-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Computer Surveillance WHITE HOUSE BIG BROTHER COMPUTER PLAN FBI gets your bank records, your phone records, your email The Clinton Administration has developed a plan for an extensive computer monitoring system, overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to protect the nation's crucial data networks from intruders. The plan, an outgrowth of the Administration's anti-terrorism program, has already raised concerns from civil liberties groups. A draft prepared by officials at the National Security Council last month, which was provided to The New York Times by a civil liberties group, calls for a sophisticated software system to monitor activities on nonmilitary Government networks and a separate system to track networks used in crucial industries like banking, telecommunications and transportation. The effort, whose details are still being debated within the Administration, is intended to alert law enforcement officials to attacks that might cripple Government operations or the nation's economy. But because of the increasing power of the nation's computers and their emerging role as a backbone of the country's commerce, politics and culture, critics of the proposed system say it could become a building block for a surveillance infrastructure with great potential for misuse. They also argue that such a network of monitoring programs could itself be open to security breaches, giving intruders or unauthorized users a vast window into Government and corporate computer systems. Government officials said the changing nature of military threats in the information age had altered the nature of national security concerns and created a new sense of urgency to protect the nation's information infrastructure. "Our concern about an organized cyberattack has escalated dramatically," Jeffrey Hunker, the National Security Council's director of information protection, who is overseeing the plan, said Tuesday. "We do know of a number of hostile foreign governments that are developing sophisticated and well-organized offensive cyber attack capabilities, and we have good reason to believe that terrorists may be developing similar capabilities." As part of the plan, networks of thousands of software monitoring programs would constantly track computer activities looking for indications of computer network intrusions and other illegal acts. The plan calls for the creation of a Federal Intrusion Detection Network, or Fidnet, and specifies that the data it collects will be gathered at the National Infrastructure Protection Center, an interagency task force housed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Such a system, to be put fully in place by 2003, is meant to permit Government security experts to track "patterns of patterns" of information and respond in a coordinated manner against intruders and terrorists. The plan focuses on monitoring data flowing over Government and national computer networks. That means the systems would potentially have access to computer-to-computer communications like electronic mail and other documents, computer programs and remote log-ins. But an increasing percentage of network traffic, like banking and financial information, is routinely encrypted and would not be visible to the monitor software. Government officials argue that they are not interested in eavesdropping, but rather are looking for patterns of behavior that suggest illegal activity. Over the last three years, the Pentagon has begun to string together entire network surveillance systems using filters that report data to a central site, much as a burglar alarm might be reported at the local police station. Officials said such a system might have protected against intrusions recently reported in computers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces information like the consumer price index that can affect the performance of the stock market. The draft of the plan, which has been circulated widely within the executive branch, has generated concern among some officials over its privacy implications. Several officials involved in the debate over the plan said that the situation was "fluid" and that many aspects were still not final. The report is vague on several crucial points, including the kinds of data to be collected and the specific Federal and corporate computer networks to be monitored. The report also lacks details about the ways information collected in non-Governmental agencies would be maintained and under what conditions it would be made available to law enforcement personnel. Government officials said that the National Security Council was conducting a legal and technical review of the plan and that a final version is to be released in September, subject to President Clinton's approval. The plan was created in response to a Presidential directive in May 1998 requiring the Executive Branch to review the vulnerabilities of the Federal Government's computer systems in order to become a "model of information and security." In a cover letter to the draft Clinton writes: "A concerted attack on the computers of any one of our key economic sectors or Governmental agencies could have catastrophic effects." But the plan strikes at the heart of a growing controversy over how to protect the nation's computer systems while also protecting civil liberties -- particularly since it would put a new and powerful tool into the hands of the F.B.I. Increasingly, data flowing over the Internet is becoming a vital tool for law enforcement, and civil liberties experts said law enforcement agencies would be under great temptation to expand the use of the information in pursuit of suspected criminals. The draft of the plan "clearly recognizes the civil liberties implications," said James X. Dempsey, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington civil liberties group, "But it brushes them away." The draft states that because Government employees, like those of many private companies, must consent to the monitoring of their computer activities, "the collection of certain data identified as anomalous activity or a suspicious event would not be considered a privacy issue." Dempsey conceded the legal validity of the point, but said there was tremendous potential for abuse. "My main concern is that Fidnet is an ill-defined monitoring system of potentially broad sweep," he said. "It seems to place monitoring and surveillance at the center of the Government's response to a problem that is not well suited to such measures." The Federal Government is making a concerted effort to insure that civil liberties and privacy rights are not violated by the plan, Hunker said. He said that data gathered from non-Government computer networks will be collected separately from the F.B.I.-controlled monitoring system at a separate location within a General Services Administration building. He said that was done to keep non-Government data at arm's length from law enforcement. The plan also has drawn concern from civil libertarians because it blends civilian and military functions in protecting the nation's computer networks. The draft notes that there is already a Department of Defense "contingent" working at the F.B.I.'s infrastructure protection center to integrate intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement efforts in protecting Pentagon computers. "The fight over this could make the fight over encryption look like nothing," said Mary Culnan, an professor at Georgetown University who served on a Presidential commission whose work led to the May 1998 directive on infrastructure protection. "The conceptual problem is that there are people running this program who don't understand how citizens feel about privacy in cyberspace." The Government has been discussing the proposal widely with a number of industry security committees and associations in recent months. Several industry executives said there is still reluctance on the part of industry to directly share information on computer intrusions with law enforcement. "They want to control the decision making process," said Mark Rasch, vice president and general counsel of Global Integrity, a company in Reston, Va., coordinating computer security for the financial services industries. One potential problem in carrying out the Government's plan is that intrusion-detection software technology is still immature, industry executives said. "The commercial intrusion detection systems are not ready for prime time," said Peter Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., and a pioneer in the field of intrusion detection systems. Current systems tend to generate false alarms and thus require many skilled operators. But a significant portion of the $1.4 billion the Clinton Administration has requested for computer security for fiscal year 2000 is intended to be spent on research, and Government officials said they were hopeful that the planned effort would be able to rely on automated detection technologies and on artificial intelligence capabilities. For several years computer security specialists have used software variously known as packet filters, or "sniffers," as monitoring devices to track computer intruders. Like telephone wiretaps, such tools can be used to reconstruct the activities of a computer user as if a videotape were made of his computer display. At the same time, however, the software tools are routinely misused by illicit computer network users in stealing information such as passwords or other data. Commercial vendors are beginning to sell monitoring tools that combine packet filtering with more sophisticated and automated intrusion detection software that tries to detect abuse by looking for behavior patterns or certain sequences of commands. The New York Times, July 28, 1999 The Digital Society Internet Dissection: Virtual Mummy Why does your computer monitor smell like formaldehyde? A MUMMY of a 2,300-year-old woman can now be dissected on the Internet, down to the resin that embalmers poured on to her skull, thanks to the Virtual Mummy project. The image of the mummy, which lies in a sycamore coffin, was made by a team of scientists at the University of Hamburg by taking a series of X-ray cross- sections, then reconstructing them with the help of a computer. Using a computer, it is now possible to provide views of the mummy from any direction, even from inside her skull. The unwrapping of a mummy by computer may not be as mysterious as the real thing, but at least it respects the dignity of the deceased, the team said. The Virtual Mummy site features in the latest issue of the journal Science and has just been released on the Internet, said Bernard Pflesser, who works with Prof Karl Heinz Höhne's team at the university's Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science in Medicine. The head is enclosed in a mask made of linen, covered with stucco. Underneath is a ring made of woven plant materials, which symbolised that the wearer had passed judgment, and at the back of the head are traces of hardened ointment. A stick helps to support the skull, which is well preserved aside from some missing teeth and a broken bone plate, which was damaged when the embalmers removed the brain through the nose. For more than a decade, Prof Höhne's team has done research in the field of anatomical 3D reconstruction of the living human body. The technology has reached the point where computer-based body models - virtual bodies - can be examined in the way an anatomist or surgeon would do, so that operations can be simulated and planned in advance. The work on mummies was conducted with Renate Germer of the university's Department of Egyptology. The London Telegraph, July 28, 1999 Bitch Country Giuliani Goes to Little Rock Listening tour. Oink. Oink. IN the sweet heat of an Arkansas morning, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York spoke from the steps of the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock yesterday, poking fun at its former occupant, Hillary Clinton. Technically, he had come to the capital of Arkansas for a fund-raising event for his probable Senate campaign. But in reality he was here to make the point that Mrs Clinton had no more business standing for office in New York, a state she has never lived in, than Mr Giuliani, the quintessential New Yorker, would have standing in Arkansas, where Mrs Clinton's husband was governor for 12 years. At a press conference with his fellow Republican, Governor Mike Huckabee, the mayor made a long-running gag of the idea that he might offer himself as a candidate in Arkansas. Asked about a local Arkansas issue, he made fun of Mrs Clinton's recent "listening tours" of New York state. "If I became a candidate in Arkansas," he said, "I would have a very strong position on that. But right now I'm just listening." Throughout, the mayor could barely hide his slightly sinister smirk, looking very much the city tough among a gaggle of soft-bellied Southern politicians. When he said how touched he was by the New York state flag hanging outside his hotel, and promised to fly an Arkansas flag outside City Hall in New York, he made sure to add "if we can find one". Arkansans have grown used to politicians coming down to their state to make a point against President Clinton and his wife. "There's always a little circus going on," said Ray Pierce of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. The Giuliani trip, however, has stirred more interest than most political visits. Last week the mayor's Senate campaign chief, Bruce Teitelbaum, had to promise in a preparatory visit to the state that Mr Giuliani was not coming to look down his metropolitan nose at the locals. Arkansans are deeply divided about the Clintons, with as many hating them as are blindly loyal. Yesterday, for example, large pickets were protesting at a Little Rock town council proposasl to rename a section of the town after the President. Outside the Governor's mansion, a group of Arkansas Republicans showed their support for Mr Giuliani. "How can Mrs Clinton know anything about New York?" asked Donna Kay Bridgeforth, 47. "But it's better than her running down here. They can have her." In New York, the mayor's big joke has gone down a storm. "Arkansas Here We Come" screamed the front page of the New York Daily News. "Rudy heads South for listening tour on Hillary's turf." Inside is a useful list of "10 things Giuliani should know about life in Arkansas", including "Little Rock is so small you could fit the populations of 43 of them into New York City"; and "Arkansans' idea of a limousine is a pick-up truck with a couch in the back". In the early thrust and parry of a campaign in which neither Mr Giuliani nor Mrs Clinton has officially announced their candidacy, poll after poll puts the mayor ahead of the First Lady. The charge that she has no business standing in New York seems to be hitting home. Before leaving New York on Monday night, a grinning Mr Giuliani explained the genesis of his trip: "Originally it started as a joke. I think I raised it about two and a half months ago. I said 'I'm going to Arkansas since I've never been there, never lived there, have no connection to the state' and that I was going to run for the Senate from there, form an exploratory committee and test the waters." The comment led to an invitation from Governor Huckabee. All over America, Democrats and Republicans are looking to the New York Senate race even more than the Presidential contest as the final vote on the Clinton legacy. Mr Giuliani has chosen his destination extremely well as he tries to remind New Yorkers that the benign Mrs Clinton they are seeing on the "listening tours" has a past. It is hard to turn a corner in Little Rock without coming upon the scene of a Clinton scandal: the hotel where Governor Clinton allegedly exposed himself to Paula Jones; the Rose Law Firm where Mrs Clinton was a partner and a set of controversial billing records vanished; and the nightclubs where the governor partied with assorted women and his cocaine-snorting brother Roger. A private lunch in Little Rock for the mayor's putative campaign was expected to raise no more than £20,000. But money was never the real point of this trip. The London Telegraph, July 28, 1999 Electronic Trading Reuters' Instinet Backs Archipelago Instinet, the securities broking arm of Reuters, yesterday threw its weight behind an upstart US trading network in a move likely to add to the pressure on the New York Stock Exchange and other US markets to turn themselves into public companies. The subsidiary of the UK media and information company has agreed to pay an undisclosed sum for a 16.4 per cent stake in Archipelago, a private electronic share trading network set up to compete with the established exchanges. At the same time, Archipelago said it planned to seek approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to become a fully fledged stock exchange. That would make it easier to challenge the New York Stock Exchange's dominance of trading in the shares of stocks listed on its market, the two companies said. The investment marks Instinet's first stake in a US trading network, and echoes similar stakes it has in the for-profit stock exchanges that operate in Stockholm and Sydney. Along with Archipelago and a group of other investors, it also recently bought a controlling stake in Tradepoint, a UK stock exchange. The NYSE and Nasdaq, which operates a screen-based market, have both courted Instinet in recent months in an effort to ensure that its sizeable trading volumes are conducted on their markets. The Reuters subsidiary claims to handle around 20 per cent of all trades in Nasdaq companies, which include most of the leading US technology companies, though it handles a far smaller share of NYSE trades. By trying to forge an alliance with Instinet, the NYSE has set out to take trading away from the rival Nasdaq market. Doug Atkin, Instinet chief executive, said the stake in Archipelago did not preclude investments later in the NYSE and Nasdaq, if those markets followed through with plans to become publicly traded, for-profit exchanges. However, he and Gerald Putnam, chief executive of Archipelago, said the upstart trading network aimed to draw trading away from the established markets for some of the most prominent US companies. The Financial Times, July 28, 1999 Banking Barclays Gets a New New Chief Executive What is the relationship between Barclays' top management and Cantor Dust? Barclays, the UK's second largest bank, yesterday ended months of uncertainty by naming Matthew Barrett, outgoing chairman of the Bank of Montreal as its new chief executive. The appointment is Barclays' second attempt to fill the vacancy caused by the abrupt departure of Martin Taylor last November. Its first choice, Michael O'Neill, a top US banker, had to withdraw through ill health before starting work. Mr Barrett, who is expected to serve five years, is to take up the post on October 1, ending a 10-month gap during which Sir Peter Middleton, the bank's chairman, has been acting chief executive. Over that period, Barclays has lost its finance director, its treasurer and its directors of planning and corporate communications. Yesterday, Graham Pimlott, director of operations and technology, also left. Investors, who had been largely unworried by the gaps in Barclays' top management, nevertheless welcomed Mr Barrett's appointment, pushing the bank's share price up 4.6 per cent to £17.82. "I was beginning to worry that Middleton had taken root in the chief executive's role," said one analyst. Although some bankers believed Christopher Lendrum, who heads Barclays' corporate banking division, or John Varley, head of its retail division, could have taken the top job, neither is thought to have been in contention for some time. Both will remain with the group. Sir Peter said Mr Barrett had been one of the candidates Barclays had considered, before it named Mr O'Neill. At the time, however, he had been engaged in the process of attempting to merge the Bank of Montreal with Royal Bank of Canada to form Canada's largest bank - a deal that was blocked by the Canadian government. The Financial Times, July 28, 1999 North Korean Missiles The Screws Tighten on North Korea Over Missiles No more free hotmail accounts if you don't shape up SINGAPORE - North Korea will be hit with punitive economic sanctions and lose a major opportunity to improve relations with Washington and its two main allies in Asia if Pyongyang tests another powerful ballistic missile, the foreign ministers of the United States, South Korea and Japan said Tuesday. Increasing diplomatic pressure on the unpredictable Stalinist state, they warned that the consequences of missile proliferation for peace and stability in Asia and the Pacific were so grave that Pyongyang had to be punished, despite the possible risk of war. After meeting in Singapore to coordinate their policies on the issue, the three officials said in a joint statement Tuesday that another long-range missile launching would have ''serious negative consequences'' for North Korea. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that such a launching, ''whether declared to be a missile test or an attempt to place a satellite in orbit, would be highly destabilizing and would have very serious consequences for our efforts to build better relations.'' As Tokyo warned Tuesday that the launching might take place within the next two months, Foreign Minister Masahiko Koumura said in Singapore that if it happened it would very likely result in Japan's withdrawing its offer of $1 billion to help build two nuclear power plants in North Korea in exchange for a freeze on Pyongyang's suspected program to develop nuclear weapons. Japan recently approved the money for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, which is building the plants under the 1994 ''agreed framework'' pact freezing the nuclear program of North Korea. ''It will be extremely difficult for Japan to continue its cooperation with KEDO,'' Mr. Koumura said. Officials fear that the reactor deal could unravel if Pyongyang continues missile testing. This could prompt South Korea to develop its own ballistic missiles and hasten plans by the United States and Japan to develop a missile defense shield, a move strongly opposed by China and Russia. North Korea sent shock waves through the Asia-Pacific region last August by test-firing a Taepo Dong ballistic missile that soared over Japan and landed in the Pacific Ocean. Pyongyang has said it was a satellite launching, not a missile test. U.S. officials have said North Korea appears to be preparing to launch a more powerful version of the missile sometime this summer that could reach as far as Hawaii and Alaska. Some analysts are convinced that Pyongyang will test the missile. But others suspect that it may be using test preparations to press Washington, Seoul and Tokyo for a better economic and political deal. They note that North Korea has in the past made skillful use of brinkmanship to exact a higher price. Still, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer of Australia said Tuesday that the prospect of another North Korean launching had alarmed all 22 of the Asian, Pacific and European countries, including China and Russia, that met privately in Singapore on Monday for security talks in the ASEAN Regional Forum. ''I think its fair to say the unanimous view was that this would be an enormous setback for regional security,'' he said. ''It will not only end the Perry review initiative, and therefore the possibility of greater engagement with North Korea, but a further test will throw into doubt the whole of the Agreed Framework.'' Mr. Downer said that, at the request of the U.S. government, William Perry, the former U.S. defense secretary, had recommended a new policy approach to North Korea that involved economic incentives and ''some sort of diplomatic normality'' for Pyongyang if it acted ''in a considerably more constructive way on security issues.'' Mr. Downer said that if North Korea tested another missile, ''it will lead to a very serious diplomatic, if not worse, confrontation between the region and North Korea.'' A Japanese government report on defense published in Tokyo on Tuesday said that the missile program of North Korea and suspected nuclear weapons development posed a grave security threat to the world. It said that the new Taepo Dong-2, with a potential range of 3,500 to 6,000 kilometers (2,200 to 3,700 miles) appeared to be under development. Mrs. Albright said that the United States, Japan and South Korea had stressed at their meeting here that improved relations with North Korea depended on cooperation in security matters. ''This means full implementation of the agreed framework, complete transparency on nuclear issues, and cessation of the development, export and testing of longer-range missiles,'' Mrs. Albright added. Mr. Hong of South Korea said that if North Korea tested another long-range missile, ''We can think of holding back all the incentives on offer and, as well, scaling down the speed and scope of all the international or the inter-Korean cooperation programs.'' The United States has urged South Korea to restrain its own missile program to help persuade North Korea to abandon its program. But Mr. Hong indicated that Seoul felt it must now press ahead with a missile deterrent. ''We have to consider that North Korea is rather advanced in its missile technology,'' he said. ''So we should do something to reinforce the real deterrence, credible deterrence, on the part of South Korea.'' The International Herald Tribune, July 28, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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