-Caveat Lector- [radtimes] # 157 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to assist RadTimes--> (See ** at end.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --WBAI And Czech Public Television: Fearful Symmetry --Labor's Critical Condition --Operation Red Tide Cracks Down on Ecstasy Dealers --In Tapping Net, FBI Insists Privacy Is Not a Victim --Frenchman Bove calls GM crop destruction "battle for future" --CIA: Olympics Open to Terrorism =================================================================== WBAI And Czech Public Television: Fearful Symmetry by Bill Weinberg The leadership at a non-commercial broadcast station is re-shuffled from above in a surprise move just before Christmas. Staff and reporters are improperly fired. Armed guards are brought in. Personnel who refuse to go along with censorship, firings and bannings are themselves threatened. Reporters are harassed for challenging powerful public figures. Large protests are held in support of persecuted station personnel. Is this taking place in the tentative new democracy of a post-Communist country? Or in the media capital of the Free World? Both. The turmoil at New York's WBAI-FM is eerily mirrored by that at the public TV station in the Czech Republic. Ironically, the situation in Prague is now approaching a resounding victory for free speech-while that at WBAI is only deteriorating. In April 2000, Jiri Hodac, a crony of former prime minister Vaclav Klaus, was appointed news director at Czech Television. Viewers and critics warned that Klaus' right-wing Civic Democratic Party would be granted undue influence. Sure enough, in June, talk-show host Roman Prorok was fired after insisting that if Klaus refused to show up for a live round-table featuring the Czech political party bosses, there would be an empty chair with his name on it in the studio. Hodac stepped down following the resultant outcry. But at Christmastime, Hodac was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed station director. He hired a news director who was a Klaus political advisor, and fired 20 people who were perceived as disloyal. The news staff rebelled, locking themselves in the news room, broadcasting their own, unapproved and uncensored programs. Hodac pulled the plug, and screens went blank across the Czech Republic. On December 31, security guards were brought in to secure access to the news room, and criminal charges were filed against strikers. But viewers mobilized, holding large protests in support of the journalists. On January 11, Hodac acceded to the popular mandate for his resignation. The journalists continued their strike, demanding that all Hodac appointees must go. Finally, on January 23, President Vaclav Havel signed a law allowing Parliament to appoint a new interim director and calling for the Czech Television Council, which picks the station director, to be nominated by citizen groups, not politicians. The government has also announced an audit of the station. The journalists have broached ending their strike. Now, dateline New York City: listeners, producers and staff are similarly protesting a "Christmas coup" at non-commercial WBAI Radio, in which the station's general manager and program director were removed and others banned for perceived disloyalty to the new regime. The banned staff charge that the National Board of the Pacifica Foundation, which holds BAI's license, is attempting to purge dissenting voices from the airwaves-or even sell the station to commercial interests. On November 29, 2000, 10-year Station General Manager Valerie Van Isler received a letter giving her an ultimatum: to accept a job with the Pacifica Board in Washington DC, or resign. She refused to do either. The timing was predictable. Two years earlier, Van Isler had-at Pacifica's request-testified against the rights of unpaid station staff to unionize before the National Labor Relations Board. But now, in a turn-around, she had just signed a nine-month extension of the contract recognizing the rights of unpaid staff to representation by the United Electrical Workers Local 404. She also protested Pacifca's efforts to rein in Amy Goodman's hard-hitting network-wide "Democracy Now!" show, which is produced at BAI. In October, Pacifica had imposed harsh restrictions on Goodman, ordering her to submit show ideas in advance for review-prompting Goodman to file a grievance with the UE. Then, on Election Day morning, Goodman and President Bill Clinton were surprised to find themselves on the air with each other when the president called New York stations to get out the vote. Goodman's relentless grilling won her a phone call from the White House the next morning, admonishing her that she would no longer have the president's "cooperation." On the night of December 22, Pacifica Executive Director Bessie Wash and WBAI "Talk Back" host Utrice Leid changed the locks on the station's front door. Utrice interrupted a broadcast to announce that she had been appointed interim general manager. The next morning, Program Director and "Wake Up Call" co-host Bernard White and his co-producer (and UE shop steward) Sharan Harper received letters at their homes by personal messenger, informing them they had been terminated-on Pacifica stationery, and signed by Bessie Wash. These terminations were arguably illegal: such decisions are to be made only in consultation with the station's Local Advisory Board under Pacifica by-laws. In the following days, guards were brought in, and Leid announced that four other personnel were banned-with no cause given. Leid declared the Local Advisory Board would be denied access to the station for their monthly meeting if it included public commentary (as mandated by station by-laws). On January 23, the LAB put this edict to the test. When Leid persisted in barring entry to the banned volunteers, nine supporters refused to move from the hallway and were arrested, including two LAB members-Miguel Maldonado and Vicente Panama Alba of the National Congress for Puerto Rican rights. They all spent that night in The Tombs. That the listeners who support non-commercial radio have a right to a voice at their station was the radical founding doctrine of the Pacifica network. But the Pacifica National Board is today a virtual who's who of corporate America, and is moving to homogenize the five member stations in New York, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington DC. Since voting to centralize all power in its own hands in February 1999, this board has been a self-perpetuating entity, denying the member stations any voice on appointments. Pacifica Treasurer Michael Palmer is a Houston real estate developer who invests in Mexican maquiladoras. In a leaked 1999 e-mail to then-Pacifica chair Mary Francis Berry, he urged the sale of WBAI to private interests. Board member John Murdock is an attorney with Epstein, Becker & Green, a New York firm that specializes in "maintaining a union-free workplace." Board member Bertram Lee, Sr. specializes in media buy-outs, with DC's WKYS-FM and Boston's CBS TV affiliate among his recent conquests. There are three lawsuits pending against Pacifica for violation of its own charter: one by a group of listeners, one by dissident members of the National Board, and one by members of the stations' Local Advisory Boards. The Foundation was also recently audited by the state of California, where it is incorporated. In 1999, it relocated to DC in the face of ongoing protests at its Berkeley offices over the crisis at the Pacifica station there, KPFA. For several weeks that summer, all staff were locked out and the station occupied by an armed security force after Pacifica removed longtime Station Manager Nicole Sawaya. The California Joint Legislative Audit Committee report found that Pacifica may have violated the rules of its tax exemption by locking out KPFA staff in breach of their contract with the Communication Workers of America. An alliance of WBAI staff and listeners has mobilized to defend WBAI's autonomy. The alliance, Concerned Friends of WBAI, has held several protests outside the station's Wall Street offices, demanding recision of the terminations, lifting of the bannings and establishment of a democratic governance structure for the station and Pacifica. But, in vivid contrast to the situation in the Czech Republic, WBAI and Pacifica management remain intransigent. The state of free speech and independent media appears to be healthier in parts of the post-Communist world than in USA. It is time for Pacifica to follow the heroic Czech example, and let the listeners back into listener-supported radio. ---- Bill Weinberg is a co-producer of WBAI's "Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade" (Tuesdays at midnight) and author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso Books, 2000). =================================================================== Labor's Critical Condition <http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2507/moberg2507.html> by David Moberg 03/05/01 When John Sweeney became the president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, he set organizing a million new members a year as the labor movement's top priority. Without a turnaround in the four-decade-long decline in union strength, organized labor faced not only losing its power in bargaining and politics, but disappearing altogether. Last year, when the percentage of the work force in unions failed to drop for the first time since 1975, there was hope that the long slump had bottomed out. That celebration was short-lived. In January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that in 2000 the number of union members had dropped once again to 16.3 million, representing only 13.5 percent of the work force, a decline of 0.4 percent from 1999. The character of the labor movement also continues to change: 37.5 percent of government workers are organized (a slight increase from last year), but only 9 percent of the private sector work force now belongs to a union. While emphasizing that there was still a net growth of 150,000 members over the past three years, AFL-CIO organizing director Mark Splain acknowledges that "clearly it's not good news that the numbers are going in the wrong direction." Although there are many reasons for the renewed decline, the central problem is that, despite strong efforts by a few unions, there is still only a spotty and superficial commitment to organizing at all levels of the labor movement. "We think there's a crisis," says Andy Stern, president o the Service Employees Union (SEIU)--one of the most aggressive organizers in the labor movement, and co-chairman of the AFL-CIO Executive Council Organizing Committee. "What I'm most concerned about is that there needs to be more of a sense of crisis from the AFL-CIO and throughout the labor movement." The decline of members last year probably reflects heavy job losses in manufacturing, where union density is relatively high, that were obscured by overall low unemployment figures. Also unions diverted much money and staff to politics this year rather than organizing. There were also some big wins in 1999, such as the 70,000 home health care workers in Los Angeles, that reflected many years of previous organizing. The AFL-CIO claims that 400,000 new workers were organized last year (although the running tally in its "Work In Progress" newsletter identified only 160,000) compared with 600,000 in 1999 and 500,000 in 1998. But several experts privately express doubts about the reliability of those numbers. A few unions are widely acknowledged as organizing leaders, such as SEIU, UNITE, the Hotel Employees (HERE) and the Communications Workers (CWA). Other unions that have made major new commitments to organizing include AFSCME (public workers), the Steelworkers, the Autoworkers and the Carpenters. But even in these unions, there isn't universal commitment. For example, CWA locals have resisted international efforts to increase spending on organizing, and only a few AFSCME district councils, such as in Illinois, have made organizing a top priority. Much of the problem reflects internal union politics: Officials succeed by catering to members, who often must be persuaded to spend their dues money on expensive, risky efforts to recruit new members rather than providing services for themselves. Since nearly three-fourths of union funds are controlled by often autonomous local unions, even a committed international union president may have limited influence. Although last summer the AFL-CIO agreed to hold unions more accountable to membership goals, the federation has no power over affiliated unions. Furthermore, despite its continual emphasis on organizing, the AFL-CIO and its leaders often send the message that political work is even more important. When Sweeney came into office, the best estimates were that few unions spent more than 5 percent of their budgets on organizing. With a few exceptions, again most notably the SEIU, very few unions reach the AFL-CIO recommended level of spending 30 percent of their budgets on organizing. "There are only a very few unions at the national or local level that have made a dramatic changes," says Richard Bensinger, the former AFL-CIO organizing director who is now a consultant to several unions. "Most union commitment to organizing is still at the level of rhetoric. You can see substantial growth and commitment in those few, but there's next to nothing in many others." The issue is partly money. "There's no way to do this on the cheap," Bensinger says. "The law is too weak and employers too vicious to think we can get by inexpensively." But the more fundamental issue is changing the internal culture of the labor movement. Starting with Bensinger's tenure, the AFL-CIO has encouraged union officials and staff to develop a new outlook on their work. Unions like HERE, for example, extensively train union stewards to mobilize members and handle grievances on the job, freeing staff to focus more on organizing new members with the help of newly energized member volunteers. This represents a dramatic change from the old "insurance" model of unions, where business agents handle individual union members' problems. Cultural change also demands a new organizing strategy. First, the best organizing unions have moved away from simply responding to "hot shop" calls from agitated workers or desperately seeking new members in seemingly easy targets outside their traditional realms. Unions like SEIU and HERE build on their strengths to develop power in particular industries (the two have even swapped locals). Against great resistance, SEIU's Stern is pushing hard for all unions to pursue more clearly focused strategies. Successful unions also approach organizing as a task of building a union at the workplace even before it is recognized, starting with the creation of an internal committee of dedicated workers who do most of the organizing. Union organizers can't succeed with old tactics of handing out leaflets at plant gates. They must pursue more aggressive tactics such as holding solidarity days at work, surveying workers about their needs, conducting actions on the job, or involving the community, including clergy, elected officials, community groups and the press, in support of workers who are trying to organize. According to Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner, unions that used five or more of these "union building" tactics as part of their organizing efforts in 1998 and 1999 were 30 percent more likely to win an NLRB representation election than unions that did not. In the long run, these tactics are also likely to build stronger unions, but they have been adopted mainly because unions needed to counter intense employer opposition. Consider the case of Certech, a 500-worker unit of the global Carpenter Technology Corporation that manufactures advanced ceramics for the auto, aerospace and electric power industries in northern New Jersey. In 1999 workers from the plant, which primarily employs immigrant women from Central America, contacted UNITE for their third try to form a union. The company responded, as usual, with a campaign of threats, including moving the company to Mexico, bribes and intimidation, even firing seven union supporters. Last March the workers voted against unionization. But the union worked with the core of committed union members to continue the fight with protests, leafleting and mobilization of support from clergy, local politicians, other unions and community groups. That support gave workers courage to testify at hearings on 70 charges of unfair labor practices that the union brought to the National Labor Relations Board. As the testimony continued into the third week, the company called and said it was ready to negotiate a contract, which was signed at the end of January. The outside support was essential, but the key was a well-organized group of workers on the job. "We put our heart into this campaign," says regional organizing director Rhina Molina, "but nothing can be done unless the workers decide they want to do it." At a time when surveys show more than a third of unorganized workers would like to join a union, the chief obstacle to unionization remains employer opposition, which exploits labor laws that have grown weaker over the years. In a scathing report issued last fall, Human Rights Watch concluded that American labor law fell far short of international standards. "Many workers who try to form and join trade unions to bargain with their employers are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association," the group reported. The problem has only grown worse with globalization. Bronfenbrenner has found that more than half of employers threatened to close all or part of the work site during organizing drives, nearly double the rate of threats in the late '80s. In the most mobile industries, like manufacturing, 68 percent of employers threatened to move during organizing drives; those threats cut union wins by about 40 percent. Although the threats (made as often by financially strong companies as weak ones) were often idle, 15 percent of plants where unions won recognition actually did shut down within two years, triple the rate in the late '80s. The fierce level of employer opposition still chills union organizing, despite improved strategies of the best unions. Unions now win more than half of all NLRB elections (53 percent in fiscal year 1999), but the number of elections held and workers eligible to vote remains below even what it was in the late '80s. Partly that reflects a shift away from NLRB elections to other methods, such as pressuring companies to recognize the union when a majority of workers have signed union cards. Yet the overall picture remains grim: Roughly one-third of the time, unions withdraw even before an election is held, as employer opposition destroys union support. Even after winning an election, only 60 percent of private sector workers typically secure a first contract. Union organizing increasingly focuses on the nonprofit-private and public-service sectors, where win rates are much higher (often 60 to 70 percent in sectors like health care and finance) because opposition is usually less fierce. With the growing influence of globalization, unions are devoting less effort to organizing in manufacturing, where they win about 42 percent of elections overall, but only about 31 percent of elections in the most global companies, according to Bronfenbrenner. Not surprisingly, multinational companies are far more likely to threaten to close and move than nationally based firms. Unions like CWA and HERE have led the effort to reduce employer opposition by using their bargaining or political clout to win agreements from companies to stay neutral during organizing drives. But unions have also used their political leverage to make sure that publicly supported local development deals provide for labor peace, no strikes during organizing in exchange for employer neutrality. California last year also approved legislation mandating that businesses not use state funds to oppose unionization. Unions won about two-thirds of organizing campaigns with neutrality agreements, according to a study published last year. It is also possible to curtail employer tactics in less formal ways. The AFL-CIO has encouraged central labor councils to promote "the right to choose a voice at work" through public actions. Stern wants the AFL-CIO to increase pressure on officials who are elected with labor support to take concrete actions to support union organizing efforts as well as push for local and state legislation, such as reversing right-to-work laws and passing legislation prohibiting public money from being used to fight unions. Splain adds, "The action for us will be at the local and state level where union density, strength, ties to the community are pretty good, like Los Angeles." President Clinton did little to help union organizing, and there is no prospect for federal legislation to aid organizing in the near future under Bush and a Republican Congress. Human Rights Watch recommended a long, reasonable list of reforms that would strengthen workers rights in the United States, but the greatest value of the report is in highlighting this country's failure to live up to established international law and human rights treaties. In a related effort, the Labor Party has launched a campaign to ground workers rights in the guarantee of First Amendment rights of free speech and association at work and in the constitutional prohibition of involuntary servitude, rather than a focus on reforming existing labor law, which is based on the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce. Ultimately, the most effective campaign for workers rights would be massive organizing drives, some focused on a particular corporation, others on a regional industry or other target, that would combine all of the demonstrated elements of a successful organizing campaign with a high-profile political and community fight to guarantee workers rights. It is unlikely that unions will break out of the cage formed by the law, employer power and globalization until the crisis of the labor movement becomes a social crisis as well. But first the labor movement must recognize its own critical condition and be willing, as the civil rights movement was, to create a social crisis if workers rights are not respected. =================================================================== Operation Red Tide Cracks Down on Ecstasy Dealers <http://www.jointogether.org/sa/default.jtml?O=265941> 2/7/01 The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are teaming to crack down on ecstasy sales in the United States, U.S. News and World Report reported Feb. 5. Their latest effort, called Operation Red Tide, resulted in the largest seizure of ecstasy in the United States and the arrest of the largest wholesaler of the drug to date. The effort began in September 1999, when two federal agents received a tip that a low-level street dealer was selling ecstasy. After tapping the dealer's phone, the agents began unraveling a major international ecstasy and cocaine distribution syndicate. As a result of the 15-month investigation, suspected ringleader Tamer Adel Ibrahim, 26, was arrested for buying cocaine from Mexico and Colombia, selling it in Europe and then using those profits to buy millions of ecstasy tablets from the Netherlands to sell in the United States. "This is a snapshot of what the new emerging trafficking groups look like," said Michele Leonhart, head of the DEA's Los Angeles, Calif., division. Most of the ecstasy sold in the U.S. comes from the Netherlands and Belgium, with Romania and Poland also becoming major source countries. The tablets are made in mobile labs inside 18-wheeler trucks or on floating barges, then transported by criminal syndicates, many run by Israeli nationals based in Europe, Israel, and the United States. "That is the ecstasy triangle," said Robert Gagne, a DEA agent on Long Island, N.Y. "The unification of Europe has helped ecstasy dealers as much as NAFTA has helped the Mexicans with free trade." =================================================================== February 8, 2001 In Tapping Net, FBI Insists Privacy Is Not a Victim <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/technology/08CARN.html> By JOHN SCHWARTZ QUANTICO, Va. - As long as there have been law enforcement agents, they have tried to listen in on what the bad guys are planning. In early times, that meant standing next to a window in the evesdrope, the place where water from the eaves drips, to overhear conversations. As communications went electronic, eavesdropping did, too: Gen. Jeb Stuart hired a tapper to intercept telegraph messages in the Civil War. And by the 1890's, two decades after Alexander Graham Bell's first call to Watson, the first known telephone wiretaps by the police were in place. The Internet, in turn, has provided new frontiers for law enforcement tappers. At first, surveillance of Internet traffic was useful only in hacking cases after all, only geeks were online. But as the world has gone digital, criminals have as well, and Internet taps are requested in a growing number of cases. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group based in Washington, requests from field offices for help with "data interception operations" rose more than 18-fold between fiscal years 1997 and 1999. In Congressional testimony in July, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's laboratory division, Donald M. Kerr, painted a stark portrait of the dangers of the online world. "The use of computers and the Internet is growing rapidly, paralleled by exploitation of computers, networks and databases to commit crimes and to harm the safety, security and privacy of others," he said. All manner of crimes child pornography, fraud, identity theft, even terrorism are being perpetrated using the Internet as a tool, he said. But one device developed by the F.B.I. to deal with this new world of crime has drawn it squarely into a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance: an Internet wiretapping system called Carnivore. The Carnivore effort, which came to light last June, met with resistance from groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives. The F.B.I. says it has already used the device in dozens of investigations. But critics are concerned that Carnivore, much more than telephone wiretaps, can cast an investigative net that captures the communications of bystanders along with those of a suspect. The House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, has said the technology raises "strong concerns" that the government "is infringing on Americans' basic constitutional protection against unwarranted search and seizure." "Until these concerns are addressed," he said, "Carnivore should be shut down." The name, to be sure, has not helped the F.B.I.'s salesmanship. It was derived from an earlier system, called Omnivore, that captured most of the Internet traffic coursing through a network. "As the tool developed and became more discerning" able to get at the meat of an investigation "it was named Carnivore," an official said. ("If they called it Device 374," he explained, "nobody could remember what Device 374 is.") The F.B.I. says the real value of Carnivore, by any name, is that it can do much less than its predecessors. It says agents can fine-tune the system to yield only the sources and recipients of the suspect's e- mail traffic, providing Internet versions of the phone-tapping tools that record the numbers dialed by a suspect and the numbers of those calling in. Those tools, known respectively as pen registers and "trap and trace" devices, are valuable building blocks of any preliminary investigation. "Trap and trace is vital," said Marcus C. Thomas, who heads the bureau's cybertechnology section, "to try to understand criminal organizations, who's communicating with who." Moreover, a full federal wiretap whether of a suspect's phone or of Internet traffic requires extensive evidence of criminal activity and approval from high Justice Department officials and a judge. Court approval to monitor the origins and destinations, not the content, requires only a pledge from the investigators that the information would be relevant. Law enforcement officials say the goal of Carnivore is to protect privacy. Under most wiretaps, they reason, investigators have to review all the material that comes in over the wire and discard any material that they are not entitled to review under the terms of the warrant say, a conversation with the suspect's grandmother. Because the path of online data is harder to isolate than a telephone line, Carnivore may capture communications unrelated to the suspect. But because it then filters out whatever investigators are not entitled to see, officials say, privacy is enhanced. To understand why the F.B.I. hungers for Carnivore, behold its ancestor: a hulking stainless steel box the size of an old Kelvinator in the building in Quantico where the bureau designs what it calls interception systems. The $80,000 behemoth can monitor data traffic on three phone lines simultaneously and translate the squeal of modems into the e-mail and Web pages that a criminal suspect sees. But it can monitor only a standard modem. If a criminal suspect has, like millions of other Americans, decided to trade up to high-speed Internet access through a cable modem or the telephone service known as D.S.L., "it's worthless," Mr. Thomas said. In contrast to that middle-tech dinosaur, Carnivore is a sleek and speedy mammal, a black box of a PC built to work with the vast amounts of high-speed data that course through the Internet. The machine can tap communications for almost all of the ways that people get online. It costs a tenth of what the bureau pays for each of the older machines, and it can do far more: it can sift through all the communications of an Internet service provider, perhaps including tens of thousands of users, and pull out the e-mail and Web travels of the suspect. And although doing so would raise deep constitutional issues, the system can even be programmed to monitor the use of particular words and phrases used in messages by anyone on the network. When law enforcement agents get permission to install Carnivore, they send their own technicians to the office of an Internet service provider. The system itself, once programmed with the details of a search, can easily be installed on the same racks that the company uses for its own network equipment, and is tied in to the flow of data. For all its power, however, Carnivore cannot digest all that it eats: if law enforcement officials intercept a message that has been encrypted, they will get a featureless fuzz of ones and zeroes. The furor over the technology caught the F.B.I. by surprise. "What would you have us do?" Mr. Thomas asked in frustration. "Stop enforcing laws because it's on the Internet?" Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, added, "The public should be concerned about the criminals out there abusing this stuff, and not the good guys." The two men discussed the system in Mr. Thomas's office at the bureau's research center at Quantico, home of the F.B.I. training academy. From the outside, the center is so unremarkable that it could be a college classroom building in a witness-protection program. But the array of dishes and antennas along the roofline suggest that something more interesting is going on inside. This is where three F.B.I. engineers took pieces of commercial software and modified them in an effort to allow the kind of selective data retrieval that the law requires, and where they have worked to upgrade the system in response to the criticism of Carnivore. The engineers have added auditing features, for example, that the bureau says will help insure that investigators will not tamper with the system or try to gather more information than authorized. But the F.B.I. is not depending on Carnivore alone for the future of online surveillance. According to budget documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center under a Freedom of Information Act request, the bureau's plans include developing ways to listen in on the growing medium of voice telephone calls conducted over the Internet and to monitor the live online discussion system known as Internet Relay Chat, as well as other network technologies that were identified in the original document but were blacked out in the copies provided to the group. Some alternatives are already in use, including one that reportedly figured in an investigation of Nicodemo S. Scarfo Jr., an accused bookmaker whose imprisoned father is the former head of the Philadelphia crime organization. In 1999, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, agents planted a tap in Mr. Scarfo's computer keyboard that stored everything the suspect typed including the password for the encryption software used to protect files on his hard drive. Mr. Thomas was unwilling to discuss new techology methods in detail, but said he knew of only two cases in which such devices had been used. A former federal prosecutor, Mark Rasch, says still more methods of Internet wiretap could be on the way. Mr. Rasch, vice president for cyberlaw at Predictive Systems, an Internet consulting company, noted that hacker groups had developed malicious computer programs with names like Back Orifice 2000 that when planted in a target computer give full remote access of the target machine to the hacker. Mr. Rasch suggested that such remote-control programs could reduce the risk of break-ins for the agency and might already be in use. "I would be shocked," he said, if such software were not being used in intelligence investigations, which provide government agents with more leeway than in criminal investigations of American citizens. But Marc J. Zwillinger, a former Justice Department lawyer, said law enforcement agents were unlikely to take such a risky course, because "it would be difficult to control, and if it did get out of control, there would be a backlash against the agency." In the meantime, as the Congressional debate over Carnivore continues, the future of the system is uncertain. [The new attorney general, John Ashcroft, has not addressed Carnivore directly, but he has taken a tough stand in the past against what he sees as high-tech government intrusions into privacy.] Members of Congress and civil libertarians argue that the analogies to telephone taps are flawed and that the Carnivore technology violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. "The whole controversy is over intercepting thousands of conversations simultaneously," regardless of the filtering then applied, said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Mr. Armey, the House majority leader. Some critics have suggested imposing the same strict authorization rules on Carnivore that prevail for full-scale telephone wiretaps, with stiff penalties for any abuse of the system. Still, many of those who oppose Carnivore have concluded that it is here to stay. "You can't outlaw this technology," said James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a high-tech policy group in Washington. "All you can do is set strict legal standards." =================================================================== Frenchman Bove calls GM crop destruction "battle for future" Agence France Presse February 8, 2001 by Bernard Degioanni MONTPELLIER, France French anti-globalisation activist Jose Bove on Thursday called the destruction of thousands of genetically-modified plants a "battle for the future" in a court appearance here. Bove is on trial with two other defendants from his radical Peasant Confederation (CP) for destroying 3,000 genetically modified rice plants at an international research lab in June 1999. All have admitted destroying the crops to denounce what Bove called "publicly-funded research that works hand in hand with food companies. "There is no difference between public and private research. That is a trick they would like (us) to believe in," Bove told the court. "It's technology for technology's sake and progress for progress' sake." When asked by the court why he had wrecked the plants, he called his actions a "battle for the future." Bove and his two CP colleagues, former CP national secretary Rene Riesel and regional spokesman Dominique Sollier are accused along with about 150 others of destroying several thousand experimental rice plants at an institute in Montpellier in June 1999. "GM foods have no use, neither for farmers nor consumers," he told journalists in the southern French town before the trial began. And he warned his judges that his conviction would merely prove that "the justice system is favorably disposed towards GM crops." The case began under strict security, as area roads were sealed off and parking banned with reports circulating that up to 5,000 of his supporters may turn up. The CP said it had tried to turn the trial into a "party" by organizing a farmers' market and various street events surrounding GM foods. If convicted Bove and his two colleagues could be jailed for up to five years for the assault on Cirad, an internationally-funded research institute in Montpellier. About 150 people destroyed 3,000 plants at the institute in 1999. Cirad is also claiming four million francs (610,000 euros, 565,000 dollars) in damages. Bove was among the leaders of anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle in December 1999. He has already been sentenced to three months in prison for ransacking a McDonald's fast food restaurant in his hometown of Millau, southern France, earlier that year. His appeal against that sentence will be heard in Montpellier on February 15. =================================================================== CIA: Olympics Open to Terrorism http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/breakingnews/US/0,3560,720074,00.html Wednesday February 7, 2001 WASHINGTON (AP) - As host for the 2004 Olympic Games, the Greek government must treat the threat of terrorism against athletes as a ``major vulnerability,'' CIA director George Tenet said Wednesday. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tenet said the U.S. government has held discussions with ``the relevant Greek ministers about their need to take this terrorist threat far more seriously than it's been taken in the past, that the Olympics are a major vulnerability.'' ``There is a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of work,'' Tenet said in reference to preparations for Olympic security. He spoke in response to a question from the committee's chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. The U.S. government for years has pressed the Greek government to take stronger measures against terrorists. Last May, the State Department called Greece ``one of the weakest links in Europe's efforts against terrorism.'' Barely a week goes by in Greece without an arson or bomb attack claimed by self-proclaimed anarchists and other groups. The late-night blasts rarely cause casualties but add to worries about security. The decision to hold the 2004 Olympics in Athens has significantly raised the stakes. In November, Greek government officials gave the International Olympic Committee a security blueprint for the Summer Games that includes military patrols and 5,000 surveillance cameras. =================================================================== "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. 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