-Caveat Lector- RadTimes # 75 - October, 2000 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --------------- --Girls swap diapers for rebel life [Columbia] --Roboprotest --Prague update: 11 prisoners released --Privacy Becomes Issue For UPS, FedEx As Drug Seizures Surge --Space surveillance complex changes hands Linked stories: *Workplace toxins can kill at home *Big Radio Bites Back! *U.S. Murder Rate Declines to 1966 Levels *Foiled again [Nader] *Police Treaty a Global Invasion? *Fingering the DVD Pirates ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Begin stories: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Girls swap diapers for rebel life <http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/10/06/p6s1.htm> Colombia's main leftist group, notorious for drugs and kidnapping, gives women equality, freedom By Martin Hodgson Special to The Christian Science Monitor SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, COLOMBIA Eliana Gonzalez was married at 14 and gave birth to her daughter a year later. Her husband, a landless peasant, would disappear on drunken binges for days at time, she says, "But he was the kind of man who believed a woman should always stay at home. I had to get his permission just to visit my parents. "I wanted to do something with my life. I wanted things to change," says Ms. Gonzalez, explaining why 26 years ago she left her family, chose a new name, and became a guerrilla fighter in what is now Colombia's largest - and most feared - rebel army. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are best known in the wider world for their reliance on kidnapping and extortion, close ties with the illegal narcotics trade, and casual use of extreme violence. So why are increasing numbers of Colombian women choosing to join them? When Gonzalez became a guerrilla in 1974, the FARC had fewer than 900 members, of whom only a handful were women. Now the group fields some 15,000 fighters, including more than 5,000 women. The figures alone illustrate the escalation of Colombia's bloody 34-year conflict, which pits leftist rebels against state security forces and their de facto allies, illegal right-wing paramilitaries. And as the US prepares to send nearly $1 billion worth of aid to Colombia's military, the fighting is likely to get worse, observers say. According to military analyst Alfredo Rangel, the FARC are stepping up their recruiting drives throughout the country. "A growing army needs whoever it can get, and women are an important source of new recruits," he says. But while the numbers indicate the scale of the violence, they also reflect the social conditions that helped trigger Colombia's war. "Young people in rural areas have no alternatives. Their families don't have money for education and there are no jobs," says Mariluz Rubio, human rights ombudsman in San Vicente del Caguan, the largest town in a southern region ceded to the rebels to enable peace talks that began in January, 1999. In much of rural Colombia, there has never been a consistent state presence, or investment in any kind of infrastructure or legal economy. A nationwide recession has pushed urban unemployment above 20 percent, so rural youngsters have little hope of escape to the cities. "And this is still a very macho country. For women, the possibilities are even fewer," says Ms. Rubio, adding that many families still see educating daughters as a waste of time. In rural communities, girls are married and start childbearing when they are as young as 12 years old. For many, the only job opportunities are in the drug trade, or with the armed factions. East of San Vicente, a two-hour drive down a rutted track leads to a rebel camp deep in the jungle. At the sound of a whistle blast, 24 guerrillas in drab green uniforms line up on a makeshift parade ground. Each one bears an assault rifle, a harness with spare ammunition, and a stubby machete. None is older than 25, and almost half are women. The drill commander is Sandra. The guerrilla in her 20s, who didn't want to give a last name, takes roll call in a school composition book, then assigns cookhouse and sentry details. "We all have the same duties and responsibilities, man or woman," she says later, sitting on her rough wooden cotwhile she and two friends paint their fingernails with red and pink nail polish. Like Gonzalez, Sandra grew up in a remote farming town, where she scraped through one year of primary school before the money ran out. She started working when she was 10, keeping house and looking after her five younger brothers and sisters. "Lots of women are here because their parents beat them, or just to get away from the poverty. I got on well with my parents, but I had to work harder at home than I do here." "It's tough, but at least you don't have to worry about where you'll get food and clothes from," agrees Ana Maria, also in her early 20s. Now Sandra has three sets of clothes - identical camouflage uniforms - and a pair of rubber boots, as well as an AK-47 that rests against her bed while her fingernails dry. "In Colombia, money and weapons are the only things that confer power. In a country where women are usually ignored, [women guerrillas] are surrounded by symbols that give them an identity," says anthropologist Maria Eugenia Vasquez, who is writing a book on female rebels. "The first time you pick up a weapon you feel proud, you feel more important. When you're a civilian, you don't belong anywhere, but when you're a guerrilla, people treat you better," says 16-year-old Lusia, who also declined to give her last name. She worked as a maid in the capital, Bogota, before joining the rebels. The guerrilla bands offer women equality and freedom from the expectations of a macho culture, they say, but charge a high price in return. "Once you're a soldier, you're always a soldier," says Gonzalez. In her mid-40s, she is one of the oldest and longest-serving women in the FARC. "But if you're a mother, you're always a mother," she adds in a soft tone. After she joined the rebels, she didn't see her daughter for nine years. "I got used to this life very quickly, but you can never adapt to leaving your child," she remembers. Guerrillas are not allowed to keep their children with them, explains Commandante Mariana Paez, a member of the FARC's negotiation team. "You can't be a guerrilla and a mother. You either neglect one or the other - and usually it's the children," she says. Female fighters are given obligatory birth-control advice. If they become pregnant, they are told to leave the babies with their families. In the camp, Sandra admits that she sometimes finds the rule a little harsh. "Most of us would like to have children, but you can't. Well ... you shouldn't," she says. Lusia disagrees. "If you have a husband, it's worse. They just cheat and fill you up with children. It's much better here," she says, remembering her best friend, who became a mother at 14. "We used to play hide and seek together, but I haven't seen her for years now," Lusia says. "I chose a different path. I think it was the right one." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roboprotest Artists and engineers make subversive allies September/October 2000 Technology Review By Nick Montfort With body-armored riot police poised like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in front of a corporate city called Niketown, the uprising late last year against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle seemed science-fictional at times. If the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) has its way, the future of civil disobedience will be even stranger. This team of artists has already engineered a new form of resistance: robot protesters. Three disruptive automatons have now been manufactured by the IAA, an anonymous group of artists founded in 1998. The group's Web site declares that it develops technologies for the "emerging market of cultural insurrection." While other researchers fashion robots to work in environments that are physically hazardous to humans, the IAA is building robots to speak out in areas where free speech has been regulated out of existence. The IAA takes technologies that have been developed to serve corporate, institutional and military interests and uses them to challenge and subvert those interests. IAA has so far built three civilly disobedient machines. The first, an anthropomorphic mobile robot known variously as Pamphleteer, Little Brother or Petit Frère, proffers subversive literature to passersby. Its partner in protest, GraffitiWriter, functions much like a remote-control dot-matrix printer—one that uses an array of spray paint cans as its print head and the sidewalk as its blank page. GraffitiWriter has now been used more than 200 times in seven cities by, among others, a Girl Scout troop, a homeless man and a policeman. A larger-scale version of this robot, called StreetWriter, is now in the final stages of development. Mounted to a car bumper, it paints huge messages on the street in letters that are legible from tall buildings and low-flying aircraft. Though painting the sidewalk or streets may strike some onlookers as anti-social, these robots are in some sense only imitating certain forms of corporate activity: Reebok recently commissioned a New York City artist to spray-paint advertising onto sidewalks and streets without city permission. Pamphleteer was constructed to give activists an appealing metal face. IAA's Web site declares that the robot is intended to "bypass the social conditioning that inhibits activists' ability to distribute propaganda by capitalizing on the aesthetics of cuteness." The designers even gave the robot a childlike voice. A tongue-in-cheek research paper by the IAA documents how Pamphleteer outperformed a human activist, distributing more literature as it worked uninterrupted for longer periods of time. The John Henry- style trial was conducted on street corners, but the IAA says Pamphleteer is now ready for deployment in malls, government buildings and business offices—places that ordinarily prohibit humans from distributing pamphlets. The IAA wants to use this robot's technological allure to critique the institutions that usually sell themselves with the same high-tech glitz. The IAA is sticking its neck out when it deploys its protesting robots, since their actions leave their expensive electronics at risk of seizure. For some protesters, such as those who smashed Seattle storefronts and claimed that their destruction of property was nonviolent, deployment of robotic allies that are subject to similar smashing appears to complicate their position. Other contexts invite additional complications. For instance, Pamphleteer would be a strange sight handing out fliers at picket lines where human workers are protesting increasing automation. Moreover, a technology that distances human protesters from the repercussions of illegally marking up the public pavement has some troublesome implications. Many means of civil disobedience have emphasized personal responsibility for one's reasonable but illegal actions; the IAA robots work against this trend. The IAA robots do, however, represent an attempt to reclaim public space and open up new means of communication. They also raise interesting questions about the use of technology for control and disruption and point out how the appeal of new technologies can allow people to act without responsibility. Both the protested and the protesters should come away with new perspectives after a hands-on experience with the IAA's technologies of resistance. Gutenberg's printing press powered the Protestant Reformation and the American Revolution. Fax machines helped topple the Berlin Wall, and e-mail is undermining dictatorships around the world. Robots are thus stepping into a grand tradition of applying cutting-edge technology to foster political dissent. ---- Nick Montfort is an electronic novelist whose latest interactive epic appears at <http://www.edreport.com> Institute for Applied Autonomy: <http://www.appliedautonomy.com/> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prague update: 11 prisoners released There has been a flurry of activity in Prague over the last few days, including interaction between international protesters and a conference that included President Havel and the Dalai Lama, as well as a full-page interview in which Havel disputed the Czech Interior Ministry's criminalization of protest (bear in mind that the Czech presidency is largely a ceremonial position; Havel has little practical power, but a good amount of moral authority). As a result, 11 prisoners have been released, as detailed in the following report: "Today, the person who is responsible for amnesties in the castle spent the whole morning with Havel. The 7 Hungarians, the 2 Spanish, the German and one of the two Danish are out now. Apparently all of them still face charges, but they are not anymore behind bars. The case of the 7 Hungarians is especially remarkable, since they were held incommunicado until now (accused of assault to police), not even some of the most mainstream NGOs had been able to visit them, and the prosecutor was saying until 2 days ago that it would take still quite some time until they could be visited. It is not completely clear to what extent all this is related to political pressure (meaning both actions all over Europe and political pressure here, which is already starting to change public perception), but it certainly seems to be the case." That means there are still, apparently, up to nine people being held in prison -- one or two Czechs, one Dane, one Briton, one Austrian, two Romanians, and two Poles. The activists in Prague working on the situation pledge not to stop their struggle until all are released and the criminalization of protest -- which is not just a matter of imprisoning protesters, but also of enforcing a negative portrayal of the very act of protest -- is reversed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Privacy Becomes Issue For UPS, FedEx As Drug Seizures Surge <http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1533/a06.html?999> Do Delivery Firms Have Police Responsibilities? October 11 - When the "Detroit Boys" absolutely, positively had to get drug money to their suppliers, they sent it via "X-Daddy" - code for FedEx Corp., king of the overnight-delivery industry and the preferred service of the cocaine ring that ran at least 12 crack houses in Minneapolis. To pay drug suppliers, the dealers regularly bundled piles of cash into FedEx packages in 1995 and 1996 and let the express carrier take it from there. For less-urgent shipments, the Detroit Boys used "Pri-Daddy," the U.S. Postal Service's slower-moving Priority Mail. Until the gang was busted four years ago, it was known not only for its shipping savvy, but also for wrapping enemies it thought had cheated the group in duct tape and beating them. In recent years, drug traffickers across the country have leapt enthusiastically onto the New Economy bandwagon of supply-chain efficiency, motivated by the speed and dependability of express-delivery services and increased law-enforcement pressure on airlines and other forms of transport. "I wasn't going to put it on the plane with me," says Maurice Clark, a Knoxville, Tenn., drug dealer who nevertheless was arrested and sentenced last year to 87 months in federal prison after sending roughly four pounds of cocaine in two shipments through United Parcel Service Inc. Divided Loyalties The trend has fueled a conflict, reaching as high as the office of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, between law-enforcement agencies around the country and big express-delivery services over just how much the companies and the Postal Service should help police. After a string of run-ins with police over access to its clients' packages, UPS began requiring warrants before allowing police to search packages. And the Postal Service still won't let outside law-enforcement officials inspect outbound international mail. The tension between police and delivery services highlights a broader debate about privacy and law enforcement as telecommunications companies, Internet service providers, banks and other institutions amass huge electronic databases about their customers' activities. Among the prominent examples: "Carnivore," the Federal Bureau of Investigation's new software system for performing court-ordered wiretaps at ISPs, which has prompted strong criticism from privacy advocates. For their part, the big parcel carriers, particularly FedEx and UPS, operate elaborate digital information systems that compile troves of data about all the packages they carry - in all, about 8% of the country's economic output at any moment. Express-delivery services are "the best way to smuggle dope," says San Diego police detective Steve Sloan, who uses an eight-year-old Labrador retriever named Alvin to sniff out drugs at package-handling facilities in southern California. "Pick any night at random, and we can seize anywhere from 50 to 200 pounds ... and sometimes higher." U.S. Customs Service drug seizures from express-delivery parcels ballooned to 970 in 1999, from 69 in 1996, and the amount of drugs seized from the U.S. mail by postal inspectors jumped 22% last year alone, reaching 15,436 pounds. The seizures involve dozens of different criminal organizations. And despite those big numbers, law-enforcement officials say, most of the drugs and drug money flowing through the system still goes undetected. The Postal Service and private carriers such as FedEx and UPS insist that this is a business they don't want. The carriers also say that the use of their delivery networks by drug dealers is tiny compared with the amount of drugs hauled by trucks, cars, boats and human couriers, and that the spike in drug seizures at least partly reflects the companies' vigilance in helping police spot suspicious packages. Taking Umbrage The four giants of the U.S. express-delivery industry - UPS, FedEx, Airborne Freight Corp. and DHL Airways Inc. - and the Postal Service won't talk in detail about their security procedures, citing concerns that doing so might reveal drug-detection secrets. Privately, though, industry officials bristle at the suggestion that they have become major players in the drug business or aren't cooperative enough with drug-law enforcers. UPS trains its 68,000 brown-uniformed drivers to look for suspicious packages. FedEx, based in Memphis, Tenn., has mustered a global army of more than 500 security personnel whose duties include scouring its fleet of air freighters and trucks for drugs, while DHL, the U.S. affiliate of Brussels-based DHL International Ltd., relies on more than 100 security officers. Postal officials point out that they seized $12.8 million in drug money during the past two years. Drug dealers like the express-delivery services for many of the same reasons that law-abiding customers do - delivery is fast and reliable, and customers can track their packages. A drug-courier ring busted in New York earlier this year entered its tracking numbers at the Web sites of Airborne, DHL, FedEx, UPS and the post office to determine when the deliveries would arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Under current postal rules, drug dealers also can mail a foreign-bound letter holding roughly $200,000 in cash without much worry that it will be intercepted. Law-enforcement experts say the increase in use of high-speed deliveries by drug dealers started in the mid-1990s. A string of stepped-up investigations and new police techniques had rattled many dealers and their human drug couriers. Some were particularly spooked by the new antiterrorism practice, prompted by the 1996 crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, of quizzing airline passengers about their carry-on luggage, police say. As police noticed more drug shipments entering delivery systems, federal Drug Enforcement Administration offices around the country began negotiating local guidelines with private carriers over how the companies would handle suspicious packages. FedEx in 1993 reached one of the first agreements, promising to notify the DEA anytime the overnight-delivery giant intercepted a shipment of at least 500 pounds of marijuana or 500 grams of cocaine. FedEx says the aim of the agreement, which was in essence copied later in other areas of the country, "was to try to bring some clarity and discipline to the process." Sluggish In Richmond Still, tensions flared as drug agents around the country began more aggressively scrutinizing shipping companies. In 1997, the U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Va., accused UPS of slowing down an investigation into a cocaine-dealing gang in Richmond by refusing access to suspicious packages at a critical point in the investigation. "UPS was not as cooperative with the interdiction efforts of the law-enforcement community as it could be," says James B. Comey, lead prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Richmond office, which eventually prosecuted more than a dozen dealers in the case. UPS declines to comment on the matter. Several months later, state and local police showed up unexpectedly at a UPS package-handling facility in Cincinnati to look for drugs, angering UPS officials. In response to incidents like that one, Atlanta-based UPS issued new guidelines in May 1998 that sharply restricted police access to its parcel-handling facilities, according to an internal company memo. The rules required police to get a search warrant or subpoena to search any suspicious item, to make appointments to search for drug packages and to stay out of the way of UPS employees. UPS refuses to lend uniforms or delivery trucks to undercover agents, as does FedEx except in rare circumstances, making it harder for police to arrest dealers after they receive a drug shipment. Seattle-based Airborne, on the other hand, often provides uniforms and trucks to law-enforcement officials, while DHL, based in Redwood City, Calif., occasionally lends uniforms but not delivery vehicles. "There is no consistent policy, or there is no policy at all, so guys don't know what to expect day to day," says Clayton Searle, a former Los Angeles police detective who now leads a nonprofit police-training organization called the International Narcotics Interdiction Association. Customs officials became so frustrated that they started to air their complaints publicly. In a presentation at an air-cargo conference near Washington in 1998, Phil Metzger, a high-ranking Customs Service official, described an ominous surge in drug seizures from private carriers and suggested that express-delivery companies appeared to have become a top choice for drug dealers. 'Copious Efforts' The Air Courier Conference of America, an industry trade group with a board of directors that includes UPS and FedEx executives, fired back. James A. Rogers, chairman of the group's international committee, sent a letter to Customs that said any "assertion that the increased drug seizures are evidence that the express industry is now the preferred conduit for drug traffickers is a huge jump to a very wrong conclusion." The drug-seizure increase, he said, was the result of "copious efforts" by carriers to work with law enforcement. "At the very least, we believe a public apology is in order," Mr. Rogers demanded in the letter. He didn't get one. Instead, top Justice Department officials suggested to Attorney General Reno in early 1998 that she convene a working group from officials at the DEA, the FBI, the Postal Inspection Service, FedEx, UPS, Airborne, DHL, the Emery Worldwide Airlines unit of CNF Inc. and state and federal prosecutors to discuss a coordinated, nationwide approach to interdicting drug movements. A key element promoted by some of the law-enforcement officials, according to a top postal-inspection official, was to give law enforcement access to the private databases of the big shippers. That was a particularly thorny proposition for FedEx and UPS, which have spent fortunes to build the information systems needed to orchestrate their clockwork deliveries. Each package moving through their systems - about 18 million a day combined - is hit by electronic scanners at least a half-dozen times during even a short journey within the U.S. As a result, at any instant, the companies' computers can zero in on the exact locations of items in transit and the history of other shipments by the same sender or to the same recipient. The private-sector delivery companies - but not the Postal Service - are required to supply Customs agents with an electronic record of delivery-manifest information on all international shipments destined for the U.S. Customs officials then use their own computers to check for clues of drug smuggling hidden in the addresses, descriptions of contents and other data about each package. A box speeding via FedEx, for example, toward the same address as a previous package nabbed by a drug-sniffing dog usually will be flagged by the computer. And agents may inspect any international package on a private carrier without a search warrant. But the private carriers aren't required to provide the same data to law-enforcement agencies about packages being shipped within the U.S., and all foreign-bound Postal Service shipments are exempt from scrutiny without a warrant. Postal officials say the law is clear: Mail is just as protected from warrantless searches as someone's house. "There is a delicate balance between defending the borders and protecting the privacy rights of our citizens," says Kenneth Newman, deputy chief in the Postal Inspection Service's criminal-investigations unit. The Postal Service currently is fighting draft federal legislation that it claims would allow Customs to freely search mail leaving the U.S. In the meetings of the Justice Department task force last year and early this year, which weren't attended by Ms. Reno, officials from the express-delivery companies insisted that they must walk a similarly fine line, even though the constitutional protections of the mail don't apply to them, according to people who attended the sessions. A Legitimate Crush FedEx, UPS and other package-delivery companies acknowledge that it's largely up to them whether parcels in their systems are searched, but the companies insist that there is a limit to how much they can cooperate with police while still delivering the crush of legitimate parcels that flood their systems every day. UPS requires warrants but won't comment on whether other parts of the policy it issued in 1998 remain in force. DHL says it usually requires a warrant from local or state police but not from federal agencies. In the end, the Justice Department backed away from the proposal to tap private databases, concluding that any such effort might further complicate relations with the companies. "We didn't want to turn an army of FedEx people into policemen," a senior Justice Department official said. For their part, the companies promised to be as cooperative as possible without violating the privacy of their customers. After the talks, Justice Department staffers recommended to Ms. Reno that no national interdiction agreements be pursued, and she agreed, according to Justice Department officials. The task force hasn't met since then. In May, federal law-enforcement officials at a House criminal-justice subcommittee hearing said relations with the big package carriers had improved. Only the Postal Service was sharply criticized because of its continuing refusal to let overseas mail be opened without a warrant. FedEx was praised for tipping off police in 1998 to a huge marijuana-trafficking organization that allegedly included more than 20 FedEx drivers and other employees, including a security officer at a FedEx facility at Pier 40 in Manhattan. The resulting investigation led to more than 100 arrests and the April breakup of a drug ring that smuggled about 120 tons of marijuana. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Space surveillance complex changes hands Telescope becomes operational 10/05/00 MAUI, Hawaii (AFPN) -- The Defense Department's most sophisticated telescope complex, the Maui Space Surveillance Complex here, changed hands Oct. 1, from Air Force Space Command to Air Force Materiel Command. In conjunction with the changeover, Air Force officials announced that the complex's 3.67-meter telescope -- the world's largest for taking pictures of passing satellites -- was now fully operational. The complex, located atop Mt. Haleakala, is used primarily to track and "photograph" satellites, and for research into technologies and techniques for improving the quality of the images that are taken. The change reflects a greater emphasis on the site's research activities, on closer collaborations with academic researchers, and on developing and implementing techniques that will further improve the quality of images collected. A majority of the operations have now transferred from Det. 3, 18th Space Surveillance Squadron, to Det. 15, Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate. Construction of the telescope was completed in 1998. But for the past two years, scientists have been adding instrumentation and deformable optics (a mirror that can change its shape) that will permit the telescope to compensate for the distorting effects of the atmosphere and get clear images of objects in space. The telescope, known as the Advanced Electro-Optical System, is available to visiting experimenters. Last year, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation announced they were making more than $2 million available over two years for civilian researchers to use the telescope. The two organizations are also contributing an additional $500,000 for civilian groups to use the telescope for upper atmospheric research. Multiple groups or institutions can use the telescope, because images captured by the telescope can be routed through mirrors to seven independent experimental labs located beneath the telescope. "By allowing civilian researchers to use this telescope, the academic community benefits and their involvement can lead to improvements that we can use in our space surveillance work," said Maj. J. Raley Marek, chief of the directorate's Space Surveillance Systems Branch. The telescope, along with a 1.6-meter telescope, 1.2-meter twin telescopes, a 0.8-meter beam director-tracker and a 0.6-meter beam director are part of a space surveillance network for identifying and pinpointing objects in space for U.S. Space Command. Earlier this year, the telescope complex received $15 million to continue operations and research and development, and for performance enhancements, in addition to supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA often uses the 1.2-meter telescope to track asteroids passing near earth. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linked stories: ******************** Workplace toxins can kill at home <http://www.usatoday.com/money/bighits/toxin1.htm> Workers in dozens of industries are not only being exposed to dangerous substances on the job, but are also transporting those toxins home on their clothes, skin, tools, and briefcases, unwittingly exposing family members to dangerous contamination, according to an investigation by USA Today. ******************** Big Radio Bites Back! <http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/10/16/lpfm/index.html> Major broadcasting companies and NPR are ganging up on low-power FM radio. This is the story of how big broadcasting is trying to kill the low-power radio star. ******************** U.S. Murder Rate Declines to 1966 Levels <http://www.jointogether.org/jtodirect.jtml?U=83952&O=264773> A new report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that murder rates in the United States have dropped for the eighth year in a row. ******************** Foiled again <http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/10/18/nader/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=664> Ralph Nader is turned away from yet another presidential debate, but he's hoping for a post-debate bounce nonetheless. ******************** Police Treaty a Global Invasion? <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39519,00.html?tw=wn20001018> Civil liberties groups say a proposed treaty that will grant more surveillance powers to U.S. and European police agencies runs roughshod over Internet freedom. ******************** Fingering the DVD Pirates <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39351,00.html?tw=wn20001018> A new fingerprinting technology, created by a company specializing in forensic analysis of bullets, could make it easier for manufacturers and retailers of CDs and DVDs to identify bogus copies. ******************** ====================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ====================================================== "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." -J. Krishnamurti ______________________________________________________________ To subscribe/unsubscribe or for a sample copy or a list of back issues, send appropriate email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. ______________________________________________________________ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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