Clips August 26, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips August 26, 2002

ARTICLES

Cybersecurity should be kept in civilian hands
OMB Puts A Freeze On Tech Spending
Army CTO pushes 'federation of sites'
Army picks EMC for storage
Integration office may not happen
Local officials need homeland help
UCITA still haunts IT
FEC Decision Could Jump-Start SMS Political Ads
Hyperlink patent claim thrown out of court
FBI accused of hacking Russian computers in sting
Motorola unveils communications system for firefighters
The Great Firewall of China
People sell their faces for digital delivery
Computer tracking system to be tested in schools [Australia}
Web sites, ISPs lopping pop-up ads

****************************
Boston Globe
8/18/2002
Cybersecurity should be kept in civilian hands

In the wake of Sept. 11, we're all agreed on the need to protect critical 
infrastructure - telecommunications, electric power, transportation, 
banking, and finance. We also know much of that infrastructure depends on 
the Internet, so cybersecurity will be a critical concern of the proposed 
Department of Homeland Security. The only question: How best to achieve it?

The administration's plan has the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection 
Center, the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Protection 
Office, and the GSA's Federal Computer Incident Response Center all moving 
over to the new Department of Homeland Security. That's appropriate. But 
the plan also includes moving the Commerce Department's Computer Security 
Division (part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology) to 
Homeland Security. That move would be a big mistake.

The Computer Security Division's job is to develop security standards and 
technology for the protection of sensitive information in government and 
the private sector. The problem with moving this division into Homeland 
Security is that the civilian side of the world doesn't work the same way 
as the classified side.

A case in point: Computer security outside the national security community 
has been a Commerce Department responsibility since 1967, but in the 1980s, 
a challenge to that authority arose. The National Security Agency, which 
provides information security for classified government information, felt 
it had more expertise. So the NSA pressed banks to adopt its systems, the 
workings of which were classified, over the publicly released Data 
Encryption Standard. But banking standards are international. There was no 
way other countries would accept information security standards they 
couldn't verify.

The NSA's efforts set the banks' standards efforts back 16 months.

The 1980s and '90s saw many battles over the Computer Security Division's 
cryptography standards, with national security and law enforcement arrayed 
on one side, industry and the public on the other. In a study titled 
''Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society,'' the National 
Research Council found the result was a delay in the deployment of secure 
systems - exactly the opposite of what is needed now.

These days the Computer Security Division has learned how to develop 
computer security standards in an open environment, thus smoothing the path 
to widespread international use. It is well suited by tradition, 
reputation, and structure to do this.

Its recent successes include approval of the algorithm Rijndael, designed 
by two Belgian cryptographers, as the new Advanced Encryption Standard 
(AES). This Federal Information Processing Standard was the culmination of 
a four-year effort by the Computer Security Division. The result is an 
algorithm that is well accepted internationally and likely to be rapidly 
adopted.

The bottom line is this: We haven't got the 16 months that banking lost 
when NSA tried to involve itself in issues properly belonging to the 
civilian world.

As recently reported in the national press, Al Qaeda has been exploring 
cyberattacks. The Department of Homeland Security needs to have the 
resources to prevent them. It may, for example, need additional 
cybersecurity expertise for determining appropriate standards for systems 
controlling critical infrastructure components, much like the Treasury 
Department's standards for electronic funds transfer, which mandate the use 
of the Data Encryption Standard, the predecessor to AES. But the Computer 
Security Division is effectively doing its job improving computer security 
for public systems. Moving it to a department controlled by law enforcement 
and national security would diminish its effectiveness.

It would, in short, leave us less secure in cyberspace, not more.

Sun Microsystems' Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer, and Susan 
Landau, senior staff engineer, are co-authors of ''Privacy on the Line: the 
Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption'' (MIT Press, 1998). Diffie is the 
coinventor of public-key cryptography.
****************************
Washington Post
OMB Puts A Freeze On Tech Spending
$1 Billion in Plans Land In Limbo
By Renae Merle

The Office of Management and Budget has ordered seven of the 22 agencies 
slated to make up the proposed Department of Homeland Security to 
temporarily halt spending on more than $1 billion in information technology 
projects while it looks for savings and compatible technology.

The recent order has sent jitters through the community of government 
contractors expecting a flood of new spending in response to the war on 
terrorism -- not a delay in projects.

"Our concerns are the length of time it is going to take" to determine 
which projects will be consolidated or canceled, said Dan Heinemeier, 
president of the Government Electronics and Information Technology 
Association in Arlington. "Companies put resources on the line when they 
bid for proposals."

The OMB said ongoing projects won't be affected, but new contracts will 
have to be approved by the Homeland Security Investment Review Group.

So far, the OMB suspects it can find about $300 million in savings among 
the agencies it has targeted with this order. More will be examined later; 
the OMB looked only at agencies that had proposed IT contracts worth more 
than $500,000.

"This is a temporary cease on spending" to ensure money is not wasted on 
projects that will have a six-month shelf life if the agencies are 
combined, said Mark Forman, the OMB's associate director for information 
technology and e-government. "That includes looking at redundancies and 
interoperability requirements."

The seven agencies had planned to spend $235 million to upgrade 21 
financial management systems, according to OMB records. That can be 
consolidated into three or four programs, potentially saving $65 million to 
$85 million in the next two years, agency officials said.

"What's clear is that there are a lot of redundant investments," Forman said.

The OMB order shows that the expected flood of government IT spending -- 
which many people had hoped would offset losses in the private sector -- 
isn't guaranteed or without hurdles.

"Overall, it will be a zero-sum game," said Jim Kane, president of market 
research firm Federal Sources Inc. in McLean. "There are going to be some 
winners and losers among the contractors."

There's an escape mechanism for agencies that need it. Four emergency 
applications have already been filed and approved, including two by the new 
Transportation Security Administration.

The agency was ready to award Unisys Corp. a $1 billion contract last month 
to develop its IT infrastructure, as well as to provide computers and cell 
phones for employees at airports across the country. That plan was delayed 
for about a week before it was approved by the Investment Review Group, 
company officials said.

"I think we all had a little bit of concern about that," said Greg Baroni, 
Unisys's public sector president. But "we all came together to make sure we 
met OMB's expectations."

The freeze came as the Coast Guard was about to sign a new contract to 
license Microsoft Corp. software. At the behest of the committee, it 
negotiated on behalf of itself and the six other agencies and was able to 
make a deal that will save at least $6.1 million over the next five years, 
Forman said.

Some contractors are already starting to feel the pinch. For more than six 
months, Reston-based DynCorp has been developing a project for the Federal 
Highway Administration to lease desktop computers, new software and other 
equipment to the agency.

But the OMB freeze put the program in peril. The agency was forced to 
redirect the funds for the program to "mission-critical systems" within the 
Department of Transportation, DynCorp officials said.

"They said, 'Sorry, guys, there is no money for this,' " said Joe 
Cunningham, president of DynCorp Systems & Solutions LLC.

The freeze has also caused some angst on Wall Street, where contractors 
have been experiencing newfound popularity. "It's something we are keeping 
an eye on," said Bill Loomis, an analyst with financial services company 
Legg Mason Inc. "Just about every company has some exposure to those agencies."

But hope is not lost for IT companies desiring a piece of the federal pie. 
Congress is expected to approve a 16 percent increase in technology 
spending for next year.

"Everyone agrees that the government is doing the smart thing," said Chris 
Penny, industry analyst for investment banking firm Friedman, Billings, 
Ramsey Group Inc. "While the tap has been turned off for a while, there is 
a flood right behind it."
**************************
Federal Computer Week
Army CTO pushes 'federation of sites'

The Army's chief technology officer said he would love to see the Army 
Knowledge Online portal and the Navy training and Marine Corps procurement 
portals develop into a "federation of sites."

However, Col. Robert Coxe Jr., the Army's retiring CTO and the driving 
force behind AKO, said that it would take some time. "It's tough enough to 
get the Army to play internally with Army, but we need to start talking and 
I think we'll be ready for the next level."

Already they share one thing in common. The Navy and Marine Corps both 
recently selected Appian Corp. as the software provider for their 
respective enterprise portal projects, and the company is also behind the AKO.

Coxe said he is pleased with the work the vendor has done. Late last year 
Appian had the AKO portal up and running in about three months "and it all 
worked."

"They are as dedicated as we've been," Coxe said, adding that some 
employees had to be sent home in the early days of AKO after putting in 
more than 24 consecutive hours of work.

AKO provides Army news, distance-learning opportunities, e-mail accounts, a 
search engine, chat capabilities and an enterprise collaboration center for 
service personnel around the world.

Appian's portal work with the Marine Corps is focused on procurement, while 
the Navy site will be used largely for training.

The AKO portal has more than one million active accounts and usage is 
growing everyday, said Marc Wilson, AKO project manager at Appian. One day 
last month, there were 90,000 total AKO sessions, which was a record at the 
time, but on Aug. 20, there were 130,000, Wilson said. There are about 
70,000 different users touching the system on a daily basis, and 40 percent 
of active force is visiting AKO at least monthly, he said.

"That's not only numbers, but [a testament to] the depth of the tool," 
Wilson said.

The next application planned for inclusion on AKO is a group capability 
that would go beyond simply e-mail to include instant messaging and other 
tools. Coxe said the Army wants to provide its organizations that ability 
to not only create personalized groups, but also to horizontally link them. 
He added that the only additional cost involved with that feature would be 
storage, which can be obtained relatively cheaply today.

Wilson said users will also be able to apply security and filtering in the 
groups, "and the groups within the groups all dynamically on-the-fly by the 
people who need it or need to send it." The feature should be available by 
the end of this year, he said.
***********************
Federal Computer Week
Army picks EMC for storage

The Army National Guard is in the midst of enabling more than 50 of its 
data centers to centrally manage and control data across different vendors' 
storage systems using software from EMC Corp., according to the Guard 
official leading the effort.

Lawrence Borkowski, the Army National Guard's chief of automation and 
plans, said the organization is "fast-forwarding" its commitment to 
streamline administrative operations.

The Guard is implementing storage-area networks (SANs) in more than 50 data 
centers domestically in four U.S. territories, and has purchased more than 
200 terabytes of networked storage systems, software and services from EMC 
to do it, Borkowski said. SANs enable multiple servers to share communal 
pools of storage.

Borkowski added that EMC's technology is helping "mobilize Guard forces 
more quickly and efficiently because our critical information will be more 
available and better protected than ever before."

The SANs, based on EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems, will be used 
for personnel records management, finance, logistics, contracts, e-mail and 
other applications.

The systems also will provide storage for Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell 
Computer Corp. and other servers.

The contract was awarded in the second quarter of this year and shipping 
began in May. The EMC technology has been installed in about 40 percent of 
the data centers, with three-to-four more sites being done every week, 
according to an EMC spokesperson.

The Guard purchased the EMC technology through Northrop Grumman Information 
Technology, the prime contractor on the project, but would not disclose 
financial details of the work, according to a spokesperson.
*************************
Federal Computer Week
Integration office may not happen

The proposed Information Integration Office, an important information 
technology initiative in the Bush administration's homeland security 
effort, may never exist, according to Steve Cooper, senior director for 
information integration and chief information officer for the Office of 
Homeland Security.

The office, which would design and help roll out an information 
architecture that will enable agencies to share information across their 
technology silos, is supposed to be created at the Critical Infrastructure 
Assurance Office. The office's role would include everything from helping 
to identify the appropriate technology standards to enforcing their use 
governmentwide, administration officials said in February.

But the way things are looking in Congress, that may not happen, Cooper 
said Aug. 19 at the Government Symposium on Information Sharing and 
Homeland Security in Philadelphia.

Earlier this year, Congress removed the funding request from the fiscal 
2002 supplemental funding bill submitted by the White House, so the 
administration placed the office and the funding request in the fiscal 2003 
budget released in February. But now Congress is getting ready to cut the 
administration's request for the second time, Cooper said. The reason? 
"Because they don't think it can be done," he said.
***********************
Federal Computer Week
Local officials need homeland help

First responders do have an important role to play in the national homeland 
security mission, but they cannot do it without help from the federal 
government, officials said Aug. 21.

Because of their limited resources and limited reach, most local police 
departments will have to rely on others to fill in technical, personnel and 
experience gaps, officials said at the Government Symposium on Information 
Sharing and Homeland Security in Philadelphia.

Providing timely intelligence information that local officials can use to 
prepare for or respond to incidents is the most obvious way the federal 
government can help, said Jose Cordero, chief of the Newton, Mass., Police 
Department. "We need to have intelligence information that can have 
meaningful application in our community," he said.

There also needs to be some national resource that will provide local 
officials with real-time access to expert advice during incidents, Cordero 
said. And this resource must be available to every local official, not just 
those in areas with the most money or the best technology, he said.

The federal government should also help by setting broad technology 
standards, said William Casey, deputy chief of police in Boston.

In some cases, such as determining the communications spectrum standards 
for emergency communications, only the federal government can legally set 
the standards. And for most technologies, only the federal government can 
set broad standards that will be accepted by all so "even if we're not all 
on the same page, we are at least in the same book," Casey said.

The federal government can also help out by vetting the numerous technology 
solutions that industry is offering in the homeland security space, he 
said. State and local agencies simply do not have the resources to test new 
products to figure out where the middle ground is between cutting edge 
technology and products that would truly do what first responders need, he 
said.

"We don't know where [that balance] is, and we can't test all this 
equipment," Casey said.
***************************
Computerworld
UCITA still haunts IT

WASHINGTON -- It's been called a time bomb, code capable of disabling 
software, and some users fear its use could become pervasive if the 
controversial software law UCITA succeeds.
The Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA), due for a renewed 
push for state-by-state adoption next year, lets vendors include code to 
trigger a shutdown if, for instance, a user's license has expired.

It's a type of code that poses operational and security issues for IT, said 
Ken Tyminski, chief security officer at Prudential Financial in Newark, 
N.J. A time bomb, or a software restraint, is a potential bug that can be 
triggered without warning, sending business systems crashing. Or it can be 
activated maliciously and give hackers a back door to your network.

"That, to me, is very, very dangerous for the [insurance] industry and 
companies at large," Tyminski said. In response, Prudential is ensuring 
that its vendor contracts prevent any use of these systems.

This type of code "can cripple the business, and it can do it in a method 
where there has been absolutely no due process, there has been no chance at 
remediation, no chance at explanation," he said.

Corporate Fears

The mere existence of restraint software or time bombs also raises security 
issues. Robert O'Connor, director of network integration services at 
Pennsylvania State University in University Park, warns, for instance, that 
a disgruntled former vendor employee could trigger such a system. "I don't 
trust anything like that," he said.

This concern about software restraints in a section of UCITA called 
"electronic regulation of performance" underscores the ongoing fears that 
users have about this complex software licensing law.

UCITA's authors, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State 
Laws, tried to appease opponents by removing a "self-help" provision that 
would allow a vendor to remotely disable software in a contract dispute. 
But that change simply shifted attention to other parts of the law.

For example, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. in 
New York claims that UCITA's provisions give vendors the right to build in 
back doors, creating a potentially dramatic shift in software licensing.

"The industry is pushing very hard to turn it into a mainframe licensing 
model, where you will pay for your software on a year basis," said Alan 
Plastow, president of the International Association of IT Asset Managers in 
Akron, Ohio. "That requires the use of automatic restraints or it requires 
the use of a metering process."

But users aren't jumping on board. Also, Microsoft Corp. has said it has no 
plans to use embedded self-help features.

The use of software restraints won't help vendors win contracts with large 
enterprises, said Steve McHale, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. But 
such techniques could be attractive to vendors of pricey programs, such as 
engineering software systems.

Critics also assail UCITA because it protects vendors from liability. The 
Center for National Software Studies, formed earlier this year, is 
examining the problems with software quality and is working on a set of 
recommendations. UCITA's liability-limiting provision gives vendors little 
incentive to worry about the consequences of mistakes, said Alan Salisbury, 
who heads the Camp Springs, Md.-based center.
***************************
Washington Post
FEC Decision Could Jump-Start SMS Political Ads
By Brian Krebs

A decision by federal election regulators to exempt text-based wireless ads 
from campaign disclosure rules has critics warning that consumers could 
find their mobile phones subject to a flood of political spam as campaign 
2002 kicks into high gear.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) today approved a New Jersey 
technology firm's petition to waive disclosure rules for political ads 
delivered via SMS -- or "short messaging service." SMS is featured on a 
wide range of wireless devices, from digital mobile phones to Blackberries 
to two-way pagers.

Target Wireless of Fort Lee, N.J., joined by advertising industry groups 
and a Republican campaign committee, argued that current campaign 
disclosure rules would require political advertisers to use up too much of 
the limited amount of text -- 160 characters total -- available for 
individual SMS messages.

Disclosure exemptions have long been in place for advertising media that 
are limited to small numbers of text characters, such as bumper stickers, 
buttons, pens and pencils, skywriting, balloons and water towers.

But Commissioner Danny Lee McDonald, the lone "no" vote in the FEC's 4-1 
decision in favor of the SMS petition, said comparing cell phones to bumper 
stickers and water towers was something of a stretch, since wireless 
devices are a far more personal and private medium for most consumers.

"If you take a bumper sticker or button, those are things that are 
initiated by citizens (who wear them)," McDonald said. "With cell phones, 
the flow is the other way."

At least one campaign disclosure advocate expressed concerns that an 
exemption assumes that all political messages delivered over SMS will be 
positive.

"It's hard enough with the ads already out there to figure out who's really 
paying for what, and if you drop (the disclosure requirement), I see 
mischief all over the place," said David Farber, a professor of computer 
science and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

"If we are wrong in our judgment and it's horribly abused, we can revisit 
this," said FEC Vice Chairman Karl J. Sandstrom, seeking to downplay 
concerns about the SMS waiver. The idea that a government regulation 
"should trump the medium to get out message, means that the government 
requirement trumps the message," said Sandstrom, who was sitting in for FEC 
Chairman David M. Mason

The advisory opinion adopted by the FEC today essentially exempts political 
ads from containing basic "paid for by" notices that otherwise would take 
up much of the space available in a single SMS message. Commissioners 
discussed whether political advertisers should be urged or required to 
include a phone number or Web site address at the end of the SMS message 
telling recipients where they can go to learn more about the ad's sponsor, 
but the commission did not act formally on that proposal.

The question remains whether there's a viable market for delivering 
campaign ads via SMS in the U.S.

SMS is hugely popular in other parts of the world but has been slow to 
catch on in the states. According to the Boston-based consulting firm 
Yankee Group, there were roughly 131 million cell phone subscribers in the 
United States by the end of 2001. And while a third of those users had 
SMS-enabled phones, only about 4.3 million actually used the service.

By contrast, nearly all of the 293 million wireless users in Europe had 
two-way SMS capable devices by the end of last year, and roughly 175 
million regularly used the service, Yankee analysts found.

Target Wireless President Craig Krueger declined to name any potential 
clients for his company's service, but said he has already received 
inquiries from potential 2004 presidential candidates. His petition was 
supported by the Republican National Senatorial Committee, the Cellular 
Telecommunications and Internet Association, the American Association of 
Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers.

Krueger hopes to match content providers with advertisers, in effect 
selling paid political advertising on mainstream SMS content like news, 
financial data and sports scores. Kreuger said also his company hopes to 
begin selling political ads for delivery to customers who have "opted-in," 
or asked to receive the content and targeted ads.

Phil Noble, founder of PoliticsOnline.com and a leading cheerleader for 
e-politics, said candidates' interest in SMS is likely to grow in the 2002 
campaign season, albeit on a small scale.

"All politics is about front-runners and underdogs," Noble said. 
"Front-runners ask, 'What did we do last time, and can we do it again?' 
Underdogs look for what is new and different and try to find an edge."

New Media Communications, the company that built the Bush 2000 general 
election Web site and used SMS in two state Senate races in 2000, has plans 
to run get-out-the-vote campaigns over SMS in the days leading up to this 
year's election, according to company CEO Mike Connell.

"Campaigns go through considerable time and expense to win hearts and minds 
of people, and once you've gone through all that you've still got to make 
sure they turn out on Election Day," Connell said.

Other campaign pros aren't ready to jump on the SMS bandwagon.

Ben Green, co-founder of Crossroad Strategies and former director of 
Internet operations for the Gore 2000 president campaign, said he would 
advise clients against using the technology in this year's election.

"Campaigns are typically on a tight budget and have to spend their dollars 
wisely," Green said. "The fact is that the political Internet industry 
landscape is littered with the wreckage of companies that think they've 
found the killer ap, only to fall flat on their faces."
*****************************
USA Today
Hyperlink patent claim thrown out of court

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP)  A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit that 
could have made the World Wide Web a pay-as-you-click toll road. U.S. 
District Judge Colleen McMahon rejected BT Group's claim that it owns the 
patent on hyperlinks  those single-clicks that make the Web what it is.

Filed earlier this year, the suit accused an Internet service provider, 
Prodigy Communications, of infringing on BT's patent on hyperlinks.

McMahon rejected BT's claim that each Web server on the Internet is a 
central computer and thus the Internet falls within the patent's scope.

"The Internet is a network of computers intertwined with each other in 
order to allow users around the world to exchange information," she wrote. 
"The whole purpose of the Internet is for the sources of information to be 
in many places rather than centralized."

Her 27-page decision, filed Thursday in federal court in White Plains, 
N.Y., concluded that "no jury could find that Prodigy infringes on the 
patent."

The suit had been viewed as a test case that could have opened the door for 
BT to challenge other Internet service providers and demand licensing fees 
that might add to members' costs.

At a hearing in February, McMahon warned that it would be difficult to 
prove that a patent filed in 1976  more than a decade before the World Wide 
Web was created  somehow applies to modern computers.

BT attorney Albert Breneisen, insisted at the time that the "basic 
structure of linking is covered by the patent." Before BT's technology, he 
said, a computer user had to know and enter the complete address of another 
page.

The lawsuit has been viewed with chagrin by many in the information 
technology field.

Some computer historians trace the idea of hypertext back to Vannevar Bush, 
a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, in the 1930s. They also 
note that Doug Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse, worked on an 
early hypertext system in the late 1960s.
****************************
USA Today
FBI accused of hacking Russian computers in sting

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)  In a criminal case in which the borderless 
Internet has collided head-on with global law, a Seattle lawyer is set to 
charge that U.S. officials illegally hacked into computers of two Russians 
to get evidence to prosecute the pair on computer crimes.


Seattle defense attorney John Lundin told Reuters that he will use the same 
argument Russia's state security service FSB has used  that the FBI acted 
criminally in its attempt to nab his client Vasiliy Gorshkov  in an appeal 
he expects to file after Gorshkov is sentenced Sept. 13 in federal court in 
Seattle.

"It seems the (Russian) case is intended more to make a point, which is 
that an expansion of law enforcement techniques would have inevitable 
ramifications on international relations," said Barry Hurewitz, a lawyer at 
the law firm of Hale and Dorr, a Washington, D.C.-based expert in Internet law.

The FSB lodged its criminal complaint against the FBI over evidence 
gathered in days after the Nov. 2000 arrests of Gorshkov and of Alexey 
Ivanov, whom Gorshkov was convicted of helping steal consumer credit card 
numbers. Ivanov is still waiting to be tried on numerous charges in several 
states.

The case was the first FBI undercover plan to successfully entice people 
accused of high-tech crimes to come to the U.S. It was the first to use, in 
the FBI's words, "extra-territorial seizure of digital evidence," which led 
to another precedent: it is thought to be the first time a U.S. agency has 
been formally accused of hacking into a foreign computer network.

The Russians complain that the FBI didn't have authorization to break into 
a computer system in Russia and download files. The FBI counters, and a 
U.S. judge agreed, that Russian law does not apply to the agents' actions.

Cyber sting

The FBI lured the men, both of Chelyabinsk, Russia, to Seattle under the 
pretext of interviewing them for jobs at a company called "Invita," which 
was actually an FBI front.

FBI agents asked them to demonstrate their ability to scan a computer 
network for security flaws and gave them permission to do so on a network 
designed for that purpose, Lundin said.

Ivanov was arrested on criminal charges and Gorshkov was arrested as a 
material witness, Lundin said. The FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice 
declined to comment on the ongoing case.

Ivanov has been indicted in Connecticut, New Jersey and California on 
charges of stealing credit card numbers and other sensitive information 
from at least 40 companies including banks, Internet service providers, and 
online payment company, PayPal, and its customers.

Officials also have accused Ivanov of trying to extort money and 
manipulating eBay's online auctions.

Gorshkov was later accused of conspiring with Ivanov in illegal computer 
intrusions and permitting Ivanov to use his computers in Russia for some of 
the activities, Lundin said.

Gorshkov maintained he was not involved and did not know of Ivanov's 
activities, but he was convicted on 20 counts of computer crimes, fraud and 
conspiracy in Oct. 2001.

Keystrokes logged

To make its case, the FBI accessed the men's computers in Russia by 
installing keystroke logger programs on the computers the men used in 
Seattle to record keystrokes and passwords.

The evidence included a database with 56,000 credit cards on the men's 
computers in Russia, the FBI has alleged.

Lundin said he will argue in his appeal that the FBI's downloading of the 
data from Russia constituted an illegal search because agents had not 
obtained a search warrant before then, an argument the lower court judge 
rejected. Agents got a search warrant after they had downloaded the data.

"One of the issues decided by the court, I think wrongly, was that since 
the intrusion was in Russia there was no need for a search warrant," said 
Lundin. But, "the data was transferred to a computer in the U.S., so the 
search happens in the U.S., I would argue."

RIA news agency of Russia quoted FSB officials in the Chelyabinsk bureau as 
saying the FBI's procedures coupled with the U.S. court's decision could 
set a dangerous precedent.

"If the American side deems legal evidence obtained in this way, that would 
mean in the future U.S. government agencies could use similar means to 
collect information in Russia and other countries," RIA reported in a 
Russian-language statement last week. "Then nobody could guarantee that the 
American side would not penetrate private and government computers."

This month, the three FBI agents received Director's Awards for Excellence 
for their work in the sting operation. Gorshkov sits in a federal detention 
center in Seattle facing up to 30 years in prison. Ivanov is being held in 
Connecticut.
***************************
USA Today
Motorola unveils communications system for firefighters
SCHAUMBURG, Ill. (AP)  Motorola is introducing a new mobile communications 
system designed specially for firefighters, intended to make it easier for 
commanders to account for personnel at emergency scenes.

Motorola said the system will provide better radio coverage on the scene 
and in buildings when it becomes available next year, with future features 
to include rescue tracking capability and a self-contained breathing 
apparatus.

The Fireground Communications System was announced Friday in conjunction 
with the start of the Fire-Rescue International Conference in Kansas City, 
where it is being demonstrated.

Each system radio automatically reports the user's radio ID, which can be 
configured to display name, position and assignment on a mobile command 
terminal.

A firefighter in trouble can push an emergency button that activates an 
alarm on the mobile command terminal. The commander also can transmit a 
signal to all radios alerting users to the presence of immediate danger.

Motorola Vice President Mike Worthington, general manager of its Global 
Safety and Security Solutions division, called it a significant step 
forward for firefighter safety.

Motorola is the biggest U.S. manufacturer of cell phones and other wireless 
devices.
****************************
Los Angeles Times
The Great Firewall of China
By XIAO QIANG and SOPHIE BEACH
August 25 2002

Xiao Qiang, a 2001 MacArthur Fellow, is executive director of Human Rights 
in China, a monitoring and advocacy organization based in New York and Hong 
Kong. Sophie Beach is Asia research associate at

NEW YORK -- Last month, the Chinese government announced that some 45.8 
million of its citizens had access to the Internet. Three years ago, only 2 
million Chinese people were online. At this rate, half of China's nearly 
1.3 billion people will be online in five years.

For supporters of a free and open exchange of ideas, this sounds like 
progress. But while the rapid development of the Internet in China is 
indeed impressive, we must not ignore a less cheerful corollary 
development: The country's leaders are also escalating efforts to 
strengthen the "Great Firewall," which controls what information China's 
Internet users can view and distribute.

Since 1995, more than 60 laws have been enacted governing Internet 
activities in China. More than 30,000 state security employees are 
currently conducting surveillance of Web sites, chat rooms and private 
e-mail messages--including those sent from home computers. Thousands of 
Internet cafes have been closed in recent months, and those remaining have 
been forced to install "Internet Police 110" software, which filters out 
more than 500,000 banned sites with pornographic or so-called subversive 
content. Dozens of people have been arrested for their online activities; 
in 2001, eight people were arrested on subversion charges for publishing or 
distributing information online.

This month, a court in Tianshui City, Gansu province, sentenced former 
police officer Li Dawei to 11 years in prison for downloading and printing 
500 "reactionary" articles from the Internet, which could include a broad 
range of information that the government simply finds politically unacceptable.

The newest section of the Great Firewall is a set of regulations enacted 
Aug. 1 requiring Web publishers to censor their own sites or risk being 
shut down. Having realized that censoring the millions of Web sites now 
online is a behemoth task, the government has compelled private Internet 
service providers, Web publishers and Internet cafe owners to do the job 
for them.

Such restrictive regulations clearly trample the Internet's spirit of free 
expression and democracy. They are also destroying the buds of free 
expression in China by directly threatening tens of thousands of individual 
Web sites publishing increasingly independent and diverse viewpoints. In 
response, Chinese Internet users have launched new protests against state 
censorship of the Web. At the fore of this movement is the widely 
circulated Declaration of Internet Citizens' Rights, which demands free 
expression and freedom of information and association on the Internet.

The declaration's authors challenge the constitutionality of the new 
regulations and defend their rights to publish online by quoting the United 
Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International 
Covenant for Civil and Political Rights. The Internet declaration then 
states: "A modern society is an open society. As the Chinese people again 
face a historic transition into a modern society ... any measure that 
closes China only harms China's emergence into the international community 
and Chinese society's peace and progress.... Defending Internet freedom is 
an urgent matter." Initiated by 18 prominent writers, lawyers and private 
Web masters, the declaration immediately gained the support of more than 
600 Web publishers, Internet users and other Chinese "netizens."

Among the 18 initiators of the declaration is Wan Yanhai, Web site 
publisher of the AIDS Action Project, a Beijing-based education and 
activism group whose offices authorities closed in June. With reporting on 
AIDS officially censored in the state media, Wan's Web site, now on a 
server outside China, is the only independent source of information about 
the impending HIV/AIDS crisis. (A U.N. report has predicted that 10 million 
people in China will be infected with HIV by 2010.) On Aug. 1, Wan 
initiated a rare act of civil disobedience in China by circulating an 
online appeal to all independent Web publishers, asking them to join him in 
protesting the new regulations by turning themselves into authorities for 
operating "illegal" Web sites. Since then, Wan has continued to push the 
boundaries of free expression by using Internet chat rooms, online forums 
and e-mail groups to boldly advocate for his cause. Overseas organizations 
have helped amplify domestic voices like Wan's by providing distribution 
channels, content that is forbidden domestically and technological means to 
evade the firewall. While Chinese citizens are fighting against Internet 
censorship, the reaction from some leading international high-tech 
corporations has been shameful.

Since March, more than 300 businesses, government offices, universities and 
other organizations have signed the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for 
China's Internet Industry, drafted by the government-approved Internet 
Society of China. Signatories agree to refrain from "producing, posting or 
disseminating harmful information that may jeopardize state security and 
disrupt social stability." Yahoo, an Internet pioneer that designed one of 
the Net's most popular search engines, was among the first foreign 
companies to sign the pledge, and a visit to the Yahoo China site 
demonstrates the company's compliance. Its search engine has effectively 
filtered out the vast majority of sites containing terms usually considered 
subversive by the Chinese government--including "human rights," "Falun 
Gong" and "Tiananmen 1989."

This self-censorship is shocking, especially since Yahoo is currently 
defending itself on freedom-of-expression grounds in a legal battle with 
the French government over the right of French users to access online 
auctions of Nazi memorabilia.

The growing Internet rights movement is at the forefront of using Internet 
technology to open Chinese society. International corporations can and 
should facilitate this goal by refusing to abide by domestic Internet 
regulations that violate China's international obligations, including those 
that come with World Trade Organization membership. As a first step, 
corporations should refuse to sign the self-discipline pledge and instead 
support the Internet citizens' rights declaration. The 45.8 million 
Internet users are also Chinese citizens, and this is what they want and 
deserve.
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Mercury News
People sell their faces for digital delivery
NO-NAME MODELS PAID FLAT FEE TO APPEAR ON STOCK-PHOTO DISK
By Marcia Biederman
New York Times

First there was the Internet Guy. Then there was the Banner Lady. And now 
comes AA030587.

Superheroes? No, supermodels, at least in terms of visibility. You will not 
find these people strutting the runways in Milan or mentioned in gossip 
columns. But chances are you have seen their photos, heading Web pages or 
plastered on posters, hawking diarrhea remedies or jazzing up a PowerPoint 
presentation.

These people are working in a business known as royalty-free stock 
photography. For a flat fee, perhaps less than what Kate Moss pays for a 
lipstick, they have sold the rights for their images to be downloaded from 
the Internet or packaged in CDs, almost without restriction. While the 
photographer generally earns royalties from the sales, the models do not.

Stock photographs, or off-the-shelf pictures of people and things, have 
been around far longer than personal computers, but the digital delivery of 
images has increased their popularity. So did the advent in the early 1990s 
of royalty-free collections, which offer photos without asking how they 
will be used, a simpler and generally less expensive arrangement than 
traditional licensing agreements.

No-name cover girls and boys may come cheaply, but using their images, 
which can be purchased by anyone, is not without its perils.

Meet Julia, as an advertising copywriter nicknamed her for her vague 
resemblance to Julia Roberts. She is a dark-haired young woman with a 
dazzling smile who spent half this year on the New York subways on posters 
promoting Monroe College, which has campuses in the Bronx and in New 
Rochelle, N.Y.

``Lord knows where she's from, but she seems like a New Yorker,'' said 
Kevin Alter, formerly a senior copywriter for KPC Christopher Thomas of 
Melville, N.Y., the ad agency that created the college ad and chose the 
nickname. ``She looks frazzled and a little tough.''

In June, an identical photo arrived in many New York mailboxes, this time 
in a brochure from Time Warner Cable of New York City that was illustrated 
with 20 photos of people presented as offbeat New Yorkers. The smiling 
woman is shown with the caption ``Her deal: wears gloves on the subway year 
'round.''

In fact, Julia is a clerk at a Seattle baby photography studio, or at least 
she was two years ago, said officials at Getty Images in Seattle, which 
offers three portraits of her on its Vivid Faces CD, part of its 
royalty-free PhotoDisc collection. The company says that a photographer 
working in a neighboring studio spotted her, found her striking and asked 
her to pose.

The company knows the smiling woman not by her name -- which she signed on 
a model release but the company declined to disclose -- but rather by the 
image number, AA030587, also sold at its Web site as an individual download.

``It's very, very expensive to hire a photographer,'' said David Goldberg, 
vice president for marketing at Time Warner Cable of New York, explaining 
why his company had found its ``typical New Yorkers'' on a $399 disk 
produced in Seattle.

In 2000, the Banner Lady reigned. Clenching her teeth or screaming, this 
young woman was all over the Web in the advertising strips known as 
banners. She promised a fix for every problem, from a bad cough to bad credit.

Marc Ryan, an analyst who follows Internet advertising for 
Nielsen/NetRatings, speculated that certain stock photo images become 
ubiquitous because advertisers use the same search terms to find them in 
Getty Images' PhotoDisc collection. Indeed, searching for ``stress'' and 
``woman'' will still turn up an image of the Banner Lady.
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Sydney Morning Herald
Computer tracking system to be tested in schools

An innovative computer tracking system will be tested in NSW public schools 
in an effort to reduce theft.

The Education Department will test the new software package at high risk 
schools in Sydney and regional areas, The Sun-Herald reported.

PC PhoneHome software, developed in the US, tracks stolen computers through 
the Internet.

Every time a user logs on to the Internet, a central monitoring system can 
identify it as a stolen computer and log the unique internet protocol 
address being used.

Police can use this information to trace the machine via the phone line and 
retrieve it.

About 100 school computers will be involved in the initial trial.

The software is available to individual users and the $99 cost includes 
three years' monitoring.
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DUX Computer Digest
Web sites, ISPs lopping pop-up ads
JOHN HEINZL
Friday, August 23, 2002

Faced with a groundswell of consumer complaints, some Web sites and 
Internet service providers are curtailing those annoying pop-up ads that 
pitch everything from wireless spy cameras to on-line casinos.

A few sites have banned them almost entirely, much to the relief of 
frustrated Web users. Women's portal iVillage.com, for instance, plans to 
remove virtually all pop-ups from its family of Web sites by the end of 
September, a move that could spur others to do the same, analysts say.

The move followed a survey showing 92.5 per cent of iVillage.com visitors 
consider pop-ups "the most frustrating feature of the Web," the company 
says. Its research also found that, while pop-ups can generate considerable 
brand awareness, they can also harm the advertiser's image.

"There has been a sea change in attitudes about on-line advertising and 
pop-ups in particular. It's definitely changing for the worse," says Rudy 
Grahn, senior analyst with Jupiter Research in New York. "It's the sheer 
quantity of pop-ups that is causing the . . . aversion to them."

The number of pop-ups has skyrocketed in recent months as even major 
companies such as American Airlines and Amazon.com use them. An estimated 
4.8 billion of the ads appeared on U.S. computer screens in July, up from 
1.4 billion in January, according to Internet research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.

As consumer frustration grows, many Web sites are capping the number of 
pop-ups that appear during a single session. Internet service providers are 
also helping customers eliminate the pesky ads.

Bell Sympatico plans to make ad-blocking software available to dial-up and 
high-speed customers "in a matter of days," spokesman Andrew Cole says. 
Customers who purchase an anti-virus or firewall security service will get 
the ad-blocking feature at no extra charge.

Atlanta-based ISP EarthLink, meanwhile, this week announced it will offer 
free pop-up blocking software to its 4.8 million customers. The software 
will also zap "pop-unders," which appear after the browser closes.

For Web sites that use pop-up windows as a part of their own business, such 
as financial institutions, customers can specify Web addresses where 
pop-ups will not be disabled.

What bothers people most about pop-ups is "the hassle and irritation of 
having to get through them . . . it's the intrusive, invasive nature of 
pop-up ads," says Rob Kaiser, vice-president of narrowband marketing for 
EarthLink.

Although outright bans are uncommon, many Web sites now impose limits on 
the frequency of pop-ups. The on-line version of The New York Times, for 
instance, allows a maximum of one pop-up and one pop-under for each user 
session.

The site, http://www.nytimes.com, is trying to strike a balance "between a 
good user experience and offering a valuable advertising opportunity for 
our clients," says Christine Mohan, spokeswoman for New York Times Digital.

At Bell Globemedia Interactive, pop-ups are not permitted on the home pages 
of any of its sites, which include globeandmail.com and globeinvestor.com. 
Pop-ups are allowed on inside pages, but each user will see a particular ad 
only twice for the duration of a campaign.

"Typically, we would not have more than a few pop-up campaigns running at 
any one time," says Gary Fearnall, vice-president of sales for Bell 
Globemedia Interactive. Pop-unders are banned, he adds.

One of the keys to making pop-ups more palatable is to run them in a 
relevant environment, adds Mr. Fearnall, who is also president of the 
Internet Advertising Bureau of Canada. "Pop-ups in the right context can work."

For instance, when the sports-oriented site TSN.ca ran a Nike pop-up 
campaign, the ads did not generate a single complaint, he says. The same 
was true of pop-up ads for Subaru on the car site globemegawheels.com.

Consumer irritation usually arises when there is no link between the site's 
content and the product or service being advertised, he says.

Web sites are experimenting with more engaging forms of on-line 
advertising, such as animated images that dance across the computer screen 
and TV-like ads with motion and sound.

Although such ads also interrupt Web surfing, they are perceived as more 
entertaining than a rectangle that suddenly appears on the screen promoting 
cut-rate flights to Las Vegas.

iVillage.com, for its part, is using an ad format called the "interquizzal" 
-- a branded window that appears while users are waiting for the results of 
an on-line quiz or other interactive feature.

The window closes and the ad disappears once the results are tabulated.

Users are presumably more receptive to interquizzals because they have to 
wait for the results anyway. iVillage.com says it will continue to use 
pop-ups, but only for research purposes and in-house subscription pitches.

Mr. Grahn of Jupiter Research says he wouldn't be surprised to see other 
Web sites follow iVillage.com and ban pop-ups. Premium Web sites that are 
concerned about protecting their brand image will be the first to eliminate 
them, he predicts.

As much as consumers despise them, however, pop-ups are not going away, 
analysts say. That's because, like telemarketing calls at dinner time, they 
work. And there are plenty of advertisers who are willing to annoy a large 
proportion of the population to reach the tiny percentage of people 
interested in an ad.

"Pop-ups . . . are such a cheap vehicle to generate sales that there is 
probably always going to be a temptation to use them," Mr. Grahn says.
jheinzl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
*******************************

Lillie Coney
Public Policy Coordinator
U.S. Association for Computing Machinery
Suite 510
2120 L Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
202-478-6124
lillie.coney@xxxxxxx