see whether people who drive less should get lower insurance rates. That program could raise invasion-of-privacy issues, because it keep tabs on when, where and how much the cars are driven.
Jim Ruthven, IBM's program director for telematics, said the taxi program shouldn't raise similar concerns, because data would be sent to computer systems only when a crash occurred. IBM, which is developing what it expects will be a large business in telematics for monitoring and communicating with automobiles, is helping design the system and will run it.
The in-car devices take advantage of the multitude of sensors auto makers have deployed in cars, often under government mandates, to monitor emissions and detect passenger presence for air-bag and seat-belt systems. Normally the information stays in the car, but in the taxi system, IBM plans to connect the sensors to a black box the size of a cigarette pack that would send five seconds worth of data about the car as a text message over the cellphone network, every time an air bag exploded.
The black boxes for taxis will be custom-designed, but ultimately will cost a few hundred dollars a vehicle, IBM predicts.
The program also involves Safety Intelligence Systems Corp., a Atlanta, Ga., company established by Ricardo Martinez, former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Safety Intelligence is developing a central data repository for real-time crash information that it hopes to sell to insurers, auto makers and governments.
Dr. Martinez, a former emergency-room physician, said that most car crashes are studied only after they occur. "There's very little data, and most of that is from laboratories -- not the real world."
Write to William M. Bulkeley at bill.bulkeley@wsj.com
Libraries post Patriot Act warnings
Santa Cruz branches tell patrons that FBI may spy on them
The signs, posted in the 10 county branches last week and on the library's Web site, also inform the reader that the USA Patriot Act "prohibits library workers from informing you if federal agents have obtained records about you.""Questions about this policy," patrons are told, "should be directed to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. 20530."
...Section 215 of the act allows FBI agents to obtain a warrant from a secret federal court for library or bookstore records of anyone connected to an investigation of international terrorism or spying.
Unlike conventional search warrants, there is no need for agents to show that the target is suspected of a crime or possesses evidence of a crime. As the Santa Cruz signs indicate, the law prohibits libraries and bookstores from telling their patrons, or anyone else, that the FBI has sought the records.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/03/10/MN14634.DTL
Libraries post Patriot Act warnings
Santa Cruz branches tell patrons that FBI may spy on them
Bob Egelko, Maria Alicia Gaura, Chronicle Staff Writers Monday, March 10, 2003
Click to View Click to View
Along with the usual reminders to hold the noise down and pay overdue fines, library patrons in Santa Cruz are seeing a new type of sign these days: a warning that records of the books they borrow may wind up in the hands of federal agents.
The signs, posted in the 10 county branches last week and on the library's Web site, also inform the reader that the USA Patriot Act "prohibits library workers from informing you if federal agents have obtained records about you."
"Questions about this policy," patrons are told, "should be directed to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. 20530."
Library goers were swift to denounce the act's provisions.
"It's none of their business what anybody's reading," said Cathy Simmons of Boulder Creek. "It's counterproductive to what libraries are all about."
"I'm not reading anything they'd be particularly interested in, but that's not the point," said Ari Avraham of Santa Cruz. "This makes me think of Big Brother."
The Justice Department says libraries have become a logical target of surveillance in light of evidence that some Sept. 11 hijackers used library computers to communicate with each other.
But the signs ordered by the Santa Cruz library board -- a more elaborate version of warnings posted in several libraries around the nation -- are adding to the heat now being generated by a once-obscure provision of the Patriot Act.
Section 215 of the act allows FBI agents to obtain a warrant from a secret federal court for library or bookstore records of anyone connected to an investigation of international terrorism or spying.
Unlike conventional search warrants, there is no need for agents to show that the target is suspected of a crime or possesses evidence of a crime. As the Santa Cruz signs indicate, the law prohibits libraries and bookstores from telling their patrons, or anyone else, that the FBI has sought the records.
The provision was virtually unnoticed when the Patriot Act, a major expansion of government search and surveillance authority, was passed by Congress six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But in the last year, Section 215 has roused organizations of librarians and booksellers into a burst of political activity, and is being cited increasingly by critics as an example of the new law's intrusiveness.
SANDERS' REPEAL BILL
Even as a leaked copy of a Bush administration proposal to expand the Patriot Act was circulating, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., introduced a bill last week to repeal the library and bookstore provisions -- the first bill in the House, and the second in Congress, seeking to roll back any part of the Patriot Act.
Sanders, who voted against the Patriot Act, said he decided to target a "particularly onerous" provision that affects large numbers of people. His Freedom to Read Protection Act would allow library and bookstore searches only if federal agents first showed they were likely to find evidence of a crime.
The bill's 23 co-sponsors include four Bay Area Democrats -- Reps. Barbara Lee of Oakland, Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma, Sam Farr of Carmel and Pete Stark of Fremont.
The Bush administration has refused to say how it has used Section 215 -- prompting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by library and bookseller organizations -- and has made few public comments on the issue. One statement by a high-ranking Justice Department official, however, may have inadvertently helped to fuel the rollback efforts.
In a letter to an inquiring senator, Assistant Attorney General Daniel Bryant said Americans who borrow or buy books surrender their right of privacy.
A patron who turns over information to the library or bookstore "assumes the risk that the entity may disclose it to another," Bryant, the Justice Department's chief of legislative affairs, said in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
'INHERENTLY LIMITED' RIGHT
He said an individual's right of privacy in such records is "inherently limited" and is outweighed by the government's need for the information, if the FBI can show it is relevant to an "investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
Bryant's letter, dated Dec. 23, was slow to surface publicly but is now being held up by library and bookstore associations as evidence of the menace of government surveillance.
"Bookstore customers buy books with the expectation that their privacy will be protected," said the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which represents independent bookstores. "If (Bryant) is in any doubt about this, he can ask Kenneth Starr, who outraged the nation by trying to subpoena Monica Lewinsky's book purchases."
"I find it profoundly disturbing that an assistant attorney general asserts that we have lost the right to privacy in that kind of information," said Deborah Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. "The republic was founded on the premise that you don't have to share your thoughts."
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said Bryant was merely pointing out that patrons voluntarily turn over information to libraries and bookstores and shouldn't be surprised if others learn about it. Corallo also said the provisions pose no threat to ordinary Americans, only to would-be terrorists.
Before demanding records from a library or bookstore under the Patriot Act, he said, "one has to convince a judge that the person for whom you're seeking a warrant is a spy or a member of a terrorist organization. The idea that any American citizen can have their records checked by the FBI, that's not true."
U.S. DECIDES WHO IS TERRORIST
Once the government decides someone is a terrorist, Corallo said, "We would want to know what they're reading. They may be trying to get information on infrastructure. They may be looking in the public library for information that would allow them to plan operations."
Responding to such positions, the leaders of the 64,000-member American Library Association passed a resolution in January calling the Patriot Act provisions "a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users" and urging Congress to change the law.
And while the views of individual librarians are apparently more varied than those of their association, a recent nationwide survey found that most felt the Patriot Act went too far.
Nearly 60 percent of the 906 librarians who replied to a University of Illinois questionnaire between October and January believed that the law's so- called gag order -- which prohibits libraries from disclosing that the FBI has requested their records -- was unconstitutional.
Asked if they would defy an agent's nondisclosure order, 5.5 percent said they definitely would, and another 16.1 percent said they probably would -- even though the law makes such defiance a crime.
In Santa Cruz, where library officials are trying to stir up patrons about the Patriot Act, chief librarian Anne Turner has found a more subtle way to sidestep the gag order, if she ever faces one.
"At each board meeting I tell them we have not been served by any (search warrants)," she said. "In any months that I don't tell them that, they'll know. "
From the "how 'bout telling me something I don't know
U.S. Expands Clandestine Surveillance Operations
The number of secret searches approved by Ashcroft since the 9/11 attacks is triple those authorized in the previous 20 years.
By Richard B. Schmitt for the LA Times.
The Justice Department has stepped up use of a secretive process that enables the attorney general to personally authorize electronic surveillance and physical searches of suspected terrorists, spies and other national-security threats without immediate court oversight.
Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday he has authorized more than 170 such emergency searches since the Sept. 11 attacks -- more than triple the 47 emergency searches that have been authorized by other attorneys general in the last 20 years.
A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enables the FBI and other investigators to conduct intelligence operations under the supervision of a secret federal tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Over the years, the number of such FISA applications has grown -- and civil liberties' groups and defense lawyers have complained that the law has become a tool to dilute suspects' constitutional rights.
Now, Justice Department officials are pushing the law's limits even further. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, officials have seized on a provision that allows them to launch emergency searches signed only by the attorney general. The department must still persuade the secret court that the search is justified -- but officials have 72 hours from the time the search is launched, and such requests are almost always granted.
Ashcroft's tally was more fuel for critics of the law who contend that it already operates in the shadows.
"That is a startling increase," said Timothy Edgar, a legislative counsel for the ACLU.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-terror5mar05,0,5150443.story
Los Angeles Times - latimes.com
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department has stepped up use of a secretive process that enables the attorney general to personally authorize electronic surveillance and physical searches of suspected terrorists, spies and other national-security threats without immediate court oversight.
Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday he has authorized more than 170 such emergency searches since the Sept. 11 attacks -- more than triple the 47 emergency searches that have been authorized by other attorneys general in the last 20 years.
A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enables the FBI and other investigators to conduct intelligence operations under the supervision of a secret federal tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Over the years, the number of such FISA applications has grown -- and civil liberties' groups and defense lawyers have complained that the law has become a tool to dilute suspects' constitutional rights.
Now, Justice Department officials are pushing the law's limits even further. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, officials have seized on a provision that allows them to launch emergency searches signed only by the attorney general. The department must still persuade the secret court that the search is justified -- but officials have 72 hours from the time the search is launched, and such requests are almost always granted.
Ashcroft's tally was more fuel for critics of the law who contend that it already operates in the shadows.
"That is a startling increase," said Timothy Edgar, a legislative counsel for the ACLU.
Edgar and others are concerned that law-enforcement officials are pursuing run-of-the-mill criminal cases under the guise of national security. The trouble, they say, is that defendants' customary 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches don't apply in FISA cases. Others point to the fact that the number of search warrants obtained by federal investigators in intelligence cases in recent years has started to outstrip the number in criminal cases.
The process "is getting attenuated from any kind of effective judicial oversight," said Joshua Dratel, a New York lawyer who helped represent the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers in a challenge to FISA last year. "The question now becomes, 'How much can a court tolerate before it reins this in?' "
Currently, the Justice Department is only required to report publicly how many FISA search applications it pursues annually and how many are approved. Several members of Congress have introduced legislation that would expand the reporting requirements -- to detail the number of searches of U.S. citizens, for instance.
"The bare numbers cry out for further scrutiny," said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington civil-liberties group.
Separately, Ashcroft announced the unsealing of charges in Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court against two Yemeni citizens, Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed. Ashcroft said the men stand accused of conspiring to provide material support to the Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorist groups through a worldwide fund-raising operation that netted Osama bin Laden $20 million.
According to Ashcroft, a portion of the funds came from the Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn, a onetime gathering place for Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the blind sheik, and other men, all of whom were convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The men were arrested Jan. 10 in Frankfurt, Germany; the U.S. is seeking their extradition. A Justice Department spokesman said announcement of the arrests was delayed for "operational reasons."
In a related development, U.S. counter-terrorism officials confirmed Tuesday that the second man arrested Saturday in a predawn raid in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, is Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, one of Al Qaeda's top paymasters. Hawsawi was captured with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an Al Qaeda leader believed to be plotting additional attacks on the United States and elsewhere.
The Justice Department has accused Hawsawi of funding the Sept. 11 attacks by wiring more than $100,000 to the hijackers for their living expenses, flight lessons and airline tickets after they arrived in the United States. Just before they embarked on their deadly journeys, several of the hijackers wired the money they had not spent back to Hawsawi in the United Arab Emirates.
Federal law enforcement officials described the arrest as "extremely significant."
"This is a huge catch," one official said Tuesday. "Not as huge as Mohammed, obviously, but one of the more significant arrests we've made since the Sept. 11 attacks."
After he was captured, Hawsawi, a native of Saudi Arabia, initially gave authorities a false name and nationality, claiming he was Somali.
Several senior counter-terrorism officials have described Hawsawi as far more than just a conduit, portraying him as a senior financial operative for Bin Laden and the entire Al Qaeda network.
"Every time we can have any success in cracking the financial network of Al Qaeda brings us much closer to breaking the back of the network itself," one official said.
*
Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.
So we can give up all of our freedoms, and create hassles and holdups in every aspect of our daily lives, and there's still really no way to protect ourselves from becoming "soft targets" once the war has begun.
Sounds like another good reason to NOT START THE WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Sounds like an even better reason to NOT GIVE UP ALL OF OUR FREEDOMS since it won't make us any safer anyway.
I have a real problem with articles like this. Parts of it regarding the use of Total Information Awareness are informative, but the rest of it just adds to the hysteria.
Are we drawing up roadmaps for the terrorists now?
Writers and officers are thinking up horrific potential disasters, and printing them up, with details about which places would be best to blow up in order to cause the largest amounts of casualties -- and for what purpose? To let us know how bad it could be if we don't let our freedoms be compromised? To add to the re-freakening of America, perhaps?
At the risk of adding to the hysteria. I bring this article to you.
Fortress America
By Matthew Brzezinski fo the NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23FORTRESS.html
February 23, 2003
Fortress America
By MATTHEW BRZEZINSKI
In the last several weeks, as preparations for the war against Iraq
have heated up, it has begun to sink in that this will be a different
conflict from what we have
seen before -- that there may, in fact, be two fronts, one far away
on the ground in the Middle East, the other right here at home. For the
first time in history,
it seems plausible that an enemy might mount a sustained attack on
the United States, using weapons of terrorism. The term ''soft
targets,'' which refers to
everyday places like offices, shopping malls, restaurants and hotels, is
now casually dropped into conversation, the way military planners talk
about ''collateral
damage.''
Earlier this month, the federal government raised the official terrorism
alert level and advised Americans to prepare a ''disaster supply kit,''
including duct tape to
seal windows against airborne toxins. Members of Congress organized news
conferences to demand that passenger jets be outfitted with
missile-avoidance
systems. In major public areas of cities, the police presence has been
especially conspicuous, with weapons ostentatiously displayed. Whatever
the details, the
message was the same: war is on the way here.
The impossible questions begin with where, what and how, and end with
what to do about it. Sgt. George McClaskey, a Baltimore cop, spends his
days thinking
about the answers, and one cold day recently, he took me out in an old
police launch to survey Baltimore harbor. He showed me some of the new
security
measures, like the barriers at the approach to the harbor, which rose
out of the water like stakes in a moat. Cables were suspended between
these reinforced
pylons, designed to slice into approaching high-speed craft and
decapitate would-be suicide bombers before they reached their mark. It
looked fairly daunting.
Then McClaskey maneuvered the boat toward an unprotected stretch of
Baltimore's Inner Harbor. With the temperature dipping into the teens,
the place was
empty. But when the weather is warm, up to a quarter of a million people
congregate on these piers and brightly painted promenades every weekend.
''If I wanted to create a big bang,'' McClaskey said, adopting the
mind-set of a suicide bomber, ''I'd pack a small boat with explosives
and crash it right there.'' He
pointed to a promenade. ''It'd be a catastrophe,'' he declared. ''It
would take 48 hours just for the tide to flush out the bodies from under
the boardwalk.''
The port is lined with large oil terminals, storage tanks and
petrochemical facilities, incendiaries in need only of a lighted fuse.
Even the Domino sugar refinery,
with its sticky-sweet flammable dust, poses a threat. ''Most people
don't think about it,'' McClaskey said, ''but that's a giant bomb.''
The list of vulnerabilities is perilously long in Baltimore, as it is
just about everywhere in the United States. And every one of those
potential targets can set in
motion an ever-broadening ripple effect. Should terrorists manage to
blow up an oil terminal in Baltimore, for instance, the nearby
ventilation systems for the
I-95 tunnel would have to be shut. Shut down the tunnel, and the
Interstate highway must be closed. Close down a section of I-95, and
traffic along the entire
Eastern Seaboard snarls to a halt.
''So how would you defend against frogmen blowing up half the harbor?''
I asked McClaskey.
The sergeant shrugged uneasily. ''Honestly,'' he confessed, ''I don't
think it's possible.'' Like most law enforcement officers in this
country, McClaskey has been
trained to catch crooks, not to stop submerged suicide bombers.
Imagining doomsday possibilities is one thing; we've all become good at
it these past 18
months. Coming up with counterterror solutions is another story, often
beyond the scope of our imaginations. But while that expertise may not
yet exist in the
United States, it's out there, if you know where to look.
''Sonar,'' replied Rear Adm. Amiram Rafael, when I put the same question
to him 6,000 miles away in Israel, perhaps the one place in the world
where terrorism
is as much a part of daily life as commuter traffic. ''It can
distinguish between humans and large fish by mapping movement patterns
and speed.'' Rafael spent
28 years protecting Israel's coastline from terrorists and now consults
for foreign clients. ''If the alarm sounds, rapid response units in fast
boats are dispatched,''
he said. ''They're equipped with underwater concussion grenades.''
''To stun the divers?'' I asked.
''No,'' Rafael said, flashing a fatherly smile. ''To kill them.''
Until recently, the United States and countries like Israel occupied
opposite ends of the security spectrum: one a confident and carefree
superpower, seemingly
untouchable, the other a tiny garrison state, surrounded by
fortifications and barbed wire, fighting for its survival. But the
security gap between the U.S. and
places like Israel is narrowing. Subways, sewers, shopping centers, food
processing and water systems are all now seen as easy prey for
terrorists.
There is no clear consensus yet on how to go about protecting ourselves.
The federal government recently concluded a 16-month risk assessment,
and last
month, the new Department of Homeland Security was officially born, with
an annual budget of $36 billion. Big money has already been allocated to
shore up
certain perceived weaknesses, including the $5.8 billion spent hiring,
training and equipping federal airport screeners and the $3 billion
allocated for
''bioterrorism preparedness.'' All that has been well publicized. Other
measures, like sophisticated radiation sensors and surveillance systems,
have been installed
in some cities with less fanfare. Meanwhile, the F.B.I. is carrying out
labor-intensive tasks that would have seemed a ludicrous waste of time
18 months ago,
like assembling dossiers on people who take scuba-diving courses.
This marks only the very beginning. A national conversation is starting
about what kind of country we want to live in and what balance we will
tolerate between
public safety and private freedom. The decisions won't come all at once,
and we may be changing our minds a lot, depending on whether there are
more attacks
here, what our government tells us and what we believe. Two weeks ago,
Congress decided to sharply curtail the activities of the Total
Information Awareness
program, a Pentagon project led by Rear Adm. John Poindexter and
invested with power to electronically sift through the private affairs
of American citizens.
For the time being, it was felt that the threat of having the government
look over our credit-card statements and medical records was more
dangerous than its
promised benefits.
Congress didn't completely shut the door on the T.I.A., though. Agents
can still look into the lives of foreigners, and its functions could be
expanded at any
time. We could, for instance, reach the point where we demand the
installation of systems, like the one along the Israeli coastline, to
maim or kill intruders in
certain sensitive areas before they have a chance to explain who they
are or why they're there. We may come to think nothing of American
citizens who act
suspiciously being held without bail or denied legal representation for
indeterminate periods or tried in courts whose proceedings are under
seal. At shopping
malls and restaurants, we may prefer to encounter heavily armed guards
and be subjected to routine searches at the door. We may be willing to
give up the
freedom and ease of movement that has defined American life, if we come
to believe our safety depends upon it.
For the better part of a generation now, Americans have gone to great
lengths to protect their homes -- living in gated communities, wiring
their property with
sophisticated alarms, arming themselves with deadly weapons. Now imagine
this kind of intensity turned outward, into the public realm. As a
culture, our
tolerance for fear is low, and our capacity to do something about it is
unrivaled. We could have the highest degree of public safety the world
has ever seen. But
what would that country look like, and what will it be like to live in
it? Perhaps something like this.
Electronic Frisking Every Day on Your Commute
As a homebound commuter entering Washington's Foggy Bottom subway
station swipes his fare card through the turnstile reader, a computer in
the bowels of
the mass transit authority takes note. A suspicious pattern of movements
has triggered the computer's curiosity.
The giveaway is a microchip in the new digital fare cards, derived from
the electronic ID cards many of us already use to enter our workplaces.
It could be in
use throughout the U.S. within a couple of years. If embedded with the
user's driver's license or national ID number, it would allow
transportation authorities to
keep tabs on who rides the subway, and on when and where they get on and
off.
The commuter steps through the turnstile and is scanned by the radiation
portal. These would be a natural extension of the hand-held detectors
that the police
have started using in the New York subways. A cancer patient was
actually strip-searched in a New York subway station in 2002 after
residue from radiation
treatments tripped the meters. But this doesn't happen to our fictitious
commuter. The meters barely flicker, registering less than one on a
scale of one to nine,
the equivalent of a few microroentgens an hour, nowhere near the 3,800
readout that triggers evacuation sirens.
Imagine a battery of video cameras following the commuter's progress to
the platform, where he reads a newspaper, standing next to an old
utility room that
contains gas masks. Cops in New York already have them as part of their
standard-issue gear, and a fully secure subway system would need them
for
everybody, just as every ferryboat must have a life preserver for every
passenger. Sensors, which are already used in parts of the New York
subway system,
would test the air around him for the presence of chemical agents like
sarin and mustard gases.
The commuter finishes reading his newspaper, but there is no place to
throw it away because all trash cans have been removed, as they were in
London when the
I.R.A. used them to plant bombs. Cameras show the commuter boarding one
of the subway cars, which have been reconfigured to drop oxygen masks
from the
ceiling in the event of a chemical attack, much like jetliners during
decompression. The added security measures have probably pushed fares up
throughout the
country, maybe as much as 40 percent in some places.
The commuter -- now the surveillance subject -- gets off at the next
stop. As he rides the escalator up, a camera positioned overhead zooms
in for a close-up of
him. This image, which will be used to confirm his identity, travels
through fiber-optic cables to the Joint Operations Command Center at
police headquarters.
There, a computer scans his facial features, breaks them down into
three-dimensional plots and compares them with a databank of criminal
mug shots, people on
watch lists and anyone who has ever posed for a government-issue ID. The
facial-recognition program was originally developed at M.I.T. Used
before 9/11
mainly by casinos to ferret out known cardsharps, the system has been
tried by airport and law enforcement authorities and costs $75,000 to
$100,000 per
tower, as the camera stations are called.
''It can be used at A.T.M.'s, car-rental agencies, D.M.V. offices,
border crossings,'' says an executive of Viisage Technology, maker of
the Face-Finder
recognition system. ''These are the sorts of facilities the 19 hijackers
used.''
Almost instantly, the software verifies the subject's identity and
forwards the information to federal authorities. What they do with it
depends on the powers of
the Total Information Awareness program or whatever its successors will
be known as. But let's say that Congress has granted the government
authority to note
certain suspicious patterns, like when someone buys an airline ticket
with cash and leaves the return date open. And let's say the commuter
did just that -- his
credit cards were maxed out, so he had no choice. And he didn't fill in
a return date because he wasn't sure when his next consulting assignment
was going to
start, and he thought he might be able to extend his vacation a few
days.
On top of that, let's say he was also indiscreet in an e-mail message,
making a crude joke to a client about a recent airline crash. Software
programs that scan for
suspect words are not new. Corporations have long used them to
automatically block employee e-mail containing, for instance, multiple
references to sex. The
National Security Agency's global spy satellites and supercomputers have
for years taken the search capability to the next level, processing the
content of up to
two million calls and e-mail messages per hour around the world.
Turning the snooping technology on Americans would not be difficult, if
political circumstances made it seem necessary. Right now, there would
be fierce
resistance to this, but the debate could swing radically to the other
side if the government showed that intercepting e-mail could deter
terrorists from
communicating with one another. Already, says Barry Steinhardt, director
of the A.C.L.U. program on technology and liberty, authorities have been
demanding
records from Internet providers and public libraries about what books
people are taking out and what Web sites they're looking at.
Once the commuter is on the government's radar screen, it would be hard
for him to get off -- as anyone who has ever found themselves on a
mailing or
telemarketers' list can attest. It will be like when you refinance a
mortgage -- suddenly every financial institution in America sends you a
preapproved platinum
card. Once a computer detects a pattern, hidden or overt, your identity
in the digital world is fixed.
Technicians manning the Command Center probably wouldn't know why the
subject is on a surveillance list, or whether he should even be on it in
the first
place. That would be classified, as most aspects of the government's
counterterrorist calculations are.
Nonetheless, they begin to monitor his movements. Cameras on K Street
pick him up as he exits the subway station and hails a waiting taxi. The
cab's license
plate number, as a matter of routine procedure, is run through another
software program -- first used in Peru in the 1990's to detect vehicles
that have been
stolen or registered to terrorist sympathizers, and most recently
introduced in central London to nab motorists who have not paid
peak-hour traffic tariffs.
Technicians get another positive reading; the cabdriver is also on a
watch list. He is a Pakistani immigrant and has traveled back and forth
to Karachi twice in the
last six months, once when his father died, the other to attend his
brother's wedding. These trips seem harmless, but the trackers are
trained not to make these
sorts of distinctions.
So what they see is the possible beginning of a terrorist conspiracy --
one slightly suspicious character has just crossed paths with another
slightly suspicious
character, and that makes them seriously suspicious. At this moment, the
case is forwarded to the new National Counterintelligence Service, which
will pay very
close attention to whatever both men do next.
The N.C.S. does not exist yet, but its creation is advocated by the
likes of Lt. Gen. William Odom, a former head of the National Security
Agency. Whether
modeled after Britain's MI5, a domestic spy agency, or Israel's much
more proactive and unrestricted Shin Bet, the N.C.S. would most likely
require a budget
similar to the F.B.I.'s $4.2 billion and nearly as much personnel as the
bureau's 11,400-strong special agent force, mostly for surveillance
duties.
N.C.S. surveillance agents dispatched to tail the two subjects in the
taxi would have little difficulty following their quarry through
Georgetown, up Wisconsin
Avenue and into Woodley Park. One tool at their disposal could be a
nationwide vehicle tracking system, adapted from the technology used by
Singapore's
Land Transport Authority to regulate traffic and parking. The system
works on the same principle as the E-ZPass toll-road technology, in
which scanners at
tollbooths read signals from transponders installed on the windshields
of passing vehicles to pay tolls automatically. In a future application,
electronic readers
installed throughout major American metropolitan centers could pinpoint
the location of just about any vehicle equipped with mandatory
transponders.
(American motorists would most likely each have to pay an extra $90 fee,
similar to what Singapore charges.)
When the commuter arrives home, N.C.S. agents arrange to put his house
under 24-hour aerial surveillance. The same thing happens to the
cabdriver when he
arrives home. The technology, discreet and effective, is already
deployed in Washington. Modified UH-60A Blackhawk helicopters, the kind
U.S. Customs
uses to intercept drug runners, now patrol the skies over the capital to
enforce no-fly zones. The Pentagon deployed its ultrasophisticated RC-7
reconnaissance
planes during the sniper siege last fall. The surveillance craft, which
have proved their worth along the DMZ in North Korea and against cocaine
barons in
Colombia, come loaded with long-range night-vision and infrared sensors
that permit operators to detect move-ment and snap photos of virtually
anyone's
backyard from as far as 20 miles away.
A Government That Knows When You've Been Bad or Good
In the here and now, an aerial photo of my backyard is on file at the
Joint Operations Command Center in Washington, which, unlike the N.C.S.,
already exists.
The center looks like NASA, starting with the biometric palm-print
scanners on its reinforced doors.
The center has not singled me out for any special surveillance. My
neighbors' houses are all pictured, too, as are still shots and even
three-dimensional images
of just about every building, landmark and lot in central D.C.
The technology isn't revolutionary. How many times a day is the average
American already on camera? There's one in the corner deli where I get
my morning
coffee and bagel. Another one at the A.T.M. outside. Yet another one
films traffic on Connecticut Avenue when I drive my wife to work. The
lobby of her office
building has several. So that's at least four, and it's only 9 a.m.
There are few legal restraints governing video surveillance. It is
perfectly legal for the government to track anyone, anywhere, using
cameras except for inside
his own home, where a warrant is needed to use thermal imaging that can
see all the way into the basement. Backyards or rooftops, however, are
fair game.
There is a growing network of video cameras positioned throughout the
capital that feed into the Joint Operations Command Center, otherwise
known as the
JOCC, which has been operational since 9/11. The experimental facility
is shared by several government agencies, including the Metropolitan
Police
Department, the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the State Department and the
Defense Intelligence Agency. Agents from different law enforcement
bodies man the
JOCC's 36 computer terminals, which are arrayed in long rows beneath
wall-size projection screens, like the Houston space center. The wall
screens
simultaneously display live feeds, digital simulations, city maps with
the locations of recently released felons and gory crime scene footage.
''From here we can tap into schools, subways, landmarks and main
streets,'' says Chief Charles Ramsey of the D.C. Police, with evident
pride. Theoretically,
with a few clicks of the mouse the system could also link up with
thousands of closed-circuit cameras in shopping malls, department stores
and office buildings,
and is programmed to handle live feeds from up to six helicopters
simultaneously. Ramsey is careful to add that, for now, the majority of
the cameras are
off-line most of the time, and that the police aren't using them to look
into elevators or to spy on individuals.
But they could if they wanted to. I ask for a demonstration of the
system's capabilities. A technician punches in a few keystrokes. An
aerial photo of the city
shot earlier from a surveillance plane flashes on one of the big
screens. ''Can you zoom in on Dupont Circle?'' I ask. The screen
flickers, and the thoroughfare's
round fountain comes into view. ''Go up Connecticut Avenue.'' The
outline of the Hilton Hotel where President Reagan was shot
materializes. ''Up a few more
blocks, and toward Rock Creek Park,'' I instruct. ''There, can you get
any closer?'' The image blurs and focuses, and I can suddenly see the
air-conditioning unit
on my roof, my garden furniture and the cypress hedge I recently planted
in my yard.
The fact that government officials can, from a remote location, snoop
into the backyards of most Washingtonians opens up a whole new level of
information
they can find out about us almost effortlessly. They could keep track of
when you come and go from your house, discovering in the process that
you work a
second job or that you are carrying on an extramarital affair. Under
normal circumstances, there's not much they could do with this
information. And for the
time being, that is the way most Americans want it. But this is the kind
of issue that will come up over the next few years. How many extra tools
will we be
willing to grant to the police and federal authorities? How much will we
allow our notions of privacy to narrow?
Because if domestic intelligence agents were able to find out secret
details of people's lives, they could get the cooperation of crucial
witnesses who might
otherwise be inclined to keep quiet. There is more than a whiff of
McCarthyism to all this, but perhaps we will be afraid enough to endure
it.
The JOCC is also studying the effect of large-scale bombs in Washington.
A three-dimensional map of all downtown buildings allows technicians to
simulate
bomb blasts and debris projections. They can also tap into the weather
bureau for real-time data on wind speeds and directions to determine
which parts of the
city would have to be evacuated first in the event of a radiological or
biochemical plume. Programmers are now working on an underground map of
the capital
that would show water and gas distribution and power grids.
Efforts are under way to establish facilities similar to the JOCC in big
urban centers like Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and New York. One
benefit of the
JOCC's is that they are relatively cheap to set up, particularly since
most major cities already have surveillance equipment positioned in
places like tunnels and
bridges. Each command center would likely cost around $7 million to
build, with an additional $15,000 charge for every camera installed.
There is also talk of connecting all the facilities together so that
officials in different parts of the country could coordinate response
efforts to terrorism. ''Attacks
will likely occur in different cities simultaneously,'' Chief Ramsey
says. And as for those civil libertarians uneasy with the notion of
blanket national
surveillance, Ramsey just shrugs. ''We can't pretend we live in the 19th
century. We have to take advantage of technology.''
The Mall Guard Who Carries a Machine Gun
Imagine a wintry scene: snowdrifts and dirty slush and a long line of
people muffled against the cold. This is a line to get into the mall,
and it is moving
frustratingly slowly. What's the holdup? There is no new blockbuster
movie opening that day, or any of those ''everything must go'' clearance
sales that might
justify standing outside freezing for 20 minutes. Customers are simply
waiting to clear security.
Shopping in an environment of total terrorist preparedness promises to
be a vastly different experience from anything ever imagined in America.
But for
millions of people who live in terror-prone places like Israel or the
Philippines, tight security at shopping malls has long been a fact of
life. ''I was shocked when
I first came to the States and could go into any shopping plaza without
going through security,'' says Aviv Tene, a 33-year-old Haifa attorney.
''It seemed so
strange, and risky.''
It took me just under eight minutes to clear the security checkpoint
outside the Dizengoff Center in downtown Tel Aviv. But that was on a
rainy weekday
morning before the food courts and multiplex theater had opened.
The future shopping experience will start at the parking-lot entrance.
Booths manned by guards will control access to and from lots to prevent
terrorists from
emulating the Washington sniper and using parking lots as shooting
galleries. Cars entering underground garages will have their trunks
searched for
explosives, as is the practice in Manila. It has also become common
outside New York City hotels. This will guard against car or truck bombs
of the type that
blew up beneath the World Trade Center in 1993.
No one will be able to drive closer than a hundred yards to mall
entrances. Concrete Jersey barriers will stop anyone from crashing a
vehicle into the buildings
-- a favored terrorist tactic for American targets overseas -- or into
the crowds of customers lining up. Screening will follow the Israeli
model: metal barricades
will funnel shoppers through checkpoints at all doors. They will be
frisked, and both they and their bags will be searched and run through
metal detectors.
Security would be tightest in winter, says a former senior F.B.I. agent,
because AK-47's and grenade belts are easily concealed beneath heavy
coats.
What won't be concealed, of course, are the weapons carried by the
police at the mall. Major shopping areas will not be patrolled by the
docile, paid-by-the-hour
guards to whom we're accustomed, but -- like airports and New York City
tourist attractions -- by uniformed cops and soldiers with rifles.
What will it be like to encounter such firearms on a regular basis? I
lived for years in Moscow, and after a short time, I rarely noticed the
guns. In fact, I tended
to feel more uncomfortable when armed guards were not around; Israelis
traveling in the United States occasionally say the same thing. But
despite the
powerful presence of guns in popular culture, few Americans have had
much contact with the kind of heavy weapons that are now becoming a
common sight on
city streets. Such prominent displays are meant to convey the notion
that the government is doing something to ward off terrorists, but they
can have the reverse
effect too, of constantly reminding us of imminent danger.
Even more mundane procedures might have the same effect -- for example,
being asked to produce a national identification card every time you go
into a store,
much the same way clubgoers have to prove they are of age. The idea of a
national identity card, once widely viewed as un-American, is gaining
ground in
Washington, where some are advocating standardizing driver's licenses
throughout the country as a first step in that direction. Though perhaps
reminiscent of
Big Brother, these cards are not uncommon in the rest of the world, even
in Western Europe. In Singapore, the police frequently ask people to
produce their
papers; it becomes so routine that people cease being bothered by it.
How long would it take Americans to become similarly inured?
The new ID's, which are advocated by computer industry leaders like
Larry Ellison of Oracle, could resemble the digital smart cards that
Chinese authorities
plan to introduce in Hong Kong by the end of the year. These contain
computer chips with room to store biographical, financial and medical
histories, and
tamper-proof algorithms of the cardholder's thumbprint that can be
verified by hand-held optical readers. Based on the $394 million Hong
Kong has budgeted
for smart cards for its 6.8 million residents, a similar program in the
U.S. could run as high as $16 billion.
Among other things, a national identity card program would make it much
harder for people without proper ID to move around and therefore much
easier for
police and domestic-intelligence agents to track them down. And once
found, such people might discover they don't quite have the rights they
thought they had.
Even now, for instance, U.S. citizens can be declared ''enemy
combatants'' and be detained without counsel. Within a few years,
America's counterterrorist
agencies could have the kind of sweeping powers of arrest and
interrogation that have developed in places like Israel, the Philippines
and even France, where the
constant threat of terrorism enabled governments to do virtually
whatever it takes to prevent terrorism. ''As long as you worry too much
about making false
arrests and don't start taking greater risks,'' says Offer Einav, a
15-year Shin Bet veteran who now runs a security consulting firm, ''you
are never going to beat
terrorism.''
In years past, the U.S. has had to rely on other governments to take
these risks. For example, the mastermind of the 1993 W.T.C. bombing,
Ramzi Yousef, was
caught only after Philippine investigators used what official
intelligence documents delicately refer to as ''tactical interrogation''
to elicit a confession from an
accomplice arrested in Manila. In U.S. court testimony, the accomplice,
Abdul Hakim Murad, later testified that he was beaten to within an inch
of his life.
In Israel, it is touted that 90 percent of suicide bombers are caught
before they get near their targets, a record achieved partly because the
Shin Bet can do almost
anything it deems necessary to save lives. ''They do things we would not
be comfortable with in this country,'' says former Assistant F.B.I.
Director Steve
Pomerantz, who, along with a growing number of U.S. officials, has
traveled to Israel recently for antiterror training seminars.
But the U.S. is moving in the Israeli direction. The U.S.A. Patriot Act,
rushed into law six weeks after 9/11, has given government agencies wide
latitude to
invoke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and get around judicial
restraints on search, seizure and surveillance of American citizens.
FISA, originally
intended to hunt international spies, permits the authorities to wiretap
virtually at will and break into people's homes to plant bugs or copy
documents. Last year,
surveillance requests by the federal government under FISA outnumbered
for the first time in U.S. history all of those under domestic law.
New legislative proposals by the Justice Department now seek to take the
Patriot Act's antiterror powers several steps further, including the
right to strip terror
suspects of their U.S. citizenship. Under the new bill -- titled the
Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 -- the government would not be
required to
disclose the identity of anyone detained in connection with a terror
investigation, and the names of those arrested, be they Americans or
foreign nationals, would
be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, according to the Center
for Public Integrity, a rights group in Washington, which has obtained a
draft of the
bill. An American citizen suspected of being part of a terrorist
conspiracy could be held by investigators without anyone being notified.
He could simply
disappear.
The Face-to-Face Interrogation on Your Vacation
Some aspects of life would, in superficial ways, seem easier, depending
on who you are and what sort of specialized ID you carry. Boarding an
international
flight, for example, might not require a passport for frequent fliers.
At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, ''trusted'' travelers -- those who
have submitted to
background checks -- are issued a smart card encoded with the pattern of
their iris. When they want to pass through security, a scanner checks
their eyes and
verifies their identities, and they are off. The whole process takes 20
seconds, according to Dutch officials. At Ben-Gurion in Israel, the same
basic function is
carried out by electronic palm readers.
''We start building dossiers the moment someone buys a ticket,'' says
Einav, the Shin Bet veteran who also once served as head of El Al
security. ''We have quite
a bit of information on our frequent fliers. So we know they are not a
security risk.''
The technology frees up security personnel to focus their efforts on
everybody else, who, on my recent trip to Jerusalem, included me. As a
holder of a
Canadian passport (a favorite of forgers) that has visa stamps from a
number of high-risk countries ending in ''stan,'' I was subjected to a
40-minute
interrogation. My clothes and belongings were swabbed for explosives
residue. Taken to a separate room, I was questioned about every detail
of my stay in
Israel, often twice to make certain my story stayed consistent. Whom did
you meet? Where did you meet? What was the address? Do you have the
business
cards of the people you met? Can we see them? What did you discuss? Can
we see your notes? Do you have any maps with you? Did you take any
photographs while you were in Israel? Are you sure? Did you rent a car?
Where did you drive to? Do you have a copy of your hotel bill? Why do
you have a
visa to Pakistan? Why do you live in Washington? Can we see your D.C.
driver's license? Where did you live before Washington? Why did you live
in
Moscow? Are you always this nervous?
A Russian speaker was produced to verify that I spoke the language. By
the time I was finally cleared, I almost missed my flight. ''Sorry for
the delay,''
apologized the young security officer. ''Don't take it personally.''
El Al is a tiny airline that has a fleet of just 30 planes and flies to
a small handful of destinations. It is also heavily subsidized by the
government. This is what
has made El Al and Ben-Gurion safe from terrorists for more than 30
years.
Getting the American airline system up to this level would require a
great deal more than reinforced cockpit doors and the armed air marshals
now aboard
domestic and international flights. It would require changing
everything, including the cost and frequency of flights. Nothing could
be simpler, right now, than
flying from New York to Pittsburgh -- every day, there are at least a
dozen direct flights available from the city's three airports and
countless more connecting
flights. Bought a week or two in advance, these tickets can be as cheap
as $150 round-trip.
Making U.S. airlines as security-conscious as El Al would put the U.S.
back where the rest of the world is -- maybe a flight or two a day from
New York to
Pittsburgh, at much higher costs, and no assurance whatsoever you can
get on the plane you want. Flights would take longer, and landings might
be a little more
interesting, because pilots would have to stay away from densely
populated areas, where a plane downed by a shoulder-launched Stinger
missile could do
terrible damage.
Kayaking in the Wrong Place Is a Federal Crime
In a state of full readiness, American cities would be a patchwork of
places you couldn't go near. At first, most people wouldn't even notice
when no-sail zones
were instituted around all 50 major industrial ports in the country.
Maybe they would find out when they went to a local marina where they
occasionally rent a
small outboard to go water-skiing and found that it had been closed and
relocated. Or maybe they went kayaking up near the Indian Point nuclear
plant on the
Hudson and spent an afternoon talking to the Coast Guard after they got
a little too close.
There may be a lot of places private boats will be unable to go, like
anywhere near a shipping channel used by oil and gas freighters.
Infrared and video optronic
systems that can detect small boats, and even inflatable rubber craft,
may be deployed to enforce the no-sail zones. ''We invented it after
terrorists rode a
freighter to within 10 miles of Tel Aviv,'' says Rafael, the former
Israeli rear admiral, ''and used inflatable boats to attack beachfront
hotels.''
Each optronic installation costs $2 million, and four or five of the
units would be needed to protect the approach to any major harbor,
Rafael says. The system
would thus cost around $500 million.
''I'm always amazed at how lightly defended your industry is compared to
most other countries,'' says Hezy Ribak, another Israeli intelligence
expert, who runs a
security consulting firm. ''In Israel, we treat security at our
industrial facilities the way we do borders. The stakes,'' he adds,
''are just as high, higher if you
consider the damage terrorists can do if they infiltrate a nuclear power
plant or blow up a gas reservoir.''
The P-Glilot natural gas reservoir near Tel Aviv is a good example of
what security experts like Ribak have in mind for the U.S. From a
distance, P-Glilot
doesn't seem all that different than similar installations in New
Jersey, Ohio or Texas. The massive storage tanks are even painted with
quaint butterflies and
birds. But just off the highway, watchtowers dot the landscape. If you
drive closer, the complex takes on the feel of a military garrison, with
high walls and
electric fences bristling with sensors and cameras, and notices posted
in Hebrew, English and Arabic warning: ''No Photography.'' Pull off the
road and park by
the perimeter fence for a mere 15 seconds, and a metallic voice sounds
from an unseen loudspeaker, calling out your license plate number and
telling you to
move on.
''Security,'' Einav says, ''is about layers, creating buffer zones.'' On
the ground, that means changing the way industrial sites are guarded.
Security precautions in
the U.S. are concentrated around the core of the targets -- be they
reactors, pumping stations or chemical plants -- rather than the
perimeter. ''Security at the
main buildings might stop environmental protesters or the lone crazy,
but it doesn't help in the case of a truck loaded with explosives,
because the terrorists have
already reached their objective,'' Ribak says. ''Why give yourself so
little room? There should be as big a buffer as possible between the
first line of defense --
the perimeter of the property -- and the target, to give yourself early
warning.''
Perimeters, Ribak says, will need to be equipped with vibration sensors;
thermal and infrared cameras; buried magnetic detection devices that can
distinguish
between humans, animals and vehicles; and several rows of old-fashioned
razor coil to delay intruders, giving guards time to respond to alarms.
In the U.S., where many industrial facilities are concentrated in dense
urban areas, such security measures would necessitate the rerouting of
highways and
possibly the relocation of neighborhoods that are just too close. In New
York City, power plants sit right in the middle of residential
neighborhoods, like the one
at 14th Street and Avenue D in the East Village. It is across the street
from Stuyvesant Town and a public housing project, home to tens of
thousands of people.
Israeli security officials shake their heads in astonishment at such
''crazy'' U.S. practices, but then again who ever thought that putting
an airport next to the
Pentagon was a security risk?
Securing dense, mixed-use urban neighborhoods could not only complicate
housing markets and commuting patterns, which are typically a disaster
in most
cities already, but could also come at tremendous expense. Consider the
Donald C. Cook nuclear power plant in Berrien County, Mich. It has two
Westinghouse reactors and sits on a relatively cramped 650-acre plot.
Just to provide a three-mile buffer around the plant would run $76
million, according to
U.S.D.A. statistics on the average price per acre of land in Michigan.
For the Indian Point plant in Westchester, the cost would be
exponentially higher. Add to
that the $3.5 billion to $7 billion estimated by a recent Princeton
University study to safeguard spent fuel pools from air attack, the
roughly $3.5 million price
tag of new perimeter sensors and the $160 million that Raytheon charges
for a Patriot missile battery capable of knocking out airborne threats,
and multiply the
total by the 103 nuclear power stations in the country.
Now factor in the 276,000 natural gas wells in the U.S., the 1.5 million
miles of unprotected pipelines, the 161 oil refineries, 2,000 oil
storage facilities and
10,400 hydro, coal and gas-fired power generating stations, and you get
a sense of the costs involved.
Every Day Is Super Bowl Sunday
But you probably won't be thinking about any of that when you go out to
dinner or to the movies or to a ball game. By then, it could all be
second nature. The
restaurant attendant will go through your purse and wave a
metal-detector wand over your jacket, as they do in Tel Aviv. The valet
parker will pop open your
trunk and look through it before dropping your car off at an underground
garage, just as in Manila.
If you take the family to a Dodgers game, you'll be able to tell your
kids how, back in the day, they used to have blimps and small planes
trailing ad banners
over stadiums. The flight restrictions, started at Super Bowl XXXVII in
2002, would not permit any planes within seven miles of any significant
sporting events.
Fans would have to park at least five miles from the stadium and board
shuttle buses to gates. Spectators would be funneled through
airport-style metal
detectors and watched over by a network of 50 cameras installed
throughout the stadium. Air quality would be monitored for pathogens by
the type of portable
detectors brought in by the Army at last year's Olympics.
Even people with no interest in sports who live in high-rises near
stadiums would know whenever game day came round. ''Tall buildings near
stadiums are also
a risk,'' says Col. Mena Bacharach, a former Israeli secret-service
agent who is one of the lead security consultants for the 2004 Summer
Olympics in Athens.
''They would have to be swept for snipers or R.P.G.'s.'' R.P.G.'s? Those
are rocket-propelled grenades, another term that could become an
American
colloquialism.
It's still too early to tell what all this would mean to ticket prices,
but, in a sign of the changing times, the security allocation alone for
last month's Super Bowl
was $9 million -- the equivalent of $134 for every one of the 67,000
fans in attendance.
Of course, public awareness programs could help to significantly cut
down counterterror costs. In Israel, televised public service
announcements similar to
antidrug commercials in the U.S. warn viewers to be on the lookout for
signs of suspicious activity. The messages are even taught to
schoolchildren, along with
other important survival tips, like how to assemble gas masks. ''I was
out with my 7-year-old granddaughter the other day,'' recalls Joel
Feldschuh, a former
Israeli brigadier general and president of El Al. ''And she sees a bag
on the street and starts shouting: 'Granddaddy, granddaddy, look.
Quickly call a policeman.
It could be left by terrorists.' ''
What Is Your Security Worth to You?
It is commonly held that a country as big and confident in its freedoms
as the United States could never fully protect itself against
terrorists. The means
available to them are too vast, the potentially deadly targets too
plentiful. And there is a strong conviction in many quarters that there
is a limit to which
Americans will let their daily patterns be disturbed for security
precautions. Discussing the possibility that we might all need to be
equipped with our own gas
masks, as Israelis are, Sergeant McClaskey of Baltimore assured me it
would never happen. ''If it ever reaches the point where we all need gas
masks,''
McClaskey said, shaking his head with disgust, ''then we have lost the
war on terror because we are living in fear.''
What does it really mean, however, to ''lose the war on terror''? It's
as ephemeral a concept as ''winning the war on terror.'' In what sense
will it ever be possible
to declare an end of any kind?
One thing that makes the decisions of how to protect ourselves so
difficult is that the terrorism we face is fundamentally different from
what other governments
have faced in the past. The Israelis live in tight quarters with an
enemy they know well and can readily lay their eyes on. Terror attacks
on European countries
have always come from colonies or nearby provinces that have generally
had specific grievances and demands. Americans don't know exactly who
our enemies
are or where they are coming from. Two of the recent thwarted
terrorists, Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, were in fact Europeans.
The United States also lacks the national identity that binds Israel and
most European countries and helps make the psychic wounds of terrorism
heal faster. In
Israel, hours after a bombing, the streets are crowded again -- people
are determined to keep going. Immediately after 9/11, that's how many
Americans felt, too,
but it's not at all clear how long this kind of spirit will endure.
Nor is it clear how we will absorb the cost. An adviser to President
Bush estimates that as much as $100 billion will have to be spent
annually on domestic
security over the next 10 years, if you factor in all the overtime
accrued by police departments every time there is a heightened alert.
There are many who believe,
as General Odom does, that the money is ''insignificant.'' ''At the
height of the cold war we used to spend 7.2 percent of G.D.P. on defense
and intelligence,'' he
says. ''We spend less than half that now.''
Outside of defense and some of the entitlement programs, however,
domestic security will dwarf every other kind of federal spending:
education, roads,
subsidized housing, environmental protection. More than that, the
decisions we make about how to protect ourselves -- the measures we
demand, the ones we
resist -- will take over our political discourse and define our ideas
about government in the years to come.
One significant argument against the creation of an American security
state, a United States that resembles Israel, is that even there, in a
society rigorously
organized around security, the safety of its citizens is far from
guaranteed. But what keeps Israelis going about their daily lives -- and
what might help
Americans do the same despite the fear of violence here -- is the
conspicuousness of the response and the minor sacrifices that have to be
made every day. The
more often we have to have our bags searched, the better we might feel.
Sitting in the kind of traffic jam that would have normally frayed our
nerves might seem
almost comforting if it's because all the cars in front of us are being
checked for bombs. We may demand more daily inconveniences, more routine
abrogations
of our rights. These decisions are not only going to change how we go
about our days; they're also going to change our notion of what it means
to be an
American. How far do we want to go?
''Security is a balancing act,'' says Einav, the former El Al security
chief. ''And there are always trade-offs. Give me the resources, and I
can guarantee your
safety. The question is, What are you willing to pay or put up with to
stay safe?''
Matthew Brzezinski, a contributing writer for the magazine, last wrote
about the detention of Hady Hassan Omar, a Muslim immigrant.
Patriotism Perverted
By Dan Gillmor for the San Jose Mercury News.
The Bush administration's hostility to our fundamental liberties is unrelenting. Not content with ramming the contemptibly named ``USA Patriot Act'' through a sadly compliant Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House and its forces are lining up for another whack at the Bill of Rights.Draft legislation from Attorney General John Ashcroft's law-enforcement gnomes is making the rounds. It's apparently being called the ``Domestic Security Enhancement Act,'' but think of it as ``UnPatriot II.''
Read the draft on the Center for Public Integrity's Web site. Then read the FindLaw Web site's analysis by Anita Ramasastry, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington School of Law and associate director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology.
The legislation, Ramasastry warns, is ``a wholesale assault on privacy, free speech and freedom of information.'' She does not exaggerate.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000808.shtml#000808
Patriotism Perverted
• posted by Dan Gillmor 01:43 PM
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000808.shtml#000808
• permanent link to this item
The Bush administration's hostility to our fundamental liberties is unrelenting. Not content with ramming the contemptibly named ``USA Patriot Act'' through a sadly compliant Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House and its forces are lining up for another whack at the Bill of Rights.
Draft legislation from Attorney General John Ashcroft's law-enforcement gnomes is making the rounds. It's apparently being called the ``Domestic Security Enhancement Act,'' but think of it as ``UnPatriot II.''
Read the draft on the Center for Public Integrity's Web site. Then read the FindLaw Web site's analysis by Anita Ramasastry, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington School of Law and associate director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology.
The legislation, Ramasastry warns, is ``a wholesale assault on privacy, free speech and freedom of information.'' She does not exaggerate.
A week ago, members of a congressional conference committee agreed to stop, at least for now, the Pentagon's ``Total Information Awareness'' program, a privacy killer that aimed to scoop up and filter every bit of available information about everyone in the hopes of finding a potential terrorist.
UnPatriot II would push ahead with this kind of Big Brother scheme. The government would collect DNA from a widening circle of Americans. It would add to government surveillance authority -- not that there's all that much keeping the official snoops out of innocent people's lives at this point in any event.
And, reviving an anti-privacy notion that Ashcroft himself once denounced -- that is, before he got a taste of the overweening state power he professed to fear -- it would criminalize some uses of encryption, the scrambling of digital information.
Government snoops, who have never, ever failed to misuse this kind of authority, would know everything about you. This is a one-way mirror. The Bush administration's fanatical devotion for secrecy, preventing citizens from knowing what government is doing in their name and with their money, would get a boost.
The most astonishing suggestion in this anti-freedom smorgasbord is what Ramasastry calls a ``Citizenship Death Penalty.''
``Suppose you, as a citizen, attended a legal protest for which one of the hosts, unbeknownst to you, is an organization the government has listed as terrorist,'' she writes. Under this legislation, ``you may be deported and deemed no longer an American citizen.''
Even more amazing, she says, ``if you are simply suspected of terrorist activity, this can occur.''
We are not living under tyranny in the United States. A few more laws like UnPatriot II, and we could be.
UPDATE: This morning's email included the usual kind words from people who agree with what I said. But I also got several notes from folks who are obviously willing to turn the U.S. into a police state in order to achieve safety. (They'll only have the illusion of safety, but never mind that.)
One writer astonished me by saying, among other things: "As for being "marked" because you "accidentally" attend a protest organized by a terrorist organization, do you not see the absurdity of your statement? Don't you think protesters should know who they're supporting, and who they're providing with aid and comfort? Don't you think you just may be marching on the wrong side of the argument, if your rally is organized and sponsored by a terrorist organization? This only confirms my contention that most protesters don't even know what they're protesting, they just come out to "party".
I hardly know where to start in responding to such stuff. Of course, "aid and comfort" is a code for "traitorous" -- why not just come out and use the word? I was astonished by the notion that this writer imagines these demonstrations are organized and sponsored by terrorists, and amazed to learn that one can be a traitor by "marching on the wrong side of the argument." I guess some Americans would be happier under the kind of regime operated, say, by a murderous thug like Saddam Hussein; at least he keeps order.
By the way, I learned of the Findlaw article because I subscribe to Dave Farber's Interesting People mail list. In this emerging world of personal journalism, Dave has become one of the editors I rely on.
State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers
By Jennifer Lee for the NY Times.
Law enforcement officials across the country will soon have access to a database of 50 million overseas applications for United States visas, including the photographs of 20 million applicants.The database, which will become one of the largest offering images to local law enforcement, is maintained by the State Department and typically provides personal information like the applicant's home address, date of birth and passport number, and the names of relatives...
For all the ambitious technological proposals being debated in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, the new unified system was cobbled from existing networks and has required little new spending. "These are the networks that people are already using," said Roseanne Hynes, a member of the Defense Department's domestic security task force. "It doesn't change jobs or add overhead."
A primary feature of the system is the State Department's enormous visa database, whose seven terabytes give it a capacity equivalent to that of five million floppy disks. Until now, that database has been shared only with immigration officials.
"There is a potential source of information that isn't available elsewhere," said M. Miles Matthew, a senior Justice Department official who works with an interagency drug intelligence group. "It's not just useful for terrorism. It's drug trafficking, money laundering, a variety of frauds, not to mention domestic crimes."
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/national/31COMP.html?ex=1044680400&en=902d8048ef3daabf&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The New York Times The New York Times National January 31, 2003
State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — Law enforcement officials across the country will soon have access to a database of 50 million overseas applications for United States visas, including the photographs of 20 million applicants.
The database, which will become one of the largest offering images to local law enforcement, is maintained by the State Department and typically provides personal information like the applicant's home address, date of birth and passport number, and the names of relatives.
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It is a central feature of a computer system linkup, scheduled within the next month, that will tie together the department, intelligence agencies, the F.B.I. and police departments.
The new system will provide 100,000 investigators one source for what the government designates "sensitive but unclassified" information. Officials see it as a breakthrough for law enforcement, saying it will help dismantle the investigative stumbling blocks that were roundly criticized after the Sept. 11 attacks.
At the same time, they acknowledge the legal and policy questions raised by information sharing between intelligence agencies and local law enforcement, and critics have cast a wary eye as well at the visa database.
One other effect of the new system is that for the first time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies linked by it will be able to send one another encrypted e-mail. Previously, security concerns about the open Internet often caused sensitive information to be faxed, mailed or sent by courier.
The changes come as the F.B.I. continues working to upgrade its entire computer system, which is so antiquated and compartmentalized that it cannot perform full searches of investigative files. The bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, has said that while the technology easily allows for single-word searches, for example for "flight" or "school," it is very hard to search for a phrase, for example "flight school."
For all the ambitious technological proposals being debated in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, the new unified system was cobbled from existing networks and has required little new spending. "These are the networks that people are already using," said Roseanne Hynes, a member of the Defense Department's domestic security task force. "It doesn't change jobs or add overhead."
A primary feature of the system is the State Department's enormous visa database, whose seven terabytes give it a capacity equivalent to that of five million floppy disks. Until now, that database has been shared only with immigration officials.
"There is a potential source of information that isn't available elsewhere," said M. Miles Matthew, a senior Justice Department official who works with an interagency drug intelligence group. "It's not just useful for terrorism. It's drug trafficking, money laundering, a variety of frauds, not to mention domestic crimes."
Local law enforcement agencies seeking photographs have typically had immediate access only to their own database of booking photos. But to get photos of people not previously charged or arrested, an investigator would make a request to a motor vehicle department or the State Department.
So officials emphasize that the State Department database is not making any information newly available to law enforcement, simply making such information easier to acquire. But that increasing ease of accessibility raises some concern from civil liberties groups.
"The availability of this information will change police conduct," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has advocated more Congressional oversight of domestic security operations. "You are more likely to stop someone if you have the ability to query a database."
Or, as Mr. Rotenberg also put it: "The data chases applications."
Critics also point to what they call the unwelcome precedent of foreign-intelligence sharing with local law enforcement, even if the intelligence community's initial contribution to the new system may seem somewhat innocuous. That component is the Open Source Information System, a portal where 14 agencies pool unclassified information. Such material in the new system will includes text articles from foreign periodicals and broadcasts, technical reports and maps.
Two domestic law enforcement networks are also being tied in: Law Enforcement Online, a seven-year-old system established by the F.B.I., and the Regional Information Sharing Systems, six geographically defined computer networks that help local law enforcement agencies collaborate on regional crime issues like drug trafficking and gangs.
Becoming part of a collaborative computer network is unusual for the F.B.I., which has been criticized for its insular nature and technological sluggishness. As some agents joke, the bureau "likes to have yesterday's technology tomorrow." Many agents do not have direct access from their desks to the Internet, because of security concerns. Instead, some field offices have separate areas that agents refer to as "cybercafes," where they can log on to the Internet.
The bureau is now engaged in a multibillion-dollar effort to upgrade its computer system. A recent report by the Justice Department's inspector general cited mismanagement of the project, though Director Mueller gave reporters a sunny assessment today, saying among other things that parts of the upgrade would go online in March as scheduled.
As for the new interagency system, other large security and law enforcement computer networks are scheduled for integration with it within the next year.
These include an unclassified part of the Defense Department computer network, as well as the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System, which is used to disseminate criminal justice information nationwide.
ON THE ROAD; Crime: Rising Threat in Many Areas (October 22, 2002)
Compressed Data; Getting Information From State Web Sites at a Price (September 16, 2002) $
A Simple Click Stirs a Lot of Outrage (September 13, 2002)
Fast Action On Passports, But for a Price (March 17, 2002)
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Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet
By John Markoff and John Schwartz for the NY Times.
Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service providers are concerned about the privacy implications of this as well as liability," since providing access to live feeds of network activity could be interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order.Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the proposal could move forward.
Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/technology/20MONI.html?ex=1041051600&en=8b95ba76443ce31d&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The New York Times The New York Times Technology December 20, 2002
Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet
By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ
The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.
The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.
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The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the report is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the new Department of Homeland Security.
Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge because the Internet has thousands of independent service providers, from garage operations to giant corporations like American Online, AT&T, Microsoft and Worldcom.
The report does not detail specific operational requirements, locations for the centralized system or costs, people who were briefed on the document said.
While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of the worldwide network, some officials of Internet companies who have been briefed on the proposal say they worry that such a system could be used to cross the indistinct border between broad monitoring and wiretap.
Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service providers are concerned about the privacy implications of this as well as liability," since providing access to live feeds of network activity could be interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order.
Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the proposal could move forward.
Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level.
But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson said, because Internet service providers and security companies and other online companies only have a view of the part of the Internet that is under their control.
"We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture," she said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening until it's too late."
The government report was first released in draft form in September, and described the monitoring center, but it suggested it would likely be controlled by industry. The current draft sets the stage for the government to have a leadership role.
The new proposal is labeled in the report as an "early-warning center" that the board says is required to offer early detection of Internet-based attacks as well as defense against viruses and worms.
But Internet service providers argue that its data-monitoring functions could be used to track the activities of individuals using the network.
An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals.
"Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said.
The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."
One former federal Internet security official cautioned against drawing conclusions from the information that is available so far about the Securing Cyberspace report's conclusions.
Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National Critical Infrastructure Protection Center and now the director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth, said it was common for proposals to be cast in the worst possible light before anything is actually known about the technology that will be used or the legal framework within which it will function.
"You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what, concretely, is being proposed," Mr. Vatis said.
A technology that is deployed without the proper legal controls "could be used to violate privacy," he said, and should be considered carefully.
But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned, "You end up without technology that could be very useful to combat terrorism, information warfare or some other harmful act."
I just send a letter to Orrin G. Hatch (Judiciary Comittee Chair) via the EFF's Action Center asking him as chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, to permit either the Technology and Terrorism Subcommittee or the
full Judiciary Committee to hold oversight hearings on Total Information Awareness. A copy was also sent to my Representative, Nancy Pelosi.
I timed it and it took me less than a minute. (Including having them send me a new password.)
Very Cool. (I'd like a round of applause please for Ren Bucholtz, EFF Activisit.)
Think I'll go back and send another one. (This time asking to cut TIA funding.)
(This could be habit forming.)
Taking Liberties With Our Freedom
By Lauren Weinstein for Wired News.
Law enforcement interests pushed through a variety of surveillance measures, including some unrelated to terrorism, that had long been rejected as inappropriate in a free society.Important protections related to monitoring and intelligence gathering, established after serious past abuses, were swept away with the assurance that this time the government won't abuse its powers.
Among various alarming provisions, the law opens up enormous avenues for monitoring Internet communications, without even after-the-fact notifications. Virtually any government agency at any level can initiate surveillance on flimsy grounds. No subpoenas or court oversight are required.
Not to be left off the gravy train, big business also pushed through its own grab bag of perks in the new legislation.
One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act's creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.
Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior -- even totally unclassified activities -- to the federal government, and claim it's related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be "CII," or Critical Infrastructure Information.
Instantly, the company filing drops that information into a black hole of secrecy, hidden from public view. If a government employee releases any such data without the permission of the company that submitted it, regardless of its importance to the public, they could be subject to jail time.
That's potentially a major blow to the government's regulation of corporate misdeeds, since it's often not until such abuses become publicly known that officials take steps to deal with them properly. As long as there's cover, the urge to let sleeping dogs lie is strong indeed.
Ironically, the existing statute, the Freedom of Information Act, already had exceptions for information that truly needed to be kept private. The new homeland security law goes much farther, creating a magic rubber stamp that can make a host of problems disappear from the public radar.
The dangers of the new restrictions extend beyond obvious infrastructure risks related to power, water, manufacturing, pollution and the like. They could also strike to the heart of the computer industry and Internet as well.
By invoking the exemptions of the Homeland Security Act, software and computer hardware companies could hide the existence of critical security flaws or other bugs, claiming (with a familiar refrain) that letting anyone know about them was just too big a risk.
Here is the full text of othe article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56600,00.html
Taking Liberties With Our Freedom
By Lauren Weinstein | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1
02:00 AM Dec. 02, 2002 PT
"The fix is in." So said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of the mammoth new Homeland Security Act, which was signed into law last week.
McCain was upset about an array of goodies that were tacked onto the bill at the last minute by the House of Representatives. These included broad liability protections for makers of vaccines, and an array of other extremely valuable giveaways.
In the end, the overwhelming majority of the Senate, including most Democrats, chose the politically expedient course of supporting the vast legislation.
That said, McCain and other critics were right to be concerned. While it has some positive aspects, the Homeland Security Act is also full of worrisome surprises for U.S. citizens concerned about their freedoms, particularly when combined with last year's USA PATRIOT Act.
Since the events of 9/11, a range of legislation detrimental to fundamental freedoms and privacy rights has been rammed into law, without any assurance that our safety will improve as a result.
Law enforcement interests pushed through a variety of surveillance measures, including some unrelated to terrorism, that had long been rejected as inappropriate in a free society.
Important protections related to monitoring and intelligence gathering, established after serious past abuses, were swept away with the assurance that this time the government won't abuse its powers.
Among various alarming provisions, the law opens up enormous avenues for monitoring Internet communications, without even after-the-fact notifications. Virtually any government agency at any level can initiate surveillance on flimsy grounds. No subpoenas or court oversight are required.
Not to be left off the gravy train, big business also pushed through its own grab bag of perks in the new legislation.
One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act's creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.
Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior -- even totally unclassified activities -- to the federal government, and claim it's related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be "CII," or Critical Infrastructure Information.
Instantly, the company filing drops that information into a black hole of secrecy, hidden from public view. If a government employee releases any such data without the permission of the company that submitted it, regardless of its importance to the public, they could be subject to jail time.
That's potentially a major blow to the government's regulation of corporate misdeeds, since it's often not until such abuses become publicly known that officials take steps to deal with them properly. As long as there's cover, the urge to let sleeping dogs lie is strong indeed.
Ironically, the existing statute, the Freedom of Information Act, already had exceptions for information that truly needed to be kept private. The new homeland security law goes much farther, creating a magic rubber stamp that can make a host of problems disappear from the public radar.
The dangers of the new restrictions extend beyond obvious infrastructure risks related to power, water, manufacturing, pollution and the like. They could also strike to the heart of the computer industry and Internet as well.
By invoking the exemptions of the Homeland Security Act, software and computer hardware companies could hide the existence of critical security flaws or other bugs, claiming (with a familiar refrain) that letting anyone know about them was just too big a risk.
These kinds of cover-ups rarely succeed in the long run. When the bad guys ultimately find ways to exploit the flaws, the ordinary folks who are at risk will be the last to know what's going on.
In a similar vein, ISPs and telecommunications firms may now avoid taking responsibility for security flaws in their systems. Just sweep the problems under the homeland security rug and, with luck, nobody on the outside will be the wiser.
It's been hard enough in the best of times to get companies and government agencies to admit their mistakes and abuses. Now, thanks to the Homeland Security Act, we may have more of a reason to fear those very actions than we do the terrorist threats that the new law is supposed to address.
Lauren Weinstein has been involved with the Internet for decades, beginning with ARPANET. He is the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, the creator and moderator of the Privacy Forum and an outspoken commentator on technology and society.
Information Awareness Office - Scientia Est Potentia ("Knowledge is Power")
Total Information Awareness System Description Document (PDF file - 150 pages - first draft, May 1, 2001)
Keep Big Brother's Hands Off the Internet Senator John Ashcroft, 1997
Meet Big Brother - John Poindexter and the Iran Contra Reunion Tour HereInReality.com
Refuting 'Big Brother' Charge Newsday
Sacrificed for Security Mother Jones
Total Information Awareness Electronic Privacy Information Center
Total Information Awareness Resource Center
Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
New Total Information Awareness project will sniff company databases for terrorists.
by Faye Bowers and Peter Grier for the Christian Science Monitor.
See the ton of good links at the bottom too!
Credit-card companies already carry out such paper profiling as an antifraud device, say proponents of the new effort. That's why you get a call when you suddenly start spending lots of money far from home, or exceed your daily allotment of transactions. Using such techniques to prevent another Sept. 11 may thus be simply a natural progression in technology.But the recent theft of thousands of identities from commercial databases points out what can happen when such data falls into the wrong hands, say critics. And the federal government is not American Express. It has far greater power, and citizens thus need to assiduously protect their privacy from its snooping.
"Data files that become available [to the government] are likely to be used beyond their initial purpose, and we need to guard against that somehow," says Robert Pfaltzgraff, professor of international security at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1203/p01s01-usgn.html
Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
Yes, quarterbacks can run. But this one's a revolution.
Testing limits of police tactics in interrogations
How far Bush will go on conservative agenda
USA
from the December 03, 2002 edition
Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
New Total Information Awareness project will sniff company databases for terrorists.
By Faye Bowers and Peter Grier | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – Should Uncle Sam know as much about you as MasterCard does?
In essence, that may be the key question posed by the Pentagon's new Total Information Awareness (TIA) project.
This effort - whose Latin motto translates as "knowledge is power" - aims to create huge databases that sift through the purchases, travel, immigration status, income, and other data of hundreds of millions of Americans. Its purpose: to sniff out the terrorists among us.
Credit-card companies already carry out such paper profiling as an antifraud device, say proponents of the new effort. That's why you get a call when you suddenly start spending lots of money far from home, or exceed your daily allotment of transactions. Using such techniques to prevent another Sept. 11 may thus be simply a natural progression in technology.
But the recent theft of thousands of identities from commercial databases points out what can happen when such data falls into the wrong hands, say critics. And the federal government is not American Express. It has far greater power, and citizens thus need to assiduously protect their privacy from its snooping.
"Data files that become available [to the government] are likely to be used beyond their initial purpose, and we need to guard against that somehow," says Robert Pfaltzgraff, professor of international security at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass.
A prototype of TIA - funded at $10 million this fiscal year and expected to grow in the next few years - is now being set up, using mostly fabricated information, although some "real" data will be used from public records.
"There are three parts to the TIA project," says Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
The first part of the technology is voice recognition, which would include sifting through electronically recorded transmissions and provide rapid translations of foreign languages.
The second part is to develop a tool that would discover connections between transactions, such as passports, airline tickets, rental cars, gun or chemical purchases, as well as arrests and other suspicious activities.
And the third part is collaborative - a mechanism to allow information- and analysis-sharing among agencies.
"If [the testing] proves useful," Mr. Aldridge says, "TIA will then be turned over to the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement communities as a tool to help them in their battle against domestic terrorism."
To some, this concept is a no-brainer in light of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent terror activity. "We're talking about data-mining systems that credit-card companies in particular use," says Lee McKnight, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University in New York. "Lots of this they can buy off the shelf."
He cites an example of how the government could have utilized technology used by credit-card companies to alert airport personnel to some of the hijackers boarding planes on Sept. 11.
Dr. McKnight recently tried to purchase a washing machine in upstate New York after moving to the state, and ended up getting a call from his credit card company on the store's phone after it detected that he - a Massachusetts resident - was accruing big charges in upstate New York.
Similarly, shouldn't an alarm bell go off if three known terrorists board planes within minutes of each other, he asks.
The government should be able to have this technology up and running within a year, McKnight says. Some of the more advanced - like voice recognition and face recognition - may take longer.
The key seems to be in information sharing among departments. The CIA, for example, had information linking at least two hijackers to Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and knew they were in the US. But CIA employees did not get the names into FBI or State Department computer systems. If it had, at least those two may have been prohibited from boarding planes.
Getting government agencies, who have guarded information for their own reasons for decades, to cooperate is one thing. Motivating credit card, telephone, and other private companies to share valuable marketing information, like a customer's personal shopping practices, is another.
"A credit-card company that knows your purchasing patterns can market to you in a way that makes you happier, and makes you a better customer," says Jean Camp, an expert on the interaction of technical design and social systems at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It's good for them not to share that information."
(Attention shoppers: think those strategically timed $25-rebates from your favorite clothier.)
Moreover, the technology to mine these data sources is there, but developing systems to "talk" to other systems is much more challenging. Professor Camp says it was pretty easy to develop an online checking account system. But it has been much more difficult to get those programs to talk to banks, all of which have their own coded systems. She says it's the same with most industries - getting those systems to talk are multiyear projects.
Germany is one country that has long experience with this. In the 1970s, its federal police pulled together databases from private and public records. From crosschecking data, they were able to determine where terrorists belonging to the Red Brigades Faction lived, and even the places they frequently visited.
After the group was crushed, Germany's privacy protections were enhanced. But this past fall, Germany attempted to launch the world's largest computer dragnet after it was discovered that the principal 9/11 hijackers had lived in Germany while plotting their attacks.
Some 4,000 German companies were asked by the police to dump their electronic files into the government's database. The plan was to run all these transactions through a computer against a basic profile of hijackers - men 18 to 40 years old from Arab or Muslim countries with technical expertise or training.
Only 212 of the 4,000 companies reportedly complied with the request to give up their records, due to privacy concerns.
It also became evident that German states each had their own systems of coding, as did private companies.
"They haven't got far due to the incompatibility of computers between states and the federal government," a German official says.
The program has now stopped and has been outsourced to a private company to determine how to develop a new computer system, like the one the Pentagon is trying to design.
E-mail this story Write a letter to the Editor Printer-friendly
version Permission to reprint/republish
For further information:
• Information Awareness Office - Scientia Est Potentia ("Knowledge is Power")
• Total Information Awareness System Description Document (PDF file - 150 pages - first draft, May 1, 2001)
• Keep Big Brother's Hands Off the Internet Senator John Ashcroft, 1997
• Meet Big Brother - John Poindexter and the Iran Contra Reunion Tour HereInReality.com
• Refuting 'Big Brother' Charge Newsday
• Sacrificed for Security Mother Jones
• Total Information Awareness Electronic Privacy Information Center
• Total Information Awareness Resource Center
• 1984 e-text
Please Note: The Monitor does not endorse the sites behind these links. We offer them for your additional research. Following these links will open a new browser window.
Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Debbie Stabenow -- Delivered on the Floor of the US Senate
re: THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002
[Excerpted from Congressional Record of 11/14/02]
There are a few things that I know are in it by virtue of the fact that I have had 48 hours, sleeping time included, in which to study this monstrosity, 484 pages. If there ever were a monstrosity, this is it. I hold it in my hand, a monstrosity. I don't know what is in it. I know a few things that are in it, and a few things that I know are in it that I don't think the American people would approve of if they knew what was in there...And this is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years. I will have been in Congress 50 years come January 3... Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body. And we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages tomorrow. Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don't know all of them. It is a sham and it is a shame.
We are all complicit in going along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, ROBERT BYRD is going to vote against it because I don't know what I am voting for. That is one thing. And No. 2, it has not had the scrutiny that we tell our young people, that we tell these sweet pages here, boys and girls who come up here, we tell them our laws should have...
This is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax. We ought to tell the people the truth. They are not going to be any safer with that. That is not the truth. I was one of the first in the Senate to say we need a new Department of Homeland Security. I meant that. But I didn't mean this particular hoax that this administration is trying to pander off to the American people, telling them this is homeland security. That is not homeland security.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/11.20A.byrd.home.htm
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t r u t h o u t | Address
Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Debbie Stabenow
Delivered on the Floor of the US Senate
THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002
[Excerpted from Congressional Record of 11/14/02]
Thursday, 14 November 14, 2002
Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan:
"...as Senator Byrd has said so many times on the floor, we need to look at details. We need to know what is in this bill. It is a different bill that came back. I was deeply disturbed as I looked through it. I want to support homeland security. I support developing a department. We all share that. This is not a partisan issue. We want to have maximum safety, security and ability, communicate it effectively and efficiently, and create the kind of confidence people expect us to create in terms of the ability to respond and ideally prevent attacks. But my fear is that under the name of homeland security we are saying special interest provisions are put in this bill which are outrageous and should not have the light of day. I think it is our responsibility to shine the light of day on those provisions."
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia:
"I remember years ago, when I was in the House of Representatives, sending out a little booklet to the people in my then-congressional district of how our laws are made ...[describes the process of hearings, committees, debate, reports, etc. etc.]... we all remember how those laws are made according to the script as prepared there in those handsome little booklets that we send out. That is how the American people expect this Congress to operate. That is the way we are supposed to operate.
But the way this bill was brought in here, less than 48 hours ago, a brand-new bill. It had not been before any committee. It had undergone no hearings, not this bill. It is a bill on our desks that has 484 pages. There are 484 pages in this bill.
It has not been before any committee. There have been no hearings on this bill. There have been no witnesses who were asked to appear to testify on behalf of the bill or in opposition to it. It did not undergo any such scrutiny.
It was just placed on the Senate Calendar. It was offered as an amendment here. And so here it is before the Senate now. There it is. That is not the way in which our children are taught how we make our laws--not at all.
The American people expect us to provide our best judgment and our best insight into such monumental decisions. This is a far, far cry from being our best. This is not our best. As a matter of fact, it is a mere shadow of our best. Yet we are being asked, as the elected representatives of the American people, those of us who are sent here by our respective States are being asked on tomorrow to invoke closure on these 484 pages.
If I had to go before the bar of judgment tomorrow and were asked by the eternal God what is in this bill, I could not answer God. If I were asked by the people of West Virginia, Senator Byrd, what is in that bill, I could not answer. I could not tell the people of West Virginia what is in this bill.
There are a few things that I know are in it by virtue of the fact that I have had 48 hours, sleeping time included, in which to study this monstrosity, 484 pages. If there ever were a monstrosity, this is it. I hold it in my hand, a monstrosity. I don't know what is in it. I know a few things that are in it, and a few things that I know are in it that I don't think the American people would approve of if they knew what was in there.
Even Senator Lieberman, who is chairman of the committee which has jurisdiction over this subject matter, even he saw new provisions in this legislation as he looked through it yesterday and today. As his staff looked through it, they saw provisions they had not seen before, that they had not discussed before, that had not been before their committee before.
Yet we are being asked on tomorrow to invoke cloture on that which means we are not going to debate in the normal course of things. We are going to have 30 hours of debate. That is it, 30 hours. That is all, 30 hours; 100 Senators, 30 hours of debate.
And this is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years. I will have been in Congress 50 years come January 3... Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body. And we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages tomorrow. Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don't know all of them. It is a sham and it is a shame.
We are all complicit in going along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, ROBERT BYRD is going to vote against it because I don't know what I am voting for. That is one thing. And No. 2, it has not had the scrutiny that we tell our young people, that we tell these sweet pages here, boys and girls who come up here, we tell them our laws should have.
Listen, my friends: I am an old meatcutter. I used to make sausage. Let me tell you, I never made sausage like this thing was made. You don't know what is in it. At least I knew what was in the sausage. I don't know what is in this bill. I am not going to vote for it when I don't know what is in it. I trust that people tomorrow will turn thumbs down on that motion to invoke cloture. It is our duty.
We ought to demand that this piece of legislation stay around here a while so we can study it, so our staffs can study it, so we know what is in it, so we can have an opportunity to amend it where it needs amending.
Several Senators have indicated, Senator Lieberman among them, that there are areas in here that ought to be amended. What the people of the United States really care about is their security. That is what we are talking about. We don't know when another tragic event is going to be visited upon this country. It can be this evening, it can be tomorrow, or whatever. But this legislation is not going to be worth a continental dime if it happens tonight, tomorrow, a month from tomorrow; it is not going to be worth a dime. There are people out there working now to secure this country and the people. They are the same people who are already on the payroll. They are doing their duty right now to secure this country.
This is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax. We ought to tell the people the truth. They are not going to be any safer with that. That is not the truth. I was one of the first in the Senate to say we need a new Department of Homeland Security. I meant that. But I didn't mean this particular hoax that this administration is trying to pander off to the American people, telling them this is homeland security. That is not homeland security. Mr. President, the Attorney General and Director of Homeland Security have told Americans repeatedly there is an imminent risk of another terrorist attack. Just within the past day, or few hours, the FBI has put hospitals in the Washington area, Houston, San Francisco, and Chicago on notice of a possible terrorist threat.
This bill does nothing--not a thing--to make our citizens more secure today or tomorrow. This bill does not even go into effect for up to 12 months. It will be 12 months before this goes into effect. The bill just moves around on an organizational chart. That is what it does--moves around on an organizational chart.
The Senate Appropriations Committee, on which Senator Stevens and I sit, along with 27 other Senators, including the distinguished Senator who presides over the Chamber at this moment, the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Reed, tried to provide funds to programs to hire more FBI agents, to hire more border patrol agents, to equip and train our first responders, to improve security at our nuclear powerplants, to improve bomb detection at our airports. That committee of 29 Senators--15 Democrats and 14 Republicans--voted to provide the funds for these homeland security needs. Those funds have been in bills that have been out there for 4 months.
But the President said no--no, he would not sign it. President Bush is the man I am talking about. He would not sign that as an emergency. These moneys have been reported by a unanimous Appropriations Committee. But this administration said no. So that is what happened. These are actions that would make America more secure today. Did the President help us to approve these funds? No. Instead, the President forced us--forced us--to reduce homeland security funding by $8.9 billion, and he delayed another $5 billion. This is shameful; this is cynical; this is being irresponsible. It is unfair to the American people. And then to tell them Congress ought to pass that homeland security bill--that is passing the buck.
Mr. President, I call attention to a column in the New York Times. This is entitled ``You Are A Suspect.'' It is by William Safire. I will read it:
"If the homeland security act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:" Listen, Senators. This is what William Safire is saying in the New York Times of November 14, 2002. That is today. This is what the New York Times is saying to you, to me, to us: "If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make"-- Hear me now-- "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend--all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as ``a virtual, centralized grand database.'' ... "Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear." [ see complete Safire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html -- Byrd reads the entire article to the Senate]
If the American people, if the American public is to believe what they read in this week's newspapers, the Congress stands ready to pass legislation to create a new Department of Homeland Security. Not with my vote. Passage of such legislation would be the answer to the universal battle cry that this administration adopted shortly after the September 11 attacks: Reorganize the Federal Government.
How is it that the Bush administration's No. 1 priority has evolved into a plan to create a giant, huge bureaucracy? How is it that the Congress bought into the belief that to take a plethora of Federal agencies and departments and shuffle them around would make us safer from future terrorist attacks?..."
Now there's "privacy control" software that claims it can capture every click, email, and chat thread by those cheating husbands and wifes pretending to work late on the computer all of the time. (C'mon now. We all know what they're really up to.)
Now all we need is an influx of marriage counselors to deal with the severe situations that will undoubtedly be caused by snooping wives and husbands screwing things up on their spouses' computers while trying to install and use this crap. "You deleted my last two weeks of work because....why?"
What was even creepier is was the spam they sent me -- which I clicked on unknowingly because it looked like a privacy-related domain: http://www.us-privacy.org.
This kind of product also reinforces the backwards concept that by invading someone elses privacy, you are somehow protecting or "controlling" your own privacy. (Or in this case, your family's "security.")
Here is the text of the ad when the link inevitably goes bad (it was sent to me via spam):
http://www.us-privacy.org/index.htm
IS YOUR SPOUSE CHEATING ONLINE?
Find Out Who They Are Chatting/Emailing With All Those Hours!!!
Protect your family on the Internet
Make sure they are being safe on the Internet with Privacy-Control Monitoring Software.
Privacy-Control will hide on your computer and secretly record all instant messages, chat, email, web sites and more! Once you install it, it becomes completely invisible. Then, after the computer is used, you just enter a secret key-sequence, and you can see everything that happened!
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The public is growing increasingly concerned John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project.
Here's a new website with lots of helpful links on the subject.
The Washington Post and NY Times have warned us all about the implications.
The ACLU has a letter writing campaign:
In the last several days, media reports have revealed that a little-known Defense Department office is developing a computer system that threatens to turn us all into "suspects" and would provide the government with the ability to snoop into all aspects of our private lives without a search warrant or proof of criminal wrongdoing.This program is being created in the Pentagon by a new Office of Information Awareness, which has been charged with creating a system it is calling "Total Information Awareness:" effectively a computer program that will provide government officials with immediate access to information about everything from our phone calls to Internet mail, from our financial records to the history of what we buy online or in our local pharmacy, from every trip we book to all of our academic and medical records.
Leading this initiative is John Poindexter, the former Reagan era National Security Adviser who famously said that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress. In his new post as Head of the Office of Information Awareness, Poindexter has been quietly promoting the idea of creating "a virtual centralized database" that would have the "data-mining" power to pry into the most minute and intimate details of our private lives.
So I'm going over the government's ANALYSIS FOR THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002, and I'm not sure if there's a particular part of it I'd amend exactly that would make it OK.
Figured I'd start out with:
TITLE II — INFORMATION ANALYSIS AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION
http://www.whitehouse.gov/deptofhomeland/analysis/title2.html:
Sec. 201. Under Secretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection.
Sec. 202. Functions transferred.
Sec. 203. Access to information.
Sec. 204. Information voluntarily provided.
Here's the actual text of bill, Sections 201-204:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/deptofhomeland/bill/title2.html#201
But the main "threat" doesn't seem to be one that can be amended easily. Namely that this "Secretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection" (presumably John Poindexter) will be taking over:
"the functions, personnel, assets, and liabilities of the following entities-...(1) the National Infrastructure Protection Center of the FBI...
(2) National Communications System of the Department of Defense...
(3) the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office of the Department of Commerce...
(4) the Computer Security Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)...
(5) the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center of the Department of Energy..
(6) the Federal Computer Incident Response Center of the General Services Administration..."
Big bleep on the Reinstein Radar today: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
Poindexter...Poindexter...I knew that name sounded familiar as I've been reading through this last week's frightening headlines about the "Total Information Awareness" project and the guy spearheading the whole thing: John "Iran Contra" Poindexter -- The token "bad guy" who took the fall in the Iran-Contra trial so everybody else involved in the scandal could get off (like President Reagan and Ollie North). I'd forgotten that an appeals court had overturned Poindexter's conviction shortly afterward. (Meaning it was time to go back to working for the Bush's apparently!)
These days, Poindexter is making a name for himself as the head of the DARPA's "Information Awareness Office" -- and if the Homeland Security Act passes through the Senate next week without any amendments, he will be the central point of control for all of your commercially-obtained once-considered private information. We're talking government intrusion on your privacy in its purest Orwellian-style form. And what security will we get in return? They're going to have to get back to us on that one...
You Are a Suspect
By William Safire for the NY Times.
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.
This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?ex=1037854800&en=3778829e1bec3dc2&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The New York Times The New York Times Opinion November 14, 2002
You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON — If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.
A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.
This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.
Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.
He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.
When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.
This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.
Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.
The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" — "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.
E-mail: safire@nytimes.com
Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans
By John Markoff for the NY Times.
As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant...Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.
The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.
Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html?ex=1037509200&en=873ff5626a3c666e&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The New York Times The New York Times Washington November 9, 2002
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INTELLIGENCE
Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans
By JOHN MARKOFF
The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.
As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.
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Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a speech in California earlier this year.
Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.
The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.
"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a Pentagon spokeswoman said.
An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the project's critics without knowing more about it.
He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were not familiar enough with the project.
Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the system might be easily abused.
"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."
Continued
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(Page 2 of 2)
Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary to track potential enemies operating inside the United States.
"They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it needs to be understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is executive director of the Markle Foundation task force on National Security in the Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of the need to make the tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness."
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On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging development of technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according to several people who attended the meeting.
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.
The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.
The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.
The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.
The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.
"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.
Turns out that the Shrub's "No Child Left Behind Act" is actually the "All Childrens' Private Information Is Ours For The Taking Or We'll Cut Your Federal Funding" Act.
Parents and Students: you have the right to withhold your records! Exercise it!
Here's more information in a Mother Jones article by David Goodman:
No Child Unrecruited
But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid."I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an education law," says Shea-Keneally. "I did not see the link."
The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation's high schools are "problem schools" for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."
...The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone -- leaving students without any say in the matter.
"I think the privacy implications of this law are profound," says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. "For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it's something we should be concerned about."
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2002/45/ma_153_01.html
No Child Unrecruited
Should the military be given the names of every high school student in America?
David Goodman
November/December 2002
But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid.
"I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an education law," says Shea-Keneally. "I did not see the link."
The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation's high schools are "problem schools" for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."
To many educators, however, requiring the release of personal information intrudes on the rights of students. "We feel it is a clear departure from the letter and the spirit of the current student privacy laws," says Bruce Hunter, chief lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. Until now, schools could share student information only with other educational institutions. "Now other people will want our lists," says Hunter. "It's a slippery slope. I don't want student directories sent to Verizon either, just because they claim that all kids need a cell phone to be safe."
The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone -- leaving students without any say in the matter.
"I think the privacy implications of this law are profound," says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. "For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it's something we should be concerned about."
Educators point out that the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals for the past two years in a row, even without access to every school. The new law, they say, undercuts the authority of some local school districts, including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, that have barred recruiters from schools on the grounds that the military discriminates against gays and lesbians. Officials in both cities now say they will grant recruiters access to their schools and to student information -- but they also plan to inform students of their right to withhold their records.
Some students are already choosing that option. According to Principal Shea-Keneally, 200 students at her school -- one-sixth of the student body -- have asked that their records be withheld.
This from the latest EFFector:
"If you know of any public school students, teachers, school
administrators, school board members, parents, or recent public school
alumni in the United States who are willing to speak about the impact
of Internet blocking on educational opportunities, the EFF would like
to make contact with them. Please have them contact: Will Doherty
wild@eff.org
PS: We are also seeking the donation of a high-powered statistics
package such as SPSS, MINITAB or SAS.
By Frank J. Murray for the Washington Times:
NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports.
NASA wants to use "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors," imbedded in gates, to collect tiny electric signals that all brains and hearts transmit. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources," NASA documents say.The notion has raised privacy concerns. Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says such technology would only add to airport-security chaos. "A lot of people's fear of flying would send those meters off the chart. Are they going to pull all those people aside?"
The organization obtained documents July 31, the product of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration, and offered the documents to this newspaper.
Here's the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020817-704732.htm
NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Airport security screeners may soon try to read the minds of travelers to identify terrorists.
Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.
Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs "to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat," according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times.
NASA wants to use "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors," imbedded in gates, to collect tiny electric signals that all brains and hearts transmit. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources," NASA documents say.
The notion has raised privacy concerns. Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says such technology would only add to airport-security chaos. "A lot of people's fear of flying would send those meters off the chart. Are they going to pull all those people aside?"
The organization obtained documents July 31, the product of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration, and offered the documents to this newspaper.
Mr. Kshirsagar's organization is concerned about enhancements already being added to the Computer-Aided Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system. Data from sensing machines are intended to be added to that mix.
NASA aerospace research manager Herb Schlickenmaier told The Times the test proposal to Northwest Airlines is one of four airline-security projects the agency is developing. It's too soon to know whether any of it is working, he says.
"There are baby steps for us to walk through before we can make any pronouncements," says Mr. Schlickenmaier, the Washington official overseeing scientists who briefed Northwest Airlines on the plan. He likened the proposal to a super lie detector that would also measure pulse rate, body temperature, eye-flicker rate and other biometric aspects sensed remotely.
Though adding mind reading to screening remains theoretical, Mr. Schlickenmaier says, he confirms that NASA has a goal of measuring brain waves and heartbeat rates of airline passengers as they pass screening machines.
This has raised concerns that using noninvasive procedures is merely a first step. Private researchers say reliable EEG brain waves are usually measurable only by machines whose sensors touch the head, sometimes in a "thinking cap" device. "To say I can take that cap off and put sensors in a doorjamb, and as the passenger starts walking through [to allow me to say] that they are a threat or not, is at this point a future application," Mr. Schlickenmaier said in an interview.
"Can I build a sensor that can move off of the head and still detect the EEG?" asks Mr. Schlickenmaier, who led NASA's development of airborne wind-shear detectors 20 years ago. "If I can do that, and I don't know that right now, can I package it and [then] say we can do this, or no we can't? We are going to look at this question. Can this be done? Is the physics possible?"
Two physics professors familiar with brain-wave research, but not associated with NASA, questioned how such testing could be feasible or reliable for mass screening. "What they're saying they would do has not been done, even wired in," says a national authority on neuro-electric sensing, who asked not to be identified. He called NASA's goal "pretty far out."
Both professors also raised privacy concerns.
"Screening systems must address privacy and 'Big Brother' issues to the extent possible," a NASA briefing paper, presented at a two-day meeting at Northwest Airlines headquarters in St. Paul, Minn., acknowledges. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional police efforts to use noninvasive "sense-enhancing technology" that is not in general public use in order to collect data otherwise unobtainable without a warrant. However, the high court consistently exempts airports and border posts from most Fourth Amendment restrictions on searches.
"We're getting closer to reading minds than you might suppose," says Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland and spokesman for the American Physical Society. "It does make me uncomfortable. That's the limit of privacy invasion. You can't go further than that."
"We're close to the point where they can tell to an extent what you're thinking about by which part of the brain is activated, which is close to reading your mind. It would be terribly complicated to try to build a device that would read your mind as you walk by." The idea is plausible, he says, but frightening.
At the Northwest Airlines session conducted Dec. 10-11, nine scientists and managers from NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., proposed a "pilot test" of the Aviation Security Reporting System.
NASA also requested that the airline turn over all of its computerized passenger data for July, August and September 2001 to incorporate in NASA's "passenger-screening testbed" that uses "threat-assessment software" to analyze such data, biometric facial recognition and "neuro-electric sensing."
Northwest officials would not comment.
Published scientific reports show NASA researcher Alan Pope, at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., produced a system to alert pilots or astronauts who daydream or "zone out" for as few as five seconds.
The September 11 hijackers helped highlight one weakness of the CAPPS system. They did dry runs that show whether a specific terrorist is likely to be identified as a threat. Those pulled out for special checking could be replaced by others who do not raise suspicions. The September 11 hijackers cleared security under their own names, even though nine of them were pulled aside for extra attention.
Nat Hentoff explains it all for the Progressive:
Keep in mind the massive, pervasive electronic surveillance--with minimal judicial supervision under the USA Patriot Act--of inferential "pre-crime" conversations and messages, both sent and received. Add to that the FBI's power, under the same law, to break into your home or office, with a warrant, while you're not there, and inset "The Magic Lantern" into your computer to record every one of your keystrokes, including those not sent. Then add the Patriot Act's allowing the FBI to command bookstores and libraries to reveal the books bought or read by potential domestic terrorists.
Here's the text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.progressive.org/sept02/hen0902.html
September 2002
Ashcroft Watch Nat Hentoff
The Terror of Pre-Crime
E-Mail This Article
Nat Hentoff photoJohn Ashcroft recently released his guidelines for investigating people he suspects as terrorists, and these guidelines exceed even J. Edgar Hoover's contempt for due process.
Activists particularly--and I expect the term applies to a good many readers of The Progressive--should know what may well be in store for them. On page three of "The Attorney General's Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations," we are told: "A terrorism enterprise investigation may be initiated when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that two or more persons are engaged in an enterprise for the purpose of . . . furthering political or social goals wholly or in part through activities that involve force or violence and a federal crime . . ."
Note the use of "reasonably" and "wholly or in part." These insidiously malleable guidelines for terrorism investigations could apply to political action (and the reaction) during demonstrations by environmentalists, anti-globalizationists, animal rights pickets, or union members on strike, as well as pro-lifers trying to talk, and only to talk, to women entering abortion clinics ("obstruction" at clinics can be a federal crime).
The guidelines go on to note that "the 'reasonable indication' standard for commencing a terrorism enterprise investigation is . . . substantially lower than probable cause." It is so low it could be part of the new Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, which envisions the nabbing of "pre-criminals." As The Washington Times puts it, such pre-criminals are convicted "before they ever act on, or, in some cases, are even aware of, their murderous designs."
On page four of the Ashcroft Guidelines: "The nature of the conduct engaged in by a [terrorist] enterprise will justify an inference that the standard [for opening a criminal intelligence investigation] is satisfied, even if there are no known statements by participants that advocate or indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts." (Emphasis added.)
The Attorney General, furthermore, extends the dragnet to make individuals in a group under suspicion responsible for what other members say or write: "A group's activities and the statements of its members may properly be considered in conjunction with each other. A combination of statements and activities may justify a determination that the threshold standard for a terrorism investigation is satisfied, even if the statements alone or the activities alone would not warrant such a determination." (Emphasis added.)
Also indicating the "pre-crime" mindset of Attorney General Ashcroft is the following paragraph. "While no particular factor or combination of factors is required, considerations that will generally be relevant whether the threshold standard for a terrorism investigation is satisfied includes as noted, a group's statements, its activities, and the nature of potential federal law violations suggested by its statements or its activities." (Emphasis added.)
Keep in mind the massive, pervasive electronic surveillance--with minimal judicial supervision under the USA Patriot Act--of inferential "pre-crime" conversations and messages, both sent and received. Add to that the FBI's power, under the same law, to break into your home or office, with a warrant, while you're not there, and inset "The Magic Lantern" into your computer to record every one of your keystrokes, including those not sent. Then add the Patriot Act's allowing the FBI to command bookstores and libraries to reveal the books bought or read by potential domestic terrorists.
You may now appreciate the prophecy of Senator Frank Church--who was instrumental in exposing the constitutional crimes of J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro operation--when he said in 1975 that future government intelligence capabilities could "at any time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left--such is the capacity to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter." And that was before the omnivorous, permeable Internet. The Web can be a spider web.
Senator Church, referring to "potential" enemies of the state, warned: "There would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."
There is still time to fight back.
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Village Voice, Legal Times, Editor&Publisher, and The Progressive.
Digital Speech.org has created a boilerplate letter you can send to your representative.
I hope to get to this later this evening. I'll let you know how it goes...
Craig Newmark sent out an email Tuesday urging California-based citizens to acknowledge their support for a SB773 (a Bill that Craig has personally taken the time to investigate) by going to Californiaprivacy.org and sending a form-based letter. (It took me about 15 seconds to do this.)
Here's Craig's Letter.
Here's the whole letter:
Like Mr. Ed, I never speak, unless I have something to say ... and I
happen to know a few things about forthcoming financial privacy
legislation, so here goes.
Right now, banks share your financial information to provide you with
services, which is okay, but also sell your financial information for
marketing purposes.
Jackie Speier has proposed a bill (SB 773) to stop this, but it's stalled
in the state assembly.
Some large banks and insurers are already in support of SB 773 and at
least a couple of large financial institutions have told me that, with a
few technical changes, they could live with this. So, while a change to
some existing business practices, SB 773 shouldn't put them out of
business.
The lawmakers really need to hear from you:
-- visit California Privacy: http://www.californiaprivacy.org/
and send Governor Gray Davis an email.
-- feedback? here's a discussion board:
http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=5785
(If the state bill doesn't pass, it's been proposed at the County level
for San Francisco and San Mateo... and Chris Larsen, CEO of E-LOAN, has
committed a million to get it passed as a voter referendum. Then, this
problem can be addressed in Washington.)
Here's more about these issues, from a down-to-earth perspective. I feel
that there's a lot of confusion around this bill, in part, because the
people how know this stuff have a hard time explaining it to civilians.
The following guidelines protect your privacy from advertisers who overdo
it, while allowing the banks to do the services you request. It also
allows the banks to do some marketing in a way that's more effective for
them, for advertisers. If it's clear that they're making money from
sending you ads, maybe they should offer you a cut of the resulting
dollars.
To make conversation easy, I'd say a "bank" is any financial institution
and the other institutions it controls or uses ("outsources") to render
you the services you've contracted. An insurance company is a "bank" for
purposes of discussion, and so is a retailer issuing credit cards or a
family of insurance companies doing business together. The bank should
assume liability for info security and reliability, including identity
theft.
"disclosure" is the clear and conspicuous disclosure to customers of bank
practices and policies in a specific matter.
1. A bank may share customer financial information with another company to
provide services that the customer has requested. This includes secondary
purposes like fraud detection. Such relationships must be disclosed
periodically.
The customer may opt-out from some or all such sharing arrangments,
subject to denial of the related services. (It is assumed that the
customer opted into this relationship in the account application, even if
it wasn't clear at the time.)
2. A bank may promote other services from other companies without sharing
any information about you. For example, it might include advertising
inserts from other companies.
3. A bank may share customer financial information with other companies
for any purpose with customer permission, that is, opt-in. This permission
will remain in effect, until such time as the customer opts out. Every
such case must be disclosed periodically.
Again, here are ways to take action or find out more:
-- visit California Privacy: http://www.californiaprivacy.org/ and send
Governor Gray Davis an email.
-- any feedback? please use our discussion board:
http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=5785
Thanks!
Craig
What's worse than an automated DMCA cease and dissest letter spamming system with lousy heuristics and a big hollywood budget?
One currently in use by our own government and law enforcement agencies for gathering "Open Source Intelligence".
P.S.Ranger's own news page seems to be a good place for articles on them.
The MPAA's latest weapon against online piracy comes at the expense of your system's security -- wink wink, nudge nudge, all in the name of protecting the 5% revenue loss claimed by the industry that's currently under investigation for misrepresenting those numbers anyway...
Theoretically, Ranger is scouring the Internet looking for filenames it believes to belong to pirated files -- although its only source of information for the names of those files is a list it gets from the MPAA.
Meanwhile, I wonder what else is the MPAA and Ranger Online might decide to do with all of that private information that its collecting from "peer-to-peer sites" (user's hard drives) without obtaining permission? Hmmm...
More about Ranger Online and what the hell that's all about and how it appears that the Motion Picture Industry is about to be taken on the most expensive snipe hunt in its history later, but I thought you'd want to check out this rather informative article (despite its being an obvious-tool-of-mpaa hype-and-propaganda) from the Washington Post:
'Ranger' Vs. the Movie Pirates .
Ranger takes the titles and, "like a bloodhound," Valenti said, sets out on the Internet, looking for those films on Web sites, in chat rooms, on peer-to-peer sites. It is an automated software, speeding across the Internet. When it finds a movie title, it marks the location, decides whether the movie is being used in a way that infringes on its copyright, then moves on. Jeremy Rasmussen, Ranger Online's chief technology executive and founder, won't disclose exactly how his software manages this, except to say: "The challenge is 'How do you cover a lot of area without having to visit every page?' That's part of the intelligent way we scan."
Ranger Online provides the data to the MPAA and prepares cease-and-desist letters. The MPAA reviews the data and decides which letters to send. Last year, the group sent 54,000 letters; this year, it is on pace to send 80,000 to 100,000. Typically, the letters are sent to the Internet service provider hosting a site or user that the MPAA has deemed to possess ill-gotten films. The ISPs take down the offending site 85 to 90 percent of the time, Valenti said. Ranger then checks back periodically on the offending site to make sure it hasn't begun pirating again.
If the letters don't work, then the MPAA may contact local authorities, asking them to seize computer servers storing the pirated films. MPAA action recently led to a server seizure in the Netherlands.
Ranger sells itself to the MPAA and other clients based on its global scope, speed and thorough analysis. But a recent suit questions Ranger's precision.
I am speechless. Just watch the cartoon.
The bad news is: this isn't a joke. It's a real product. (And it looks damn affordable.)
It doesn't mean they're after you, but it does mean that the practice of placing surveillance cameras on public streets for reasons to be determined later won't be limited to Washington DC.
Millions spent to develop cameras.
Government agencies have spent more than $50 million during the past five years developing camera surveillance technology, and proposed federal spending on such systems has increased since September 11, according to a recent report released by the General Accounting Office.
The GAO surveyed 35 government agencies from July 2001 to January 2002 at the request of House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Texas Republican, who requested the report last summer after seeing spending increases for automated traffic cameras and facial recognition technology.
Facial recognition research and development made up more than 90 percent of federal surveillance budgets since 1997.
Of the 35 agencies the GAO surveyed, "17 reported obligating $51 million to [red-light, photo radar and biometric camera surveillance] as of June 2001, with the largest amount reported for facial recognition technology."
Two agencies reported promoting the use of the surveillance devices but did not report spending any money on them, the report said. The State Department, for instance, did not devote any money to deploying facial recognition as of June 20, 2001, but said it "planned to work with the Bureau of Consular Affairs to integrate the devices into its counterterrorism database" this year.
Here's what I posted on February 13, 2002 about cameras in DC:
Smile! Next time you go to Washington D.C. remember to smile to the cameras.
Check out the Reuters article:
Washington Plans Unprecedented Camera Network.
(references below are to a Wall Street Journal article that requires registration to access - if anyone has the link, please let me know.)
Cameras installed by the police have been programmed to scan public areas automatically, and officers can take over manual control if they want to examine something more closely.
The system currently does not permit an automated match between a face in the crowd and a computerized photo of a suspect, the Journal said. Gaffigan said officials were looking at the technology but had not decided whether to use it.
Eventually, images will be viewable on computers already installed in most of the city's 1,000 squad cars, the Journal said.
The Journal said the plans for Washington went far beyond what was in use in other U.S. cities, a development that worries civil liberties advocates.
Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, noted there were few legal restrictions of video surveillance of public streets. But he said that by setting up a "central point of surveillance," it becomes likely that "the cameras will be more frequently used and more frequently abused."
"You are building in a surveillance infrastructure, and how it's used now is not likely how it's going to be used two years from now or five years from now," he told the Journal.
You're not the only one that can see what's going on over that home wireless security cam.
Check out the NY Times article by John Schwartz:
Nanny-Cam May Leave a Home Exposed.
More on the Bush Administrations latest attack against your privacy: insisting that you to hand over your personal data right off the bat if you ever want to hope you see your reimbursement check from your health insurance provider.
See the article:
Bush Acts to Drop Core Privacy Rule on Medical Data,
by Robert Pear for the NY Times.
The Bush administration today proposed dropping a requirement at the heart of federal rules that protect the privacy of medical records. It said doctors and hospitals should not have to obtain consent from patients before using or disclosing medical information for the purpose of treatment or reimbursement.
The proposal, favored by the health care industry, was announced by Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, who said the process of obtaining consent could have "serious unintended consequences" and could impair access to quality health care.
The sweeping privacy rules were issued by President Bill Clinton in December 2000. When Mr. Bush allowed them to take effect last April, consumer advocates cheered, while much of the health care industry expressed dismay.
Today's proposal would repeal a provision widely viewed as the core of the Clinton rules: a requirement that doctors, hospitals and other health care providers obtain written consent from patients before using or disclosing medical information for treatment, the payment of claims or any of a long list of "health care operations," like setting insurance premiums and measuring the competence of doctors.
The Bush administration has proposed to eliminate the U.S. medical privacy rules that require patients to give consent for disclosure of their health information prior to receiving care.
The American Medical Association is crying foul.
See the Reuters article by Lisa Richwine:
Feds Urge Medical Privacy Changes, Advocates Upset.
That modification "strikes at the very heart of the privacy regulation. Without a prior consent requirement, patients will have no control over how their health care information is used or disclosed," said Georgetown University's Health Privacy Project, an advocacy group for medical privacy rights.
The American Medical Association, which had urged the federal government to make the consent requirement less burdensome for doctors, said it too thought the administration was going too far.
"We knew it had to be fixed. Just to remove it completely is a serious problem," said Dr. Donald Palmisano, the AMA's secretary-treasurer.
(Friendly Fascism
Alert :-):
This chilling editorial by Nat Hentoff for the Village Voice provides some enlightening information about the absurdity of the provisions of the USA Patriot Act which enable law enforcement and government agencies to force libraries and bookstores to hand over their records and furthermore does not allow them to talk about it publicly.
Big John Wants Your Reading List.
This is now the law, and as I wrote last week, the FBI, armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities."
Once that information is requested by the FBI, a gag order is automatically imposed, prohibiting the bookstore owners or librarians from disclosing to any other person the fact that they have received an order to produce documents.
You can't call a newspaper or a radio or television station or your representatives in Congress. You can call a lawyer, but since you didn't have any advance warning that the judge was issuing the order, your attorney can't have objected to it in court. He or she will be hearing about it for the first time from you...
...As I often do when Americans' freedom to read is imperiled, I called Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. I've covered, as a reporter, many cases of library censorship, and almost invariably, the beleaguered librarians have already been on the phone to Judy Krug. She is the very incarnation of the author of the First Amendment, James Madison.
When some librarians—because of community pressure or their own political views, right or left—have wanted to keep books or other material from readers, Judy has fought them. She is also the leading opponent of any attempt to curb the use of the Internet in public libraries.
As she has often said, "How can anyone involved with libraries stand up and say, 'We are going to solve problems by withholding information'?"
I called to talk with her about the FBI's new power to force libraries to disclose the titles of books that certain people are reading—and she, of course, knew all about this part of the USA Patriot Act. And the rest of it, for that matter.
She told me how any library can ask for help—without breaking the gag order and revealing a FISA visit from the FBI. The librarian can simply call her at the American Library Association in Chicago and say, "I need to talk to a lawyer," and Judy will tell her or him how to contact a First Amendment attorney...
George Orwell said: "If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."
Today, the public doesn't even know about this provision in the strangely titled USA Patriot Act. A lot of people are still afraid to get on a plane. Is Ashcroft fearful that if people find out about his interest in what they're reading, they'll be afraid to go to libraries and bookstores—and will start asking questions about what the hell he thinks he's doing? And where is Congress?
Looks like Microsoft broke a pretty serious promise it first made in March of 1999: to remove the function from Office 2000 that uniquely identifies every file.
In a letter from Yusuf Mehdi, Director of Windows Marketing at Microsoft, he promises that:
"The forthcoming release of Office 2000 will not include the ability to insert unique identifier in documents."
Unfortunately the Office 97 Unique Identifier Patch and Office 97 Unique Identifier Removal Tool. are no longer available. But thanks to Brewster Khale's Wayback Machine, I can get a complete index of snapshots from when it existed since 1999.
Using the wayback machine, I was able to locate the last released version of the Office 97 Unique Identifier Patch. An updated version for Office 2000 doesn't seem to ever have been made available. I'm not sure if the Office 97 patch works with later versions of Office (or even if this patch works, for that matter, because I haven't tested it -- just linking to it FYI :-)
For more information, check out:
Microsoft Office 97 and 2000 Have A Dirty Little Secret
Microsoft Attaches an ID to all Office Documents!
Hey everybody, let's not go willy nilly and throw out all our civil liberties while fighting our new unseen enemy!
Two important documents published recently from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): ACLU: Congress Should Resist Urge To Quickly Rewrite Wiretap Laws and ACLU Urges Congress to Follow Deliberative Process As It Considers New Measures After Terrorist Attacks .
"Attorney General Ashcroft today asked Congress to adopt and send to the President by the end of the week legislation that would include many provisions to expand federal law enforcement authority in ways that would infringe on civil liberties without any public showing that they will make us safer. Last week, the Senate adopted new wiretapping measures in the middle of the night with little to no debate."
