-Caveat Lector-
NEIL MORGAN
San Diegans fighting new war from their computer terminals
September 23, 2001
Like so much else before 9.11.01, it plays back to us now like a
black-and-white movie. Remember the cyberspace manhunt for the kid computer
hacker Kevin Mitnick, then on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list?
It gripped the world in 1999, until Tsutomu Shimomura, the eccentric genius
at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, finally outsmarted the kid and ended
his knockdown raids on U.S. corporations and universities.
What's changed since then in computer terrorism and counterterrorism?
Everything, but not as much as we might wish.
The hero Shimomura left the supercomputer campus to live at Lake Tahoe.
"One of the smartest people on the planet," as colleague Sid Karin calls
him, Shimomura is revered as a master computer sleuth and takes on only
cases that intrigue him.
And Mitnick? Out of jail now, he conducts an early-morning computer show on
Los Angeles radio.
Meanwhile, computer encryption has become the workaday mask of terrorism.
Federal surveillance of the Internet has become a covert industry. This
nation's 13 federal intelligence agencies are being told to streamline and
cooperate in war.
Two days after the attacks in New York and Washington, the Combating
Terrorism Act of 2001 was introduced as an amendment to a federal
appropriations bill and quietly passed the Senate. It may become part of
the legislative package coming to Congress from Attorney General John
Ashcroft.
Section 832 is at its crux: It would enhance the U.S. government's powers
to spy on suspects' communications in cyberspace.
In the short space of two years since Kevin Mitnick was on the run across
America like a fleeing train robber, this is not entertainment anymore.
This is a war for the life of the world's most powerful nation. Yet under
restrictions against such undercover spy networks as those from which John
Le Carre wrote magic yarns, our 13 intelligence agencies now may garner as
much as 70 percent of their information from open source intelligence Web
sites.
One reasonably wonders: Are these Osama bin Laden's hackers?
Both in secret intelligence personnel and in institutional power like that
of UCSD, the Supercomputer Center and the FBI's Regional Computer Forensic
Lab, San Diego is in the midst of America's war against computer terrorism.
Some online slip that renders bin Laden vulnerable would stand in history
like the code breaking that helped make the Allies victors in World War II.
These are pivotal intelligence matters about which most sensible Americans
would prefer, for the moment, to know rather less than more. It is enough
to know that there are formidable San Diegans already long active at the
top of this curve.
At the Supercomputer Center, Tom Perrine leads the security group. He
recently was honored quietly in law enforcement and intelligence circles as
San Diego's private sector investigator of the year. A year earlier, the
same award went to Abraham Singer, a programmer analyst at the
Supercomputer Center. (Each year, one award goes to a law enforcement
officer and one to the private sector.)
Erin Kenneally, an administrative specialist at the center who is also a
lawyer, is especially revered among San Diego judges. She specializes in
computer forensics. Defense attorneys in computer criminal cases manage
usually to arrive in court well enough versed in computerspeak. Judges call
on her to provide seminars to bring them up to speed.
Also at the center, Mihir Bellare, an associate professor, focuses on the
mathematics of encryptography as a field of computer security. Another
programmer analyst, and two colleagues -- Stefan Savage and Geoff
Voelker -- study denial-of-service attacks in which computer servers are
overwhelmed
and disabled.
Their work and that of thousands more may never entertain us like the Kevin
Mitnick case. But they will help save America.
================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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