Clips December 17, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips December 17, 2002

ARTICLES

Sun faces renewed H-1B complaint
AOL awarded almost $7 million in spam case
Arizona Inmates Back on the Net
Norway Teenage Cyber-Piracy Trial Ends
High-Tech Hack Attack Case Tests the Strength of Legal Ethics
Shelby Urges Creating New Intelligence Service
Limits Sought on Wireless Internet Access
Bush Plans to Seek $14 Billion Hike in Defense Budget
Searching, Or Just Surfing? [Employment]
New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online
EPA steps toward e-rulemaking
Hawaii installs fingerprint systems
Federal Web sites edge commercial ones in survey
Gilmore Commission raps cybersecurity policy
Bush science advisers contemplate technology transfer
Fastest computer spawns high-tech race between Japan, USA
U.S. Says Chip Imports May Hurt Micron
U.S. court says no to Web libel suit


******************************
CNET
Sun faces renewed H-1B complaint
By Ed Frauenheim
December 16, 2002, 7:28 PM PT

SAN FRANCISCO--The Department of Labor began an administrative law hearing 
Monday into whether Sun Microsystems violated regulations concerning the 
employment of foreign workers in the United States on temporary H-1B work 
visas.
The hearing was prompted by allegations by Guy Santiglia, a former systems 
administrator at Sun, who said that even as the company was laying off him 
and thousands of other employees, it retained H-1B workers and was applying 
for the ability to hire thousands more. Santiglia also accused Sun of 
violating his right to inspect public records.

H-1B visas, which allow skilled foreigners to work in the United States for 
up to six years, have sparked controversy in the past several years. During 
the current technology slump, unemployed U.S. tech workers have voiced 
anger at the way the visas allow foreigners to hold scarce jobs.


Critics also charge the guest workers make less than U.S. workers, thereby 
undercutting U.S. wages. Still, legal challenges to the program have been 
rare, said Michael Hethmon, an attorney with the Federation of American 
Immigration Reform who is representing Santiglia. "Because of the Byzantine 
nature of the regulations, it's been very difficult for guys like Mr. 
Santiglia to go forward and prepare a complaint," Hethmon said.

Sun spokesperson Diane Carlini said the company didn't take national 
origin, visa status or salary into account in cutting its work force from 
about 42,000 to 35,000 beginning about 18 months ago. To have considered 
national origin or visa status would have amounted to discrimination, she 
said. Carlini couldn't say whether any H-1Bs workers have been hired during 
the past 18 months, but said the company has done very little hiring during 
the tech downturn.

Santiglia's case is without merit, Carlini said, pointing out that a Labor 
Department investigation of his claims found no violations of law in how 
Sun made use of the program. She also said other federal agencies, such as 
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Justice, have 
dismissed claims against Sun by Santiglia.

The case Monday, heard by Department of Labor Judge Jennifer Gee, stemmed 
from Santiglia's appeal of the Labor Department's initial ruling.

Santiglia's complaint focuses on part of the process of securing an H-1B 
visa, known as the Labor Condition Application (LCA). The document requires 
employers to describe the salary that will be paid to the guest worker and 
to testify that use of the visa won't harm working conditions of similar 
U.S. employees. Santiglia said Sun's employment of H-1B visa holders 
adversely hurt his working conditions, in that he and three other U.S. 
employees were laid off in his work group while three H-1B visa holders in 
the group were retained.

Along with other allegations, his complaint also charges that Sun didn't 
properly post notices of LCAs in the workplace, that Sun failed to 
accurately describe the prevailing wage rate for specific jobs, and that 
the company didn't provide proper access to public documents. Santiglia 
said Sun didn't let him photocopy its LCAs, barred him from seeing them for 
several months, and ultimately required him to sign a statement precluding 
him from reproducing the material.

Roxana Bacon, an attorney representing Sun, argued Monday that the company 
never prevented Santiglia from taking notes by hand. She also said Sun had 
to take steps to protect the safety of employees because Santiglia raised 
his voice with Sun officials. Bacon told Gee that the company has been 
reasonable in giving him access to the LCAs. "Not only has there been no 
reprisal against Mr. Santiglia, there's been every effort to accommodate 
him," she said.

During the opening day of the hearing Monday, Gee upheld Sun's motion to 
preclude the expert testimony of Norman Matloff, a computer science 
professor at the University of California, Davis. Matloff has long been a 
critic of the H-1B program and has testified before Congress on the matter. 
Gee said Matloff's expertise wouldn't contribute to a decision about 
whether Sun had followed Labor Department regulations.

But Matloff said during a break in the hearing that Sun's use of H-1Bs 
harmed comparable U.S. workers by pressuring them to work longer hours, 
given that H-1Bs themselves are likely to work long hours. H-1Bs are 
beholden to employers, Matloff said, partly because the guest workers may 
rely on the employer initially to obtain permanent residency status.

Santiglia worked at Sun's Santa Clara, Calif., campus as a full-time 
employee for about four months before being laid off Nov. 5, 2001. He had 
worked as a contractor at Sun since late November 2000. Prior to the 
beginning of Sun's layoffs in 2001, about 4 percent of the company's 
workers were H-1Bs. Carlini said Monday that she didn't know the current 
percentage of H-1Bs.

Santiglia isn't the only U.S. tech worker taking an H-1B related case to 
the courts. Pete Bennett, an out-of-work Web programmer currently working 
in the mortgage business, filed a claim with the Department of Justice, 
saying employers rejected him on the basis of national origin. Bennett, a 
Danville, Calif., resident who runs the Web site Nomoreh1b.com, suggests 
additional legal challenges are coming. "There are more popping up every 
day," he says "People are fighting back."
********************************
Mercury News
AOL awarded almost $7 million in spam case

DULLES, Va. (Reuters) - A U.S. court has granted Internet giant America 
Online almost $7 million in damages from a company that the Internet giant 
said sent its users nearly 1 billion unwanted e-mails touting adult web 
sites, AOL said Monday.

The ruling is America Online's second win over CN Productions and its 
largest reward to date in an anti-spam case, an AOL spokesman said. The 
unsolicited mass messages known as spam are one of the biggest annoyances 
for e-mail users.

American Online, the Internet division of AOL Time Warner Inc. and the 
world's largest Internet service, said the U.S. District Court of the 
Eastern District in Virginia awarded it statutory damages and broadened the 
scope of a prior injunction against CN and its owner Jay Nelson.

The decision was reached in late October, but unsealed only recently and 
announced by the company only Monday.

The complaint, originally filed in 1998, charged CN with sending AOL 
subscribers nearly a billion e-mails advertising adult Web sites.

Dulles, Va.-based America Online won an injunction against CN in 1999 and 
that year asked the court to expand its investigations to third parties 
working with CN -- and found that it extended outside U.S. borders.

AOL said the ruling was the first in which statutory damages were awarded 
under an amended Virginia anti-spam statute.

``This is an important legal victory in the fight against spam and it sends 
a clear, distinct message to spammers: AOL is prepared to use all of the 
legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers who inundate 
the mailboxes of AOL members with unwanted and often offensive junk 
e-mail,'' said Randall Boe, AOL's general counsel, in a statement.

The $7 million award will be use for general purposes, the AOL spokesman said.

Nelson's counsel was not immediately available for comment.

In the latest version of its Internet software, America Online implemented 
a new tool that lets users report incidents of spam with the click of a 
button. The online giant has won more than 20 cases against spam companies.
***********************************
Wired News
Arizona Inmates Back on the Net

Citing fears of irreversible damage to the First Amendment, a federal judge 
in Arizona on Monday overturned a state law that banned information about 
state prisoners from appearing on the Web.

Under the law, prisoners were barred from corresponding with a 
"communication service provider" or "remote computing service" and were 
also charged with a misdemeanor if anyone created a website or accessed the 
Internet at a prisoner's request.

Acting on behalf of three prisoners' rights groups, the American Civil 
Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Canadian Coalition Against the Death 
Penalty v. Terry L. Stewart in federal district court last July, seeking to 
overturn what the ACLU and its clients saw primarily as a global free 
speech issue.

"Arizona's attempt to censor Internet content was a frightening step toward 
government repression of free speech," said Eleanor Eisenberg, executive 
director of the ACLU of Arizona.

"It is extraordinary that Arizona prison officials believe they can tell 
international groups opposed to the death penalty what they can and cannot 
say online about prisoners in Arizona."

Some anti-death-penalty groups such as the Canadian Coalition Against the 
Death Penalty and Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty 
host sites for prisoners on death row who want to publish information about 
their cases, or who would like to communicate with pen pals.

Shortly after the law went into effect, the Arizona Department of 
Corrections scoured the Internet and informed prisoners whose names 
appeared on websites that the information had to be removed within three 
weeks or they could face criminal charges.

But the Canadian anti-death-penalty group refused to remove inmate pages 
from its website, saying that the information had been posted before the 
law went into effect and that the information belonged to the group.

According to Tracy Lamourie, one of the CCADP's directors, for the past 
several months the coalition had received reports from prisoners charging 
they were being punished as a result of surfing activist groups' websites.

"Today's decision stops the state and prison authorities from basically 
attempting to blackmail groups like ours by punishing those whom we are 
trying to help," Lamourie said.

"We are pleased that the Arizona court recognized that states cannot 
legislate or restrict the action or First Amendment rights of prisoner 
advocacy groups or human rights groups such as ours, nor can they attempt 
to dictate what can be reported on websites or other methods of 
communications."

A spokeswoman from the Arizona Department of Corrections said that to her 
knowledge no prisoners had faced criminal charges because of the law, but 
several had been disciplined "by losing minor privileges for a short period 
of time."

The relative of a man allegedly murdered by an Arizona prison inmate had 
mixed feelings on the ruling.

"I hate to even think of the bastard who murdered my stepbrother sharing 
the same Internet as I do," said Keira Sherman, a secretary in Wisconsin. 
"And I also hate to think that people are wasting their time fighting for 
that bastard's rights.

"But I guess when I calm down a bit, I'd say I support the advocates' right 
to do what they feel is correct," she added. "I just don't believe in 
censorship, even though sometimes I wish I did."
***********************************
Reuters
Norway Teenage Cyber-Piracy Trial Ends
Mon Dec 16,12:55 PM ET
By Inger Sethov

OSLO (Reuters) - A landmark trial of a teenager in Norway over Hollywood 
charges of video piracy ended on Monday with prosecutors urging a suspended 
90-day jail term.


Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," is charged with having unlocked 
a code and distributed a computer program enabling unauthorized copying of 
DVD movies, angering Hollywood studios who fear mass piracy and loss of 
vast revenues.


"The thief who breaks into his own flat is not committing any crime," 
Johansen's lawyer, Halvor Manshaus, told the Oslo court in his closing 
argument of the case -- seen as a battle between cyber Davids and corporate 
Goliaths.


Johansen, 19, has become a symbol for hackers worldwide who say making 
software like his is an act of intellectual freedom rather than theft. 
Johansen made the so-called DeCSS (news - web sites) program when he was 15.


Following five days of hearings, prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde spent much of 
her closing argument saying that Johansen, participating in what she called 
gang crime, was a key player in developing the DeCSS program.


"I think this case is about gang crime. It is beyond any doubt that there 
was a rivalry" in developing the program, she said. Sunde called for a 
suspended 90 day sentence for Johansen under allegations that could bring a 
maximum two years' prison.


The judge, helped by two experts, is expected to make a ruling -- the first 
of its kind in Norway -- early next year.


The complaint against Johansen was filed by the U.S. Motion Picture 
Association (MBA), representing Hollywood studios.


"The criminal age in Norway is 15. He was over that and must be seen as a 
resource-strong person," she said.


Manshaus did not dispute the fact that his client had helped develop and 
distribute the program but said there were no legal basis in Norway for 
conviction, saying DVDs were technically protected from copying but not 
legally.

"You could say that Jon Johansen has done the opposite of copying," he 
said, referring to partly failed attempts to copy two DVD movied that he 
already owned while testing the program.

He said Johansen tested the DeCSS on the blockbusters "The Fifth Element" 
and "Matrix" -- both of which he already owned on DVD -- but only managed 
to transfer about five percent of the films to his harddrive.

Johansen told the court that he owns about 175 DVDs at about $34.90 per 
film. He said he even had several versions of some of his favorites, 
including two versions of "The Fifth Element" and three of "Stargate."

Hollywood studios, which code DVD movies to encourage people to buy rather 
than copy their films, say unauthorized copying of DVDs is copyright theft 
and undermines a sales market for DVDs and videos worth $20 billion a year 
in North America alone.

In the United States, where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (news - 
web sites) (DMCA) protects copyright holders from piracy, Johansen's case 
has raised concerns among Internet users of what they see as a 
constitutional right to freedom of expression.

The European Union (news - web sites) enacted the E-Commerce Directive this 
year, similar to the DMCA. Norway, although not a EU member, is expected to 
implement the EU directive.
*****************************
Washington Post
High-Tech Hack Attack Case Tests the Strength of Legal Ethics in an 
Electronic World
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 16, 2002; Page E04


When you think of computer hacking, the stereotypical suspects who come to 
mind are pimple-faced, pocket-protected teenagers who crack code for kicks. 
Think Matthew Broderick as the teen hacker in the 1983 film "War Games."

Now picture the computer hacker in pinstriped, double-breasted suits on 
billable hours.

Would you believe that a respected law firm, corporate defense attorneys in 
Dallas and Washington, a petrochemical company, and an industry trade 
association now stand accused of illegally breaking into the Web site of an 
expert trial witness?

That's the allegation in a lawsuit by occupational-illness expert David 
Egilman, who is suing Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue and others alleging 
high-tech breaking and entering. Today, Egilman plans to amend his lawsuit 
to include Washington attorney and former federal prosecutor Douglas J. 
Behr of Keller & Heckman LLP, the District-based Society of the Plastics 
Industry and Occidental Chemical Corp.

A deposition in the three-month-old lawsuit led Egilman to Behr and the 
plastics trade group after a Jones Day attorney admitted that he did, in 
fact, enter Egilman's password-protected Internet site, which he maintains 
on a home computer at his office.

W . Kelly Stewart, of Jones Day's Dallas office, testified last month that 
he entered Egilman's site after Jones Day attempted and failed to purchase 
access online. Then, after getting the pass code from co-counsel Behr, who 
had guessed it, Stewart entered the Web site, Stewart testified. The 
material gathered was used to discredit Egilman as an expert witness in a 
high-profile trial.

It remains to be seen whether a court will consider the conduct illegal. 
Computer law specialist Marc J. Zwillinger of Kirkland & Ellis said 
guessing a password, getting in and getting information is a technical 
violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The story behind the computer hacking traces back to a lawsuit filed in 
Colorado against a Cleveland company, Brush Wellman Inc. Former workers 
alleged, based on a trove of documents assembled in part by Egilman, that 
they were sickened by beryllium while assembling nuclear weapons because of 
Brush Wellman's negligence.

Egilman, a Brown Medical School internist, is not your ordinary expert 
witness. The professor is notorious among defense attorneys not only for 
his devastating grasp of complicated material, but for his zealous 
antipathy for corporate defendants.

A highly paid expert, Egilman says he uses his proceeds to fund his 
nonprofit work. Materials he helped gather have brought down a number of 
asbestos manufacturers.

During the beryllium trial, Jefferson County, Colo., District Judge Frank 
Plaut took note of Egilman's aggressiveness and placed a gag order on 
Egilman and the parties in the case.

Then, Egilman restricted access to his Web site to clients and students, to 
whom he gave passwords so they could get documents they needed for cases 
and course work. The Jones Day attorneys began showing the plaintiffs' 
attorneys pages from Egilman's password-protected Web site, and he wanted 
to know how they had gotten them.

So he decided to set a trap to catch the attorneys in the act. On his 
password-protected site, he placed a headline that said, "See How Jones, 
Day Buys a Colorado Judge." When you clicked the link, it referred not to 
the judge, but to Massachusetts state law about computer hacking.

Egilman never thought the attorneys would take the headline to the judge. 
If the attorneys ever came to court with the headline, Egilman thought, he 
would prevail by proving that he'd caught them breaking the law.

That's not how it worked out. The attorneys took it to Plaut. The judge 
didn't find Egilman's "trap" to be very funny.

(We interrupt this column for some Hearsay advice: When setting a legal 
trap, don't antagonize the judge.)

Essentially, Plaut threw out Egilman's testimony in the case, describing 
his behavior as "unprecedented," "inflammatory," "intemperate," 
"scandalous" and "out of control."

Without the bulk of Egilman's expert evidence, the sickened workers 
suffered a resounding defeat at trial.

Egilman, infuriated, attempted to get attorneys general in Colorado and 
Massachusetts, which outlaw computer hacking, to investigate. They 
declined. He filed an ethics complaint against the Jones Day lawyers in 
Colorado. That failed, too.

He called the U.S. attorney's office in Rhode Island, which turned it over 
to the FBI. An agent called Egilman on Friday.

Now Egilman is suing in Brazoria County, Tex., where attorney Stewart was 
defending another Jones Day client, Occidental Chemical, in a lawsuit in 
which Egilman also was the plaintiffs' expert.

(Asked who paid for Stewart's clever Web searching on Egilman's site, 
Stewart said Occidental Chemical, though the material ended up in the Brush 
Wellman suit. Asked why, Stewart said, "We have to bill someone.")

In his deposition, Stewart said that D.C. lawyer Behr, who represents the 
Society of the Plastics Industry, had guessed that the passwords were 
"brown" and "student" to get into Egilman's Web site. Reached last week, 
Behr declined to comment.

Egilman's attorney, Mark Lanier of Houston, asked Stewart how guessing gets 
him off the hook for hacking. "I want you to tell me how someone guessing 
at the password is any different than someone guessing at the combination 
to a safe [in a bank] or guessing at the combination to a garage door 
opener to get into someone's house to steal their goods," Lanier asked.

Replied Stewart: "There's a difference between the hypothetical you're 
talking about, about going into a bank vault and taking money, and a Web 
site that is not necessarily protected from the public, and it has 
information about my firm on it that says that my firm paid and bought a 
state court judge in Colorado."

Legal technology experts tend to disagree. "It is a serious breach of 
ethics, and it is a potential serious violation of criminal law," said Mark 
D. Rasch, a technology law specialist and senior vice president for 
Solutionary Inc. of McLean. "It is the electronic equivalent of breaking 
into someone's office to get documents for discovery."

Jones Day, whose attorneys declined to comment, should be able to figure 
out how serious the problem is. The firm brags that it has more than 150 
attorneys who specialize in technology law.

Conning the Counsel
How easy is it to defraud a law firm? Just ask 40-year-old Jonathan David 
Ghertler.

The Ocala, Fla., man apparently needed some money, so posing as a partner 
in the Los Angeles office of Arnold & Porter, he called the firm's downtown 
D.C. headquarters and told the director of finance to send $30,000 to a 
Florida bank account.

Ghertler said the money was for a third-party law firm -- he made up the 
name Dixon Stokes -- hired to represent a client. He and the client would 
pay A&P back within 30 days.

Ghertler did the same thing to San Francisco's Heller Ehrman White & 
McAullife LLP; Baltimore's Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe LLP (now called 
Piper Rudnick LLP); New York's Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP; 
Sullivan & Cromwell; and New York's Willkie Farr & Gallagher, bilking them 
out of sums ranging from $15,000 to $65,000.

How did Ghertler get away with such an obvious scam before he was convicted 
of wire fraud? By taking advantage of the rapid expansion of law firms that 
have become so impersonal that finance directors in the home office (oh, by 
the way, they often say there is no home office) don't know all the 
attorneys in the various branch offices.

Think about that next time a law firm brags about the seamless integration 
of myriad firms with offices spread around the globe.

And Furthermore . . .
Progress & Freedom Foundation President Jeffrey A. Eisenach plans to 
announce today that he's leaving to join his old mentor, James C. Miller 
III, at Howrey Simon Arnold & White LLP's CapAnalysis Group LLC, which 
handles antitrust, intellectual property and complex business litigation. 
The new PFF president: Raymond L. Gifford, chairman of the Colorado Public 
Utilities Commission and a protégé of interior secretary and former 
Colorado attorney general Gale A. Norton. . . . Last time, we told you 
about Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse's public-records battle to 
continue receiving general U.S. attorney case data from the Justice 
Department. Today, TRAC's attorney, Michael E. Tankersley of Public 
Citizen's litigation group, plans to sue the Justice Department over the 
dispute. . . . Nicholas R. Koberstein of the Federal Trade Commission's 
competition bureau is departing for McDermott, Will & Emery.
**********************************
Washington Post
Shelby Urges Creating New Intelligence Service
By Walter Pincus
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page A31

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) has called for creation of an intelligence 
organization headed by a director of national intelligence who would have 
overall responsibility for analyzing information and would be the 
president's principal intelligence adviser. It would separate the new 
position's responsibilities from spying, covert operations and technical 
satellite collection activities that would continue to be carried out under 
the direction of the CIA and the Pentagon.

Shelby, who is leaving the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence after 
six years as chairman or vice chairman, made his proposal in an 85-page 
valedictory appended -- under the headline "additional views" -- to the 
report of the joint Senate-House committee that investigated the Sept. 11, 
2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

There is a need, Shelby wrote, "to separate our country's 'central' 
intelligence analytical functions from the resource-hungry collection 
responsibilities that make agencies into self-interested bureaucratic 
'players.' "

The House-Senate intelligence panel also recommended naming a new director 
of national intelligence as a Cabinet member, but the committee's plan 
would give the new director control over CIA and Pentagon intelligence 
collection. Shelby questioned whether this transfer could be accomplished 
because of bureaucratic resistance within the CIA and Pentagon.

"DOD [the Defense Department] and its congressional allies would make such 
centralization an uphill battle, to say the least," he said.

Shelby has been one of the most vocal critics of CIA Director George J. 
Tenet on the Senate intelligence committee, charging that Sept. 11 was the 
latest in a series of intelligence failures under Tenet's watch. The plan 
he proposed in his appendix statement would limit the CIA director's 
responsibilities to covert activities.

Shelby's proposal would put clandestine human intelligence collection, now 
run primarily by CIA, into a "specialized service" devoted to covert 
operations. That new service, along with Pentagon technical, electronic and 
satellite collection agencies, "would feed information" into the new, 
centralized intelligence analysis organization.

Shelby accompanied his suggestion with a sharp criticism of the Defense 
Department, which controls 80 percent of the country's overall intelligence 
budget.

He said Pentagon intelligence-collection agencies, such as the National 
Security Agency (NSA), which intercepts electronic signals, and the 
National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which analyzes satellite 
imagery and makes military maps, are used primarily to support military 
operations. He said this is despite their being "vital parts of the 
national intelligence system, and provide crucial intelligence products to 
national-level consumers, including the president."

What this means, Shelby concluded, "is that in any unresolvable 
resource-allocations conflict between the Secretary of Defense and the DCI 
[Director of Central Intelligence], the secretary must prevail."

The new intelligence analysis organization, Shelby said, would be built 
around the CIA's directorate of intelligence. This was the original idea 
for the CIA when it was created in 1947. After the experience of Pearl 
Harbor and World War II, intelligence analysis was supposed to be fused in 
the new agency. Before the war, analysis had been conducted separately by 
the Army and Navy, with the Office of Strategic Services added during the war.

In an interview, Shelby said changes were needed because the intelligence 
community needs to become "agile." Despite Sept. 11, he said, it remains 
"hard-wired for the Cold War."

"Fighting groups as flexible as terrorists," Shelby said, "requires we have 
to be flexible."
*******************************
New York Times
December 17, 2002
Limits Sought on Wireless Internet Access
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16  The Defense Department, arguing that an 
increasingly popular form of wireless Internet access could interfere with 
military radar, is seeking new limits on the technology, which is seen as a 
rare bright spot for the communications industry.

Industry executives, including representatives from Microsoft and Intel, 
met last week with Defense Department officials to try to stave off that 
effort, which includes a government proposal now before the global overseer 
of radio frequencies.

The military officials say the technical restrictions they are seeking are 
necessary for national security. Industry executives, however, say they 
would threaten expansion of technology like the so-called WiFi systems 
being used for wireless Internet in American airports, coffee shops, homes 
and offices.

WiFi use is increasingly heavy in major American metropolitan areas, and 
similar systems are becoming popular in Europe and Asia. As the technology 
is installed in millions of portable computers and in antennas in many 
areas, industry executives acknowledge that high-speed wireless Internet 
access will soon crowd the radio frequencies used by the military. But 
industry executives say new types of frequency spectrum sharing techniques 
could keep civilian users from interfering with radar systems.

The debate, which involves low-power radio emissions that the Defense 
Department says may jam as many as 10 types of radar systems in use by 
United States military forces, presents a thorny policy issue for the Bush 
administration.

Even as the armed forces monitor United States air space for signs of 
military or terrorist attacks and gear up for a possible war with Iraq, the 
nation's technology companies hope that the popularity of wireless Internet 
access will help pull their industry out of its two-year slump. New limits 
on that technology could help undermine the economic recovery on which the 
administration is also pinning its hopes.

"Nobody, including the Pentagon, doubts that this is important for 
consumers and industry," said Steven Price, deputy assistant secretary of 
defense for radio spectrum matters. "The problem comes when it degrades our 
military capabilities."

So far, though, there have been no reports of civilian wireless Internet 
use interfering with military radar, Edmond Thomas, chief of the office of 
engineering and technology for the Federal Communications Commission, said.

Industry executives say that military uses can coexist with the millions of 
smart wireless Internet devices that can sense the nearby use of military 
radar and automatically yield the right of way. These devices are in use in 
Europe and will soon be used in the United States.

But Pentagon officials say that the new digital technologies are unproven 
and could interfere with various types of military radar systems, whether 
ones used for tracking storms, monitoring aircraft or guiding missiles and 
other weapons.

The Pentagon wants regulators to delay consideration of opening an 
additional swath of radio frequencies in the 5-gigahertz band that is 
eagerly sought by American technology companies and is already in civilian 
use internationally.

In this country, industry executives and some members of Congress see new 
spectrum-sharing technologies as a way to jump-start innovation and 
commerce. Last month, for example, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from 
California, and her Republican colleague Senator George Allen of Virginia, 
said that they would introduce a bill in the next session of Congress to 
expand the radio spectrum available for wireless Internet use.

The military-industry debate also involves the merits of a technical 
standard known as dynamic frequency selection, which is being used by 
advanced wireless Internet radios overseas to avoid interference.

Military officials are asking the American industry, and companies in other 
countries, to create and install even more sensitive versions of dynamic 
frequency selection  something that the companies say may cause the 
technology to operate incorrectly. American executives say that the 
military's demands may also curtail the capacity of wireless Internet 
services and could even force a complicated redesign of millions of 
computer communications systems already in place or nearly ready for shipment.

An estimated 16 million WiFi-enabled computers and other devices are 
already in use in this country and overseas. And in the coming year, Intel 
plans to put currently designed WiFi technology on all of the 
microprocessor chips it ships for tens of millions of desktop, laptop and 
hand-held computing devices.

"This is a hugely important issue to Intel," said Peter Pitsch, Intel's 
communications policy director in Washington. "I'm hopeful at the end of 
the day, the U. S. government will accept a reasonable compromise."

The dispute may also foreshadow a coming battle over the airwaves as 
traditional broadcasters and communications businesses like cellular 
companies confront a dazzling array of new digital communications 
technologies that can potentially use the spectrum far more efficiently by 
permitting it to be shared by different types of users.

The roots of the dispute lie in an effort that began during the Clinton 
administration and which has continued at the Federal Communications 
Commission under the current administration, to permit civilian use of 
portions of the airwaves without licenses.

"The unlicensed spectrum is a hot-bed of entrepreneurial activity and one 
of the few bright spots in our high-tech economy," said Tom Kalil, the 
former deputy director of President Bill Clinton's National Economic 
Council and an early advocate of unlicensed spectrum of radio frequencies. 
The Bush administration, he said, "should be trying to increase the amount 
of spectrum for unlicensed devices, as opposed to imposing new, retroactive 
restrictions right as the market is taking off."

Earlier this month, the United States presented the Pentagon position at an 
international technical meeting in Geneva of the World Administrative Radio 
Conference, the body that oversees radio frequency allocations and standards.

European governments hotly disputed the United States position at the 
meeting, but it was nonetheless included as a footnote in the planning 
document that resulted. The issues will be confronted directly, and perhaps 
decided, in June at the World Administrative Radio Conference in Geneva.

Industry officials said that the Defense Department position had little 
chance of gaining international support. As a consequence, they said, the 
existing radio bands would probably become more congested, and the Pentagon 
would face even more sources of interference internationally.

There is a need for global coordination, executives acknowledge, but they 
say the Defense Department is going about it the wrong way.

"The idea is to get the world on a single page, and Europe is way ahead of 
the U. S. in understanding these interference issues," said Rich Redelfs, 
president and chief executive of Atheros, a Silicon Valley maker of chips 
used for WiFi systems.

**********************************
Washington Post
Bush Plans to Seek $14 Billion Hike in Defense Budget
By Bradley Graham
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page A29

The Bush administration plans to increase military spending by about $14 
billion next year, a figure that White House officials say is in line with 
the president's pledge to build up the nation's armed forces but that falls 
short of previous administration projections and what Pentagon officials 
had hoped for to sustain the war on terrorism and pay for new weapons.

The budget plan, which is due to be presented to President Bush this week, 
would not eliminate any major new weapons that have been under scrutiny 
this year but would reduce purchases of a new Army helicopter and a new Air 
Force fighter jet and impose conditions on the Navy's construction of a new 
aircraft carrier. It would boost spending for programs that have proven 
valuable in the counterterrorism war -- notably unmanned aerial vehicles 
and Special Operations forces.

The proposal would raise total defense spending to $378.5 billion next 
fiscal year from the $364.1 billion appropriated by Congress for fiscal 
2003, which began Oct. 1. Although some Pentagon issues still need to be 
resolved, several senior officials involved in the budget process said the 
total amount was unlikely to change substantially.

The proposed increase is less than what the administration projected in 
February when it first presented its plan for defense spending. Officials, 
who agreed to discuss the plan on condition of anonymity, attributed the 
drop to a lower-than-expected rate of inflation this year. One senior 
official described the increase as essentially $10 billion to pay for 
programs and $4 billion to cover the cost of inflation.

Pentagon officials had sought an additional $10 billion for a contingency 
fund to finance operations arising from the war on terrorism. Congress 
rejected a similar request in the fiscal 2003 budget, regarding it as too 
much of a "blank check," and Bush's budget advisers want to drop the idea.

Bush has made clear his desire to keep national security a top budget 
priority. But pursuing this goal has become more complicated in the face of 
a growing federal budget deficit and political pressure to boost spending 
on education, Medicare prescription drug coverage and other social programs 
that will be crucial issues for the president as the country heads toward 
the 2004 election. Bush also has signaled a desire to propose another round 
of tax cuts.

White House officials have told nonsecurity agencies to expect budget 
increases of no more than 1 or 2 percent next year, compared with the 4 
percent spending increase projected for defense.

Without the contingency fund, officials said, the costs of counterterrorism 
operations -- as well as any war with Iraq -- would have to be handled 
through supplemental spending requests. The military budget plan is due to 
be presented to Congress in early February, along with the rest of the 
president's spending program for fiscal 2004.

Administration officials said the budget would boost spending for many 
programs that military planners regard as critical to transforming the 
military into a more flexible, quick-reaction force. Defense analysts, 
however, said the failure to cancel some costly, long-running programs 
undermines this goal.

"What troubles me is that the administration still hasn't cancelled more of 
the big defense projects," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert with 
the Brookings Institution. "The price of transformational change is just 
being added to the cost of previous plans, and that spells continuing 
budget pressure."

Bush took office pledging to accelerate transformation of the military from 
a Cold War force designed to battle the Soviet Union into a more agile 
force geared to fighting regional wars and terrorist networks. White House 
budget officials initially resisted a Pentagon request last year for a 
surge in spending but eventually agreed to a plan to go from $331 billion 
in 2002 to $451 billion in 2007 with the understanding the Defense 
Department would press ahead with significant reforms. The buildup would be 
the largest since the Reagan administration.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tapped close aide Stephen Cambone to 
review major weapons programs. Cambone, the Pentagon's director of program 
analysis and evaluation, recommended a number of program changes aimed, he 
has said, at better integrating the separate military services and placing 
emphasis on expanded communications, quicker intelligence gathering and 
more precision-guided munitions.

The proposed cuts would hit hardest at the Army, which had its new 
howitzer, the Crusader, canceled earlier this year. Last week, defense 
officials announced a postponement in funding for two of six proposed 
brigades for a new light-armored, wheeled vehicle called Stryker.

Next year's plan would reduce purchases of the Army's new helicopter, the 
Commanche, by nearly 50 percent, from about 1,200 to 650, and would limit 
its role to reconnaissance missions, setting aside plans to give it a "deep 
attack" role as well.

The Navy has wanted to build two new aircraft carriers -- one in 2007 with 
a new nuclear power plant, catapult system and other features that would 
provide a transition to a move advanced model in 2011. Under the proposed 
budget, the Navy would be allowed to build the first carrier, provided it 
contains some of the new technology intended for the second.

The Air Force, determined to preserve its new F/A-22 fighter jet in the 
face of persistent cost overruns, has agreed to order fewer planes if it 
cannot bring production expenses down. But the budget plan raises 
uncertainties about both the F/A-22 and another warplane in development, 
the Joint Strike Fighter, by boosting funds for alternative means of 
delivering bombs, including unmanned aerial vehicles, experimental 
hypersonic aircraft and new kinds of cruise missiles. "These categories 
will provide a kind of mix-and-match set of capabilities," a senior defense 
official said.

Among the big winners in the new budget plan is Special Operations Command, 
whose $4.9 billion budget is slated to climb about 20 percent in 2004, 
officials said. The Pentagon has relied heavily on Special Operations 
forces in the war in Afghanistan and counterterrorism actions around the 
world. Much of the extra money, officials said, would go toward additional 
troops, refitted MH-47 Chinook helicopters and new CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor 
aircraft and ASDS submersible vessels.

In the absence of other substantial program cuts or an even greater 
increase in spending, several defense experts said the budget plan would 
appear to keep the Pentagon on a path toward developing more new weapons 
than it can eventually buy, leading to a crunch point by the end of the decade.

"Unless they increase the top line more than projected, they can't expect 
to get to the levels of procurement they're planning," said Steve Kosiak, a 
defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a 
nonpartisan think tank.

"They could make some offsets by cutting force structure, but they don't 
seem to be talking about that either."

The senior defense official said the budget plan contains a number of 
"shifts in resources" that should make the crunch point problem "less 
onerous than it was."
*********************************
Washington Post
Searching, Or Just Surfing?
By Cindy Skrzycki
Tuesday, December 17, 2002; Page E01

Long gone are the days when a job applicant actually showed up in a 
company's employment office to fill out an application. With the growth of 
the Internet, you're more likely to shoot off an electronic résumé to 
several companies, in hopes of finding the right job at one of them.

Research done in 2001 on Internet job hunting showed that more than 18 
million people annually post their résumés on Monster.com, an electronic 
job-search service, and 90 percent of the Fortune 500 use some kind of 
online recruiting

So, does flooding cyberspace with your credentials make you a bona fide job 
applicant, a job prospector, or an Internet junkie who clicks around job 
message boards and company Web sites?

The definition of who is considered a job applicant matters to the federal 
government and to employers, especially those who are federal contractors, 
because of discrimination laws. But the government hasn't changed its 
guidance on what makes someone an applicant since 1979, when it said: "The 
concept of an applicant is that of a person who has indicated an interest 
in being considered for hiring, promotion, or other employment opportunities."

The Equal Employment Advisory Council, a group of 350 companies, complains 
that employers still have to play by rules crafted 25 years ago telling 
them how to select candidates and keep records to avoid discrimination by 
gender or race in hiring.

"In today's electronic environment, where job seekers increasingly rely on 
the Internet and most large companies use computerized applicant tracking 
and retrieval systems, this can mean that an employer actively must solicit 
race, gender, and ethnicity information from literally thousands of persons 
whose résumés are in its database, but who, in a great many cases, actually 
have no realistic prospect of, or even any interest in, being considered 
for any position the employer has to offer," said a report issued by the 
group in August 2001.

For the past two years, the Labor Department, the Equal Employment 
Opportunity Commission, the Justice Department and the Office of Personnel 
Management have been wrestling with how electronic résumés, electronic 
recruitment and the Internet have changed the definition of a serious job 
seeker. So contentious is the issue that they are going to miss their Dec. 
31 deadline.

Victoria Lipnic, assistant secretary for Labor's Employment Standards 
Administration (ESA), said the agencies hope to "figure out how to manage 
all these things coming in over the Internet" and offer new guidance on 
what records employers have to keep. Said Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal 
counsel at the EEOC: "The Internet gives greater opportunity to employers 
and job seekers . . . but it also raises complex legal and factual 
questions." Both the EEOC and Labor keep an eye on companies' hiring 
practices and handle complaints.

Employers are charged with keeping track of who is in their "applicant 
pool" to make sure they don't use selection procedures, such as tests or 
other screening devices, that might promote white male candidates at the 
expense of women and minorities. They have to keep the requisite 
demographic information for a year, or two years if they are federal 
contractors.

Companies found the 1979 definition of applicant ambiguous then and almost 
unworkable now. They said they feel uneasy about soliciting race and gender 
information from people they don't consider applicants, especially since 
those people might construe the query as one that prevents them from 
getting the job.

"What brought the problem on was the federal government said anyone was an 
applicant and their gender and ethnicity had to be solicited," said Jeffrey 
A. Norris, president of the employers group.

Norris is referring, in part, to a 1995 interpretation by the ESA on the 
Internet's effect on the definition. "We believe that it is reasonable to 
conclude that individuals who place their résumés on electronic bulletin 
boards are indicating 'an interest in being considered for hiring,' and 
are, therefore, to be included in the contractor's applicant flow data," 
the agency said.

Shirley J. Wilcher, the agency's former deputy assistant secretary for 
federal contract compliance, authored that interpretation and stands by it. 
"Even in the Internet age, we want to protect people from old-fashioned 
discrimination. They protest too much." She said software programs are 
capable of gathering race and gender information.

Employers disagree and hope the definition will be narrowed. "If you apply 
for a posting, you are an applicant if you meet the qualifications, express 
an interest and you're considered," said Norris.

This much-narrowed definition worries advocacy groups that believe employer 
complaints may be a smokescreen to eliminate record keeping that helps keep 
discrimination practices at bay.

"The business community has a credible issue, but they are using the 
Internet to go overboard to dump the basic EEOC requirements that they 
have," said Nancy Kreiter, research director for Women Employed, a Chicago 
group that promotes economic equity for women. Particularly troubling to 
Kreiter and others is that employers only want to consider people who are 
"qualified" as applicants, a restriction they say may result in eliminating 
whole pools of people.

Norris said there will still be records to check if there are suspicions of 
discrimination. "If enforcement agencies want to look at them, they are out 
there," he said.
**********************************
New York Times
December 17, 2002
New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online
By AMY HARMON


A group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to the 
leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the progress of 
science by restricting online access to their articles so they can reap 
higher profits.

Supported by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, 
the scientists say that this week they will announce the creation of two 
peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine, with the goal of 
cornering the best scientific papers and immediately depositing them in the 
public domain.

By providing a highly visible alternative to what they view as an outmoded 
system of distributing information, the founders hope science itself will 
be transformed. The two journals are the first of what they envision as a 
vast electronic library in which no one has to pay dues or seek permission 
to read, copy or use the collective product of the world's academic research.

"The written record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold E. 
Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine who is serving as the chairman of the 
new nonprofit publisher. "Our ability to build on the old to discover the 
new is all based on the way we disseminate our results."

By contrast, established journals like Science and Nature charge steep 
annual subscription fees and bar access to their online editions to 
nonsubscribers, although Science recently began providing free electronic 
access to articles a year after publication.

The new publishing venture, Public Library of Science, is an outgrowth of 
several years of friction between scientists and the journals over who 
should control access to scientific literature in the electronic age. For 
most scientists, who typically assign their copyright to the journals for 
no compensation, the main goal is to distribute their work as widely as 
possible.

Academic publishers argue that if they made the articles more widely 
available they would lose the subscription revenue they need to ensure the 
quality of the editorial process. Far from holding back science, they say, 
the journals have played a crucial role in its advancement as a trusted 
repository of significant discovery.

"We have very high standards, and it is somewhat costly," said Dr. Donald 
Kennedy, the editor of Science. "We're dealing in a market whether we like 
it or not."

Science estimates that 800,000 people read the magazine electronically now, 
compared with 140,000 readers of the print version. Given the number of 
downloads at universities like Harvard and Stanford, which buy site 
licenses for about $5,000 a year, the magazine says people are reading 
articles for only a few cents each.

In many cases even such small per-article charges to access a digital 
database can make for substantial income. The Dutch-British conglomerate 
Reed Elsevier Group, the world's largest academic publisher, posted a 30 
percent profit last year on its science publishing activities. Science took 
in $34 million last year on advertising alone.

But supporters of the Public Library of Science say the point is not how 
much money the journals make, but their monopoly control over literature 
that should belong to the public.

"We would be perfectly happy for them to have huge profit margins providing 
that in exchange for all this money we're giving them we got to own the 
literature and the literature did not belong to them," said Dr. Michael B. 
Eisen, a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the 
University of California, and a founder of the Public Library of Science.

When scientists relied on print-and-paper journals to distribute their 
work, the Library's supporters argue, it made sense to charge for access, 
since each copy represented an additional expense. But they say that at a 
time when the Internet has reduced distribution costs to almost zero, a 
system that grants journals exclusive rights over distribution is no longer 
necessary.

By publishing on the Internet and forgoing any profits, the new venture 
says it is now possible to maintain a high-quality journal without charging 
subscription fees.

Instead, the new journals hope institutions that finance research will come 
to regard publishing as part of the cost. The journals will initially ask 
most authors to pay about $1,500 per article, for exposure to a wider 
potential audience and a much faster turnaround time.

The library's founders agree that its success will depend largely on 
whether leading scholars are willing to forsake the certain status of 
publishing in the established journals to support the principle of science 
as a public resource. In a profession where publishing in a top journal is 
often crucial to success and grant money, that may be a difficult task.

"I'd be happy to forswear publishing in any of those journals, but I'm not 
in a position where I need a job," said Dr. Marc Kirschner, chairman of the 
cell biology department at Harvard Medical School and a member of the 
electronic library's editorial board. "The difficulty will be getting over 
this hump from the point where people say, `Why should I risk it?' to where 
they don't see it as a risk."

In that regard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute  the nonprofit 
institute whose $11 billion endowment makes it a leading supporter of 
medical research  has emerged as a powerful ally. Dr. Thomas R. Cech, the 
institute's president, has publicly endorsed the library's goals and 
promised to cover its investigators' extra costs of publishing in the new 
journals.

As for other researchers, "people will want to be associated with this 
because it is such a good deed," said another member of the library's 
editorial board, Dr. Nicholas R. Cozzarelli, editor of The Proceedings of 
the National Academy of Sciences.

Unfettered access to the literature, library supporters say, would 
eliminate unnecessary duplication and allow doctors in poor countries, 
scientists at budget-conscious institutions, high school students, cancer 
patients and anyone else who could not afford subscriptions to benefit from 
existing research and add to it.

Moreover, they say, the taxpayers, who spend nearly $40 billion a year on 
biomedical research, should not have to pay again  or wait some unspecified 
period  to be able to search for and see the results themselves.

But Derk Haank, chairman of Elsevier Science, whose 1,500 journals include 
Cell, says such criticism is misguided. Elsevier, he says, is offering 
broader access to its electronic databases to the institutions that want it 
for far less than the cost of subscribing to dozens of paper journals. "It 
sounds very sympathetic to say this should be available to the public," he 
said. "But this kind of material is only used by experts."

Still, in addition to making data available to more people sooner, the 
electronic library's founders argue that the research itself becomes more 
valuable when it is not walled off by copyrights and Balkanized in separate 
electronic databases. They envision the sprouting of a kind of cyber neural 
network, where all of scientific knowledge can be searched, sorted and 
grafted with a fluidity that will speed discovery.

Under the library's editorial policy, any data can be integrated into new 
work as long as the original author is credited appropriately. The model is 
inspired by GenBank, the central repository of DNA sequences whose open 
access policy has driven much of the progress in genomics and biotechnology 
of the last decade.

The library's roots can be traced to Dr. Patrick O. Brown's frustration at 
the barriers to literature he needed for research at his genetics 
laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1998. "The 
information I wanted was information scientists had published with the goal 
of making it available to all their colleagues," he said. "And I couldn't 
get it readily because of the way the system was organized."

Dr. Varmus, then director of the National Institutes for Health, talked 
with Dr. Brown in January 1999 and decided to pay for a Web site that would 
provide free access to peer-reviewed scientific literature. PubMedCentral 
(www.pubmedcentral.gov) was opened the next year.

By a year later, however, only a handful of journals had decided to 
participate in the government archive. In an effort to whip up enthusiasm, 
Drs. Varmus, Brown and Eisen began circulating an open letter to the 
journals, asking them to place their articles in a free online database.

The petition quickly garnered 30,000 signers around the world, including 
several Nobel laureates, who promised to publish their work only in 
journals that complied with their demand. But almost none did.

That is when Dr. Varmus and his colleagues became convinced that they 
needed to raise money to start their own publication. After being rejected 
by several traditional science research foundations, the scientists found a 
sympathetic ear at the Silicon Valley foundation whose benefactor, Dr. 
Gordon E. Moore, was the co-founder of Intel Corporation.

"Scientists are a conservative bunch," said Dr. Edward Penhoet, the 
foundation's senior director for science. "In the short term they'll still 
be publishing in Cell and other places. But in the long term, I think this 
has the potential to dramatically facilitate science."
*************************************
Federal Computer Week
EPA steps toward e-rulemaking
BY Megan Lisagor
Dec. 16, 2002

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to unveil the first stage of a 
governmentwide system in January 2003 that will make it easier for the 
public to comment on proposed rules and regulations.

The EPA took charge of the Online Rulemaking Management project  one of 24 
cross-agency e-government initiatives the Bush administration 
highlighted  from the Transportation Department about two months ago.

"We have agencies already lining up who don't have systems who really want 
them," said Oscar Morales, the initiative's director.

The EPA will enhance its own e-rulemaking system, which uses a solution 
from Documentum Inc. Its scalability and flexibility are crucial to making 
the transition, officials said.

"They know they're going to go out to a lot of people, both in the agencies 
and the public, and they wanted something that could scale to that degree," 
said Blix Jones, an account executive at Documentum.

Nearly 100 agencies publish rules and regulations in the Federal Register, 
but only 12 or so have electronic dockets, according to Morales.

"We're going to create a system that will migrate the current [systems] and 
add on all the other [agencies]," he said.

E-rulemaking will be accessible from the federal Web portal FirstGov, 
initially as a simple application and tool.

The second module, or version of e-rulemaking, will store, index and 
maintain documents throughout their lifecycle. Comments will be accessible 
online. "Now you'll be able to do this from your home PC," as opposed to 
sifting through papers in an agency office, Morales said.

The EPA plans to make an acquisition next year for a contractor who will 
construct the final system, with tools that help regulatory staff do their 
jobs and standardize the rulemaking process.
*****************************
Government Computer News
Hawaii installs fingerprint systems
By Dipka Bhambhani

Hawaii's Human Services Department this week installed 10 digital 
fingerprint systems as part of an initiative to increase the speed and 
accuracy of background checks for child and foster care providers working 
in the state.

Sagem Morpho Inc. of Tacoma, Wash., installed its MorphoCheck 100 livescan 
systems in Human Services offices located on each Hawaiian island.

"Employee background checks are one of our highest priorities in ensuring 
the security and safety of our children in child care placements and foster 
children," Human Services director Susan Chandler said in a statement.

Previously, the state mailed fingerprint cards to the FBI for background 
checks; the process took six weeks.

The turnaround time now is 48 hours. After collecting the digital images, 
the office transmits the prints electronically to the bureau where they can 
be checked against the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint 
Identification System.

"Sagem Morpho's biometric technology dramatically reduces our background 
check processing time and gives us the peace of mind that we have the most 
accurate information on record," Chandler said.
******************************
Government Computer News
12/16/02
Federal Web sites edge commercial ones in survey
By Lloyd Batzler
Post Newsweek Tech Media

Customer satisfaction with federal government Internet sites is slightly 
ahead of rankings given to private-sector sites, according to a survey 
released today by the University of Michigan's business school.

For the first time in its eight-year history, the American Customer 
Satisfaction Index measured satisfaction levels with government Internet 
sites in its report.

The average score for government sites, 74, was ahead of the 73.1 score for 
private sites.

"Since these Web sites are all relatively new, one would expect that they 
will continue to improve in the future," according to a commentary by Claes 
Fornell, a professor and director of Michigan's National Quality Research 
Center. Fornell also is chairman of management consultant CFI Group, a 
member of the partnership that produces the index.

"Even at this stage it seems clear the Web offers a promising new way for 
government-citizen communications," Fornell wrote. "Specifically, costs of 
communication are lower, consistency of information is better and citizen 
access is facilitated."

In a broader look at satisfaction with overall government services, the 
index showed a decline of 1.5 percent this year.

Users gave the IRS electronic tax filing system for individual returns high 
marks. E-filers' satisfaction score was 73 compared with 53 for paper filers.

The ACSI report, designed to gauge a range of customer perceptions about 
service quality and value, randomly sampled 39 customer groups for their 
input this year.
********************************
Government Computer News
12/16/02
Gilmore Commission raps cybersecurity policy
By Wilson P. Dizard III

The Gilmore Commission has strongly criticized the administration's 
cybersecurity policy and called for a merger of cyber- and physical 
security policy work in the White House.

The commission's fourth report, released in full today, repeated the 
recommendation of its third report a year ago: to establish an independent 
commission on cybersecurity. "We have concluded that the physical and cyber 
elements of [critical infrastructure protection] are so intertwined that it 
makes no sense to address them separately," according to the fourth report.

"National coordination of cybersecurity policy has not improved," the 
report said. "The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board has 
not had a large effect on policy-making, apparently relying, instead, on 
the White House Office of Cyberspace Security" 
[gcn.com/21_31/tech-report/20263-1.html].

The Gilmore Commission said the board and other organizations that develop 
cyberspace policy do not include state, local and private sector 
representatives, as it recommended. The commission criticized the board's 
continuing reliance on public-private partnerships as a weak method of 
securing cyberspace. As a result, the board's Draft Strategy on Securing 
Cyberspace "poses what we regard as voluntary, tactical responses to an 
inherently strategic problem of national importance." The board called the 
draft strategy a "small step indeed."

Former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore leads the commission, which is known as 
the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism 
Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction. Congress established the commission 
in 1998. This year, in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2002, 
Congress extended the commission's work until 2004. So far, according to 
the commission, 66 of the 79 substantive recommendations it has made have 
been partly or wholly adopted.

The commission added that the government's reliance on persuasion to 
promote cybersecurity has perpetuated "significant market disincentives to 
the adoption of cybersecurity measures ? that directly contribute to 
national needs," such as national security, health and safety.

The commission said the "federal government does not hold its leaders and 
managers responsible for cybersecurity. There are essentially little or no 
consequences for federal government agencies or officials who do not take 
prudent steps to improve cybersecurity."

The commission cited research conducted for it by the Rand Institute, an 
educational group based in Irvine, Calif., that predicted that unless 
private-sector systems and security standards were upgraded, cybersecurity 
would deteriorate. "Key reforms cannot be accomplished without fundamental 
changes in the IT market that significantly increase the understanding of 
the importance of cybersecurity."

Such changes include:


mandating levels of security by law or regulation
modifying insurance practices to reward systems security
spurring the market for secure systems via federal procurement policy
changing liability law so companies would have to bear more of the burden 
of insecure systems.

In addition to recommending that the White House merge its physical and 
cybersecurity activities, the commission said the president should mandate 
a National Intelligence Estimate on the threats to the nation's critical 
infrastructure.

The commission also called for the Homeland Security Department to adopt 
modeling and analytic capabilities and metrics used by the National 
Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center at the Energy Department's 
Sandia National Laboratory to enhance critical infrastructure security.
*******************************
Government Executive
December 12, 2002
Bush science advisers contemplate technology transfer
By Teri Rucker, National Journal's Technology Daily

Determining just how effective the federal government is in translating its 
new discoveries into private-sector successes can be difficult because it 
is so hard to measure, but the President's Council of Advisors on Science 
and Technology (PCAST) wants to sort it out so it can craft a list of "best 
practices" that federal labs and universities can follow.


"It is hard to come to a consensus on how technology transfer is doing," 
Mark Wang, associate director of RAND's Science and Technology Policy 
Institute, said on Thursday at a RAND forum. It is difficult if not 
impossible to put a dollar value on some research because it can be decades 
before the benefits are realized in the marketplace, he said.


That means policymakers should develop more meaningful metrics, with the 
understanding that "one size does not fit all," said Bruce Mehlman, 
assistant secretary for technology policy at the Commerce Department. 
"We've got to measure what we value and not value what we measure," Mehlman 
said, cautioning that policymakers should be careful not to skew the 
research toward short-term efforts because they are easier to quantify.


Mehlman also outlined recommendations that he said PCAST should consider 
during its review of technology transfer policies. Research labs should 
focus on making the transfer of government research to the private sector a 
priority and a part of the culture, he said.

Policymakers also need to understand the effect the Bayh-Dole Act, which 
outlines the process for technology transfer, has on getting new 
technologies from federal labs into the hands of consumers.

Some comments filed with PCAST were defensive of the law, Mehlman said. He 
urged the research community to be honest in its assessment of the statute. 
The administration wants "to strengthen technology transfer, not bury it," 
he said.

Lita Nelson, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 
technology-transfer office, urged policymakers to leave the Bayh-Dole Act 
alone. "Don't twiddle with it like the tax code," she said, because it has 
taken universities about a dozen years to tweak the process and get it right.

Nelson noted that the trend in technology transfer has been small, startup 
companies jumping on the latest technologies, developing the applications 
and then forging partnerships with large companies. "Large companies have 
been reluctant to take great risk" because the volatile stock market 
demands a quick return on investment," Nelson said.


She also urged policymakers to leave patent law alone, noting that it has 
withstood "all sorts of new technology without changing definitions."


However, lawmakers are going to have to determine how to handle technology 
transfer from the new Homeland Security Department, said David Beier, 
partner at the Hogan and Hartson law firm. Beier said the White House 
Office of Science and Technology Policy should coordinate the effort to 
find ways to transition research to combat bioterrorism and other issues 
into products that will benefit the public.
******************************************
USA Today
Fastest computer spawns high-tech race between Japan, USA
YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP)  It's a machine so fast it performs more computations 
per second than there are stars in our galaxy. It's so large it's housed in 
a building the size of an aircraft hangar.

Running 35.6 trillion calculations per second, the Earth Simulator is the 
fastest supercomputer in the world, almost five times faster than the next 
best one and as fast as the top 5 U.S. supercomputers combined.

For the Japanese scientists using the $350 million computer, it means 
climate research, with its complex simulations and diverse mix of 
variables, is more accurate than ever before.

For the competition, however, it is a shrill wake-up call. Even the U.S. 
government admits its March activation signaled an end to American 
dominance of this high-profile field.

According to the Department of Energy, the Earth Simulator has put American 
scientists at a 10-100 fold disadvantage in weather studies. And there are 
much deeper implications.

"The U.S. has lost the lead in climate science research," it said in a June 
report. "Since computational science contributes to DOE's energy and 
national security missions, the implications will be widespread and 
pontentially grave."

For now, the Earth Simulator is being used to track global sea 
temperatures, rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters 
over the next few centuries.

Tucked away in a suburban area just south of Tokyo, the computer's complex 
has almost 1,900 miles of cable  enough to stretch from New York to Las 
Vegas  roped together under its floors to keep its network running.

Thirty-five million cubic feet of air roar through the building every 10 
seconds to keep the monster from overheating.

With its massive horsepower, the computer can model weather at 100 times 
the resolution of previous simulations, said Tetsuya Sato, director-general 
of the Earth Simulator Center.

Built by the Tokyo-based NEC, the computer can already predict the path of 
a typhoon or a volcanic eruption with remarkable precision. Earthquakes are 
still tough to pinpoint and forecast, but likely epicenters are being 
identified and their damage mapped out to determine which dams, buildings 
and highways need reinforcing.

Plug in a 5% versus 15% cut in carbon dioxide emissions, scroll forward a 
few centuries and it can show which cities will be submerged as sea levels 
rise.

The Japanese government is betting the machine's hefty pricetag will more 
than pay off for the billions of dollars in damage it could help save in 
mitigating disasters on this quake and eruption-prone archipelago.

But other possibilities abound.

Researchers say a powerful computer like the Earth Simulator could also 
plot the course of a pandemic like AIDS, calculate the spread of a virus 
after a bioterrorist attack, speed the discovery of new drugs and save 
millions in research by simulating the interactions between a chemical and 
the human body.

"The government doesn't understand how valuable this is," Sato lamented.

The Earth Simulator's implications aren't being missed overseas, however.

"Every time there's an increase in factor of speed, you open up the 
possibility of a new science," explained Alan Edelman, professor of Applied 
Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science 
Laboratory.

Ironically, NEC used an old technology called vector processing to achieve 
the Earth Simulator's stunning performance. The technology had been largely 
abandoned by most U.S. manufacturers and supercomputer designers as 
outdated and too costly.

Spurred on by the challenge from Japan, the United States government is now 
pouring money into the technology race.

IBM, flush with a $290 million government contract to build two new 
supercomputers, says it will regain the No. 1 title in 2004 with a 
100-teraflop machine that would be nearly three times faster than Earth 
Simulator.

Seattle-based Cray has won a $90 million contract to build a supercomputer 
for nuclear weapons simulations at Sandia National Laboratory, also by 
2004. And by 2010, it has taken on a government challenge to create a 
computer that will be measured in petaflops  a mindboggling 1,000 trillion 
calculations per second.
*************************************
New York Times
U.S. Says Chip Imports May Hurt Micron
By BLOOMBERG NEWS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 (Bloomberg News)  Imports from Hynix Semiconductor Inc. 
and other South Korean chip makers threaten to hurt Micron Technology Inc., 
the International Trade Commission said today in a ruling that could lead 
to import tariffs.

Micron, the world's second-largest maker of computer memory chips and the 
last one based in the United States, complained that its South Korean 
rivals were illegally subsidized by the government.

A final ruling is not expected until the middle of next year.

Micron filed its complaint as some chip prices declined earlier this year, 
falling by as much as a third in mid-June.

Infineon Technologies, Europe's second-largest chip maker, asked the 
European Union in July to investigate whether Hynix and Samsung Electronics 
of Korea were being illegally subsidized.

The Micron complaint also followed the latest bailout of Hynix, the world's 
third-largest maker of computer memory chips, by the Korea Exchange Bank 
and other creditors. The government owns 43 percent of the bank.

Micron's case now goes to the Commerce Department, which will investigate 
whether billions of dollars in government aid to Hynix and Samsung was 
illegal and determine the size of any duties.

A ruling in Micron's favor would send the case back to the commission for a 
final determination, not likely before May or June.

Micron filed its complaint last month.
****************************
MSNBC
U.S. court says no to Web libel suit
Ruling follows controversial move by Australian high court
 By Declan McCullagh

Dec. 16  Less than a week after Australia's high court issued a ruling 
suggesting that online publishers are fair game for libel suits anywhere 
their content appears, a U.S. federal court has veered in the opposite 
direction.
       THE FOURTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS said two Connecticut newspapers 
could not be sued for libel in a Virginia court based on allegedly 
defamatory articles posted on their Web sites.
       In the decision, released last Friday, a three-judge panel 
unanimously tossed out a Virginia prison warden's lawsuit against the 
Hartford Courant and the New Haven Advocate.
       That ruling breaks with last week's decision in Australia, which 
sent shock waves through the world of online publishing by saying that the 
U.S.-based Dow Jones news organization would have to defend a defamation 
lawsuit brought by a Melbourne, Australia, businessman in an Australian 
court. Barron's magazine, a Dow Jones publication, had published the 
allegedly libelous material on servers in New Jersey, on its 
subscribers-only Web site.
       In the Fourth Circuit case, the court said the key question was 
whether the newspapers intended "to direct their Web site content, which 
included certain articles discussing conditions in a Virginia prison, to a 
Virginia audience," and concluded the answer was definitely no. Instead of 
targeting Virginians, the court ruled, the papers'
       Web sites were designed to be useful to residents of Connecticut, 
with information about weather, state politics, and local classified ads.
       "The facts in this case establish that the newspapers' Web sites, 
as well as the articles in question, were aimed at a Connecticut audience. 
The newspapers did not post materials on the Internet with the manifest 
intent of targeting Virginia readers," the court said.
       The contrast demonstrates how unsettled some areas of technology 
law remain. The two courts appear to have reached different conclusions 
because the U.S. ruling focused on whether the pair of newspapers had a 
commercial presence in Virginia, while the Australian high court worried 
more about where the harm from allegedly libelous material would be felt.
      The Connecticut papers published a series of articles and columns on 
the state's controversial practice of transferring inmates in overcrowded 
prisons to a "supermax" prison in Big Stone Gap, Va. Warden Stanley Young 
was not mentioned in any of the reports, but one column criticized his 
prison in no uncertain terms, and Young claimed the coverage was 
defamatory, suing the newspapers, their editors and the reporters in Virginia.
       Last Friday's decision only addressed the issue of jurisdiction, 
not the merits of whether Young's claims of being defamed were valid or not.
***********************


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


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Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber:

Welcome to the December 18, 2002 edition of ACM TechNews,
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACM TechNews
Volume 4, Number 436
Date: December 18, 2002

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Top Stories for Wednesday, December 18, 2002:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"U.S. Clears Russian Tech Firm In E-Book Copyright Case"
"Gilmore Commission Critical of Bush Cybersecurity Plan"
"DMCA Critics Say Reform Still Needed"
"Limits Sought on Net Access Without Wire"
"Netherlands Court Ruling Offers Haven to File-Sharing Services"
"Portland Lacks an E-Waste Disposal System"
"Regulating Cyberspace"
"Fastest Computer Spawns High-Tech Race"
"Philanthropy Meets Technology in Global Stanford Program"
"Does Moore's Law Still Hold True?"
"Software, Security, and Ethnicity"
"Sandia 'Be There Now' Hardware Enhances Long-Distance Collaborations"
"The Semantic Web Gets Real"
"Cool Runnings"
"ACM Extends Deadline for Awards Nominees"
"Links Adding Up for Grid Computing"
"CCR Using Larger-Than-Life Technology"
"The High Cost of Handhelds"
"Getting Real"

******************* News Stories ***********************

"U.S. Clears Russian Tech Firm In E-Book Copyright Case"
The U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., ruled in favor of
Russian software company ElcomSoft on Tuesday, thus dismissing a
federal lawsuit alleging that the firm violated the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by distributing a program that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item1

"Gilmore Commission Critical of Bush Cybersecurity Plan"
In its fourth annual report, the Advisory Panel to Assess
Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of
Mass Destruction finds fault with President Bush's Draft National
Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.  The commission says the plan is ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item2

"DMCA Critics Say Reform Still Needed"
Although a jury acquitted Russian software maker ElcomSoft of
willfully violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
by distributing a program that bypassed e-book copy protections,
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) says this is no reason to get ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item3

"Limits Sought on Net Access Without Wire"
The U.S. Department of Defense is looking to curb the growth of
low-power radio technology for commercial use that could
interfere with military radar.  Industry representatives have
already met with Pentagon officials to discuss the issue, after ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item4

"Netherlands Court Ruling Offers Haven to File-Sharing Services"
An Amsterdam appeals court ruling last March that local file-trading
service Kazaa is not legally responsible for copyright violations
committed by its users may encourage other file-trading service
providers to set up operations in the Netherlands.  Dutch lawyer ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item5

"Portland Lacks an E-Waste Disposal System"
The mounting problem of electronic waste (e-waste) is being
addressed in the United States and elsewhere, but with different
approaches.  The EPA estimates that up to 500 million personal
computers will be discarded between 2000 and 2007 in the United ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item6

"Regulating Cyberspace"
The so-called lawlessness of the Internet has been increasingly
called into question, most recently with an Australian court's
ruling that U.S.-based Dow Jones had committed libel against an
Australian businessman by publishing an article accessible via a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item7

"Fastest Computer Spawns High-Tech Race"
NEC's $350 million Earth Simulator in Japan has raised the bar
for other supercomputing efforts and has taken away the U.S.'s
lead in the supercomputing race; it is now the world's
fastest supercomputer, capable of running 35.6 trillion ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item8

"Philanthropy Meets Technology in Global Stanford Program"
The goal of the Reuters Foundation's Digital Vision Fellowship
Program at Stanford University is to bring information technology
to far-flung regions of developing countries by creating usable
initiatives.  Fellows covering a wide range of disciplines ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item9

"Does Moore's Law Still Hold True?"
A recent academic paper from Ilkka Tuomi, a visiting scholar at
the European Commission's Joint Research Center, argues that
there is a disparity between the doctrine of Moore's Law, which
states that computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months, and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item10

"Software, Security, and Ethnicity"
As the U.S. and its allies and foes worldwide ramp up
their ability to make war on the digital front, U.S.
organizations need to improve their software security without
casting suspicion on IT workers of foreign descent.  The threat ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item11

"Sandia 'Be There Now' Hardware Enhances Long-Distance Collaborations"
Sandia National Laboratories has devised interactive
remote-visualization hardware that will allow people to view and
manipulate computer-generated images from remote locations with
no significant lag time.  "The niche for this product is when the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item12

"The Semantic Web Gets Real"
The development and future of the Semantic Web is
debatable--there are those who argue it is a waste of time that
will never get past the drawing board stage, while others claim
it could facilitate seamless communication between computers and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item13

"Cool Runnings"
Sandia National Laboratories researchers have created a device
that cools down computer chips without heat sinks and fans, using
7-micron-thick channels that convey liquid methanol through
capillary action.  These "smart heat pipes" are contained in a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item14

"ACM Extends Deadline for Awards Nominees"
In an effort to expand the net of qualified contenders, ACM has
extended the deadline for nominations to four of its annual awards.
The deadline is now February 28 for nominees to the ACM-IEEE
CS Eckert Mauchly Award; the Grace Murray Hopper Award; and the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item15

"Links Adding Up for Grid Computing"
Grid computing is taking hold outside of the academic community,
according to Argonne National Laboratory researcher and
University of Chicago computer science professor Ian Foster.  He
and colleagues around the country continue to develop the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item16

"CCR Using Larger-Than-Life Technology"
The University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research
(CCR) has built a relatively low-cost facility enabling real-time
communication, remote collaboration, and high-definition displays
of large images.  The room has a 12-foot tiled-display wall and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item17

"The High Cost of Handhelds"
Gartner says that handheld computers can be more expensive than
most people think:  Whereas the average store-bought handheld can
cost as little as $300, Gartner estimates that hidden
costs--training, support, etc.--can drive up the total cost of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item18

"Getting Real"
Researchers are developing new 3D display technologies that do
away with headpieces, such as the classic blue and red cellophane
glasses used decades ago.  At New York University's Media
Research Laboratory, director Ken Perlin is developing an ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1218w.html#item19


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