Clips January 27, 2003

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

ARTICLES

Hastert Raises Doubts on Surveillance
Senate votes to block TIA system
Warning Sounded Over Security Spending Plan
Senate moves to block Pentagon's anti-terror data mining effort
FCC Chief's Plan Would Ease Line-Sharing Rules 
Internet Worm Hits Airline, Banks 
Health Data Monitored for Bioterror Warning
Editors and Lobbyists Wage High-Tech War Over Letters
Internet firms woo Hispanics
Senate limits Pentagon ?data-mining? 
Police arrest student for threats on Internet
Court program to hear cases that specialize in technology

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Newsday Online
Hastert Raises Doubts on Surveillance
By TED BRIDIS
Associated Press Writer
January 25, 2003, 5:34 PM EST

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Dennis Hastert raised doubts Friday about the fate of a Pentagon surveillance project after the Senate voted to ban the technology that mines government and commercial databases to identify potential terrorists. 

Hastert, R-Ill., is concerned about the privacy implications of the research program, called Total Information Awareness, Hastert spokesman Pete Jeffries said. He said it remains unclear who will fight for the project when House and Senate lawmakers meet next month to decide its future. 

"Its fate is questionable," Jeffries said. 

The Pentagon was building a system that could scour government and commercial information -- including purchase records -- to detect clues of terrorism. 

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Don Sewell, a Pentagon spokesman, said the program "will develop innovative information technology tools that will give the Department of Defense's intelligence, counterintelligence and counterterrorism communities important capabilities to prevent terrorist attacks." 

The project, launched after the Sept. 11 attacks, has been a public-relations disaster for the Bush administration, which has bristled at concerns by critics that it intends to snoop into the private lives of citizens. 

The project's future was in doubt after the Senate approved an amendment Thursday to require a detailed report by the Bush administration on the program's goals and how it would be used. 

The Senate amendment, sponsored by Ron Wyden, D-Ore., passed on a voice vote and was attached to a $380 billion omnibus spending bill. 

In a statement, Wyden echoed concerns by privacy advocates that the Pentagon's research program was "the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history." 

Under the legislation, the government would have to stop research and development on the program unless the Defense Department submits to Congress a detailed report within 60 days of enactment of the bill. The amendment also restricts use of the technology inside the United States without specific approval by Congress. 

President Bush could order the research to go forward if he determines it is necessary for national security. The amendment's limits on the program would not affect its use on foreigners. 

Wyden said the amendment guarantees "there will be checks on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans." 

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who introduced a separate bill to place a moratorium on similar "data-mining" research, said these surveillance systems were "a dangerous step that threatens one of the values we are fighting for -- freedom." 

Privacy groups praised the surprise passage of the amendment. 

"It reflects the serious concerns in Congress about being kept in the dark about an extremely invasive program," said David Sobel, a lawyer for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. 

The amendment must be resolved with the House version of the spending bill, which did not impose any restrictions on the research program. Lawmakers said that a conference committee, probably composed of members of appropriations panels, will meet in early to mid-February.
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Federal Computer Week
Senate votes to block TIA system
BY Dan Caterinicchia 
Jan. 24, 2003

The Senate approved an amendment Jan. 23 blocking use of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Total Information Awareness (TIA) system unless Congress specifically authorizes it after the Bush administration submits a report about the program's effect on privacy.

Using a voice vote, senators approved the amendment, which was introduced Jan. 15 by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and added it to the omnibus continuing appropriations bill for fiscal 2003, which is under consideration in the Senate.

In theory, TIA would enable national security analysts to detect, classify, track, understand and pre-empt terrorist attacks against the United States by using surveillance and spotting patterns in public and private transactions.

"As originally proposed, the [TIA] program is the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history," Wyden said in a statement. "The Senate has now said that this program will not be allowed to grow without tough congressional oversight and accountability, and that there will be checks on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."

The system, parts of which are already operational, incorporates transactional data systems -- including private credit card and travel records -- biometric authentication technologies, intelligence data and automated virtual data repositories. The goal is to create an "end-to-end, closed-loop system" that will help military and intelligence analysts make decisions related to national security, said Robert Popp, deputy director of DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO), which is heading up the effort.

John Poindexter, a retired Navy rear admiral who was a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, is leading the TIA project and heads DARPA's IAO. 

Numerous lawmakers and many privacy and government watchdog groups have expressed reservations about Poindexter's involvement in the program. But no one may have taken a tougher stance against Poindexter than New York Times columnist William Safire, who in a scathing Nov. 14, 2002, editorial, wrote: "He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic 'stovepiping.'" 

Wyden explained that his amendment does not "kill the program."

Rather, he said, "the amendment shifts the burden to the executive branch to make the case for the program. The amendment would restrict funding for the program unless the secretary of Defense, the attorney general and the director of central intelligence send to Congress within 60 days a report answering a series of questions about the TIA program, or the president certifies to Congress in writing that that cessation of TIA's research and development work would endanger U.S. national security." 
The Wyden amendment does contain a presidential waiver provision allowing spending to move forward if -- and only if -- the president certifies that submitting the report is not possible, or that stopping research and development for TIA would endanger national security. 

Even if the president submits such a waiver, Congress still must give final approval for any deployment of any technology TIA develops.

Following final Senate passage of the omnibus spending bill, the House and Senate will enter a conference to agree on the final wording of the spending legislation. That agreement, once approved by both chambers, will move to the president's desk for his signature.

Despite the Senate vote, a DARPA spokeswoman said the agency still believs in the TIA program.

"We still believe that the research and development planned under the Total Information Awareness program is important to our nation," she said. "TIA will develop innovative information technology tools that will give the Defense Department's intelligence, counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism communities important capabilities to prevent terrorist attacks against the U.S."
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Los Angeles Times
Warning Sounded Over Security Spending Plan
Even if Bush seeks a $3-billion increase for 2004, it won't be nearly enough, critics charge.
By Peter G. Gosselin
Times Staff Writer

January 27 2003

WASHINGTON -- There are growing signs that, contrary to pronouncements of top administration officials, President Bush's budget for the next fiscal year will include comparatively little new money for homeland security and nowhere near what many experts say is needed to minimize chances of another terrorist attack.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said last week that the president will seek to boost homeland security spending by a larger percentage than any other category in the federal budget for the fiscal year that begins in October.

But aides acknowledged that this includes a substantial chunk of Defense Department spending,

a category that independent analysts assert does little to directly bolster the security of Americans at home and work.

Even at face value, the officials' comments suggest that the White House is preparing to ask for an extra $2 billion to $3 billion for homeland security. That's less than one-third of what a recent Brookings Institution study said is needed, and barely one-tenth of what a key official with a bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations task force thinks should be spent.

And the estimate of $2 billion to $3 billion may well be too high. Preliminary figures the White House shared with Capitol Hill suggest that the increase Bush will propose in tax-funded, nondefense homeland security spending  a key measure of the extra commitment Washington is ready to make  will be closer to $1 billion.

"The bottom line is that it appears to us we're going to be under-funded is several key areas," said former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who co-chaired the council's task force that warned in October that the nation is woefully unprepared for another terrorist attack.

"It's not even sufficient to provide for the first-responder program in the states. It's not sufficient to provide for border security," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former presidential contender.

For the current fiscal year, which began in October, the president sought $37.7 billion for homeland security, of which $7.8 billion was for the Defense Department for such measures as better security at U.S. military bases. After a drawn-out congressional debate, he appears on track to get that amount.

Daniels said Thursday that the administration's homeland security request for fiscal year 2004 will be "approaching $40 billion," or about $2 billion more than this year. A Ridge aide said the administration will seek an 8% increase, or about $3 billion.

The administration's reluctance to substantially add to homeland security spending appears to reflect two convictions: that such spending could easily become a bottomless pit; and that the most important aspect of protecting the homeland is attacking terrorists abroad, which is paid for through the Pentagon budget.

Even so, spending on homeland defense is dwarfed by most other budget items. And at less than $40 billion in the current fiscal year, it is less than half the first-year cost of Bush's proposed package of tax cuts.

Administration officials hotly dispute suggestions that Bush will be stinting in his homeland security request, alternately arguing that the category will be among the most generously funded in next year's budget and that some of the money already being expended has been wasted.

Daniels, for example, said last week that "we have spent billions of dollars protecting against fairly low-level threats and not nearly enough protecting against some of those that are more serious.

"There is no amount of money that could protect every part of America against every conceivable threat."

But independent analysts say that the nation is nowhere near ready to protect itself from even some of the crudest forms of terrorism at a time when the risks of attack are rising with the approach of war with Iraq.

"Are we better prepared than we were on Sept. 11? Yes," said Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander who heads the Council on Foreign Relations homeland security studies. "But the threat has grown at a greater pace than the protection we've been able to achieve." Flynn said the administration should double federal spending on homeland security next year.

Home-front security and the administration's pursuit of it are all but certain to play a key role in the coming presidential campaign. The contrast between the administration's homeland security spending and its proposed 10-year, $674-billion package of mostly tax cuts intended to spur the economy, is already proving a hot spot.

Bush will no doubt tout his efforts to create a Department of Homeland Security, which culminated Friday with Ridge's swearing-in as its first secretary. Democratic hopefuls such as Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina, and potential GOP challengers like McCain, already have begun to paint the White House effort as inadequate.

"Putting ineffective tax cuts ahead of an effective homeland security reflects a warped sense of priorities," said Peter R. Orszag, an economist and co-author of the Brookings study of security needs.

Administration officials dismissed such comments as political carping and asserted they are doing everything possible to ensure the public is safe. They were particularly adamant that the degree of White House commitment be judged by its spending total for homeland security, including defense.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said, "Any other figure does not accurately reflect what we are doing to protect the public."

But even a cursory look at key elements of the administration's homeland security effort illustrates how slowly Washington is coming to grips with the new threat to Americans. While the government has succeeded in pumping billions of dollars  what Rudman termed "a fortune"  into screening airline passengers since the 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it has been much less successful in other areas:

In his budget for the current fiscal year, Bush sought $5.9 billion to improve defenses against biological attack. But with the White House and Congress still not settled on a budget, little of the money has been spent. Officials at the National Institutes of Health, which is set to receive a substantial share, said that any delay beyond the end of January will force them to suspend new research grants.

Although it is not known how much Bush will propose for the next fiscal year, the estimates of the overall amount the administration is seeking for homeland security left some analysts shaking their heads.

"Bioterrorism is a whole new terrain of national security that's going to have the same magnitude of impact as the creation of nuclear weapons," said Tara O'Toole, an Energy Department assistant secretary in the Clinton administration who is now director of a Johns Hopkins University research center. "We should increase spending [on bioterrorism] to $10 billion next year." That alone would require a larger increase than the administration plans to seek for all of homeland security.

Last fall, Congress passed legislation to improve security at the nation's 360 ports, notably including those of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and Bush signed the measure into law. But so far, Washington has provided only about $200 million

of the nearly $1 billion that the Coast Guard estimates should be spent immediately for infrastructure. And it is unclear where the balance will come from in the current fiscal year.

"Significantly increased levels of federal spending on homeland security, especially for maritime security, is absolutely essential," said Kurt J. Nagle, president of the American Assn. of Port Authorities, the major ports' trade group.

The president sought $3.5 billion this year to help provide the nation's "first responders"  its firefighters, police officers and medical personnel  with new protective gear in case of chemical or biological attack and improved communications. But the Justice Department, which administers one of the key programs, froze new grants in early December after disputes over how to allocate the congressional appropriation.

Even Ridge, who has portrayed most administration efforts to boost public protection as successful, acknowledged the problem. In a news conference Friday following his swearing-in, the Homeland Security secretary said although Washington has been talking to governors and mayors about dispensing the money, "they still haven't seen one dime."

According to a variety of analysts, if the administration's 2004 budget is only a few billion dollars more than the current one, state and local officials are likely to be disappointed even when funds do begin to flow.

"There is no way a budget increase of that size reflects the woeful lack of readiness that this country finds itself in the post-9/11 world," said Flynn, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Government Executive
January 24, 2003
Senate moves to block Pentagon's anti-terror data mining effort
By Shane Harris
sharris@xxxxxxxxxxx

The Senate voted Thursday to block funding for the controversial Total Information Awareness project until the Bush administration issues a detailed report on its privacy implications.


The TIA project seeks to develop a system to search public and private databasesmany containing personal financial and legal informationas well as the Internet for clues that a terrorist attack is being plotted. It has drawn fire from privacy advocates across the political spectrum.
Under an amendment proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of the Senate's most vocal TIA opponents, Congress cannot obligate any funds for the project until the attorney general, the Defense secretary and the director of the CIA provide lawmakers with a detailed report on how a TIA system would be used and what effects it could have on people's privacy.


The project's engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are testing data-mining tools that can correlate such data as telephone calls, airline ticket purchases and rental car receipts, in the hopes of preventing terrorist attacks.


Wyden assailed the project as "the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history." He said his amendment, included by unanimous consent in the fiscal 2003 omnibus spending bill the Senate passed Thursday, is a check "on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."

DARPA officials object to that characterization of the TIA project. They say controls are being tested to ensure the system wouldn't breach privacy laws.


A House-Senate conference will probably consider Wyden's amendment next. If Congress passes the amendment, within 60 days the Defense and Justice departments and the CIA would have to submit an assessment of TIA's impact on civil rights, as well as a detailed spending plan. The report also would have to assess the likelihood that the TIA system, if built, could provide evidence useful enough to predict terrorists' plans and intentions.


A number of scientists have expressed doubts that the system could work as envisioned. On Thursday, the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society in Washington, wrote a letter to members of Congress urging a thorough assessment of "the technical feasibility and practical reality of the entire program."


One major problem with the proposed TIA plan is that it would search databases that contain errors, said Barbara Simons, co-chair of the association's public policy committee. Names may be misspelled and other information may have been entered incorrectly, raising the possibility that people could be wrongly identified.  Two statistical analyses of TIA, which presumed the system would be used to screen the transactions of a finite number of people at a high rate of accuracy, each reached the same conclusion: The system would incorrectly identify thousands of people as terrorist suspects.


Critics of the project hailed the Senate's action. "It was clear that something like this was going to happen," said Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the free market Cato Institute in Washington. Crews said that privacy laws prohibit the collection of information TIA seems to envision, and that Congress must address the legal impact of the project.


Even if the Wyden amendment becomes law, funding for TIA could continue if the president declares that submitting a report isn't possible, or that halting work would compromise national security. But Congress would still have to give final approval to any use of the project for domestic purposes.

The amendment doesn't prohibit the use of the TIA for legal military purposes or foreign intelligence operations.
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Washington Post
FCC Chief's Plan Would Ease Line-Sharing Rules 
By Jonathan Krim
Saturday, January 25, 2003; Page E01 

The nation's big regional telephone companies would be able to provide ultra-fast Internet and video services over new fiber-optic lines without having to lease those lines to competitors, under a draft plan circulated by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Sources familiar with the proposals by Michael K. Powell said that in "new-build" areas, where copper phone lines aren't in place and where the phone companies run fiber cables directly to homes or businesses, requirements to share those lines would be eliminated.

If approved by the five-member commission, the change would be a victory for the regional telephone companies. 

Fiber-optic cable can provide Internet access as much as 100 times as fast as current broadband service over copper telephone wires, and also would allow phone companies to provide television programming to compete with the digital offerings of cable companies.

Some new housing developments around the country, including in Virginia, have fiber service.

But Powell's proposals stop short of freeing the former Bell companies of many other competition requirements that they have fought hard to shed. 

In 1996, Congress forced the big phone companies to open their lines to competition for local service and broadband. Seven years and a technology recession later, the companies argue that the policy has failed, and that they have to be free of such regulations to have the incentive to invest in new networks.

Competitors, including long-distance phone companies, say competition is beginning to take hold and that the FCC -- which sets rules that implement laws passed by Congress -- should give the current regulations more time to work. 

The battle has been one of the most expensive fights in Washington over the past two years. With the FCC set to decide the issues in the next three weeks, word of Powell's draft ignited another round of intense lobbying yesterday.

Various trade organizations held or scheduled press briefings, met with members of Congress and sent new entreaties to the FCC.

Longtime FCC employees cautioned that Powell's draft is likely to go through several revisions. Unlike some of his predecessors, Powell does not have the unqualified support of his party's three-member majority on the commission. Sources said that Republican Kevin J. Martin is circulating his own plan and that negotiations are likely. 

Powell generally agrees with many arguments for deregulation, but, sources said, his plan would phase out many of the rules over time. It would free the regional companies from sharing requirements on their current broadband service -- digital subscriber lines -- only as they upgrade it by pushing fiber lines closer to homes, which would improve performance.

Details were less clear on Powell's proposals to adjust the rules governing local phone competition, which is complicated by the fact that public utility commissions play a large role in determining rules and rates in individual states.

Powell has said that wireless and voice-over-Internet technologies already provide a lot of competition, and he has questioned rules that force the regional phone companies to share their systems with competitors.

But many in Congress oppose any rulemaking that would strip the states of regulatory authority.
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Associated Press
Scientists Question Bush Panel Appointments
Fri Jan 24, 5:31 PM  

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A growing number of scientists say President Bush (news - web sites)'s administration is distorting the scientific advisory process by appointing conservative ideologues to panels that are supposed to be impartial. 

They fear the appointments are politically motivated and meant to delay decision-making affecting controversial areas such as the environment, abortion and workplace safety. 

Administration officials say they are merely looking for diverse views and accuse the critics themselves of playing politics. 

One potential appointee, marketing consultant and HIV (news - web sites) patient Jerry Thacker, withdrew his name on Thursday after wide media coverage of controversy surrounding his nomination. 

Thacker, asked to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (news - web sites), was attacked by AIDS and gay rights groups for his characterization of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a "gay plague" and homosexuality as a "deathstyle." 

Thacker, who caught the virus from his wife, is an outspoken Christian who has written about his plight. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) distanced Bush from Thacker, saying the president did not agree with Thacker's views. 

Some researchers complain the Thacker case is an extreme example of an ongoing issue with the Bush administration. 
"Science policy that affects public health should be above party politics, and seen to be so," the Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, said in an editorial. "Expert committees need to be filled, by definition, with experts." 

Some of the controversial appointees have been evangelical Christians, but the Lancet said religion was not the issue. 

"This is not to decry faith in medicine; the perfect role model is C. Everett Koop, U.S. surgeon-general (from) 1981 to 1989, a devout Christian, and who maintained credibility by remaining impartial, especially in sensitive areas such as women's health and AIDS," it said. 

CONSULTANTS FOR INDUSTRY 

One appointee cited by critics is Dr. William Banner, a professor of pediatrics and expert in toxicology at the University of Oklahoma who has also consulted for the lead industry in at least one lead injury lawsuit. 

Dr. Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and former assistant Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) administrator who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University's school of public health, said consultants to industry regularly serve on panels, but she and others felt Banner had extreme views. 

"Scientific advisory committees are a very important forum where people strip away their stakeholder consensuses," Goldman said. "If you attempt to pre-empt this process ... by selecting people who, ahead of time, have a very strong point of view ... then you are discrediting the process." 

Dana Loomis, a professor at the University of North Carolina who chairs an occupational safety panel, complained in a letter to Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy that one new nominee to the panel, Laura Purnett of the University of Massachusetts, was rejected because she had publicly supported a workplace ergonomics standard that Bush repealed last year. 

"Every administration makes political appointments. But the role of a scientific advisory committee is quite different," David Michaels, a former assistant energy secretary who teaches environmental health at George Washington University, told reporters this week. 

Michaels said he saw "a consistent pattern of putting people in who assure the administration will hear what it wants to hear." 

Another complaint surrounded Dr. David Hager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Kentucky, whose critics fear his open Christian beliefs will sway his decisions on birth control and abortion. 

RELIGIOUS VIEWS AND JUDGMENT 

"The concern is that someone like Dr. Hager, who is a respected OB/GYN ... is that he will allow his religious views to overcome his scientific judgment," Michaels said. 

"They are afraid of him because he a public Christian," retorted HHS spokesman Bill Pierce. "He has publicly stated his beliefs in Christ and stated he believes prayer helps healing -- a very common idea. All they can knock is his Christianity. I don't know where that makes him unqualified." 

The critics agree it is hard to show that such appointees will change the outcome of any panel's deliberations. "It is hard to draw the line and it is hard to find evidence," Michael admitted. 

"It isn't that we object to having a variety of views in science," said Martin Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, who has worked in both science and industry. "It is that if we are seeking advice, it should be from the best possible quality of scientists who aren't carrying any other baggage with them." 

Michaels said the goal is not to change the outcome of a committee's vote, but to tangle up the decision-making process. "What these committees will do now is essentially throw their hands up and say the science is uncertain," he said. 

"That sort of paralysis is dangerous." 
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Washington Post
Internet Worm Hits Airline, Banks 
By Brian Krebs
Sunday, January 26, 2003; 7:30 PM 

An Internet worm unleashed on Saturday impaired key systems in the U.S. government and private sector, delaying operations at one major airline and several media organizations, and knocking banks' cash machines offline.

At least 160,000 computers worldwide have been infected since the worm debuted early Saturday morning, said Peter Allor, operations director of the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

"That's really a conservative estimate," Allor said. "We'll know about the extent of this attack in a few days."

The effects of the worm -- known variously as "Sapphire," "Slammer" and "SQ-Hell" -- have diminished in many parts of the world since Saturday. Major Internet service providers were able to block traffic destined for servers running a vulnerable Microsoft Corp. database program called SQL Server 2000.

The FBI is investigating the attack, a spokesman for the bureau's National Infrastructure Protection Center said.

Bank of America Corp. said Saturday that most of its 13,000 automatic teller machines could not process customer transactions for part of the day because of the bug.

Other banks also struggled this weekend with the effects of the worm, said Suzanne Gorman, chairman of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which represents some of the nation's largest financial services companies.

"There were a lot of our members affected by this," said Gorman, who declined to give more details.

The worm caused flight delays and cancellations for Houston-based Continental Airlines after it overwhelmed the company's online ticketing systems and electronic kiosks that travelers use to check in, said company spokesman Jeff Awalt.

Continental brought the ticketing and kiosk stations back online by mid-afternoon Saturday, but the airline's Web site was down for most of Sunday, causing wait times on its reservations hotline to soar to more than 140 minutes.

The attack also interfered with computer networks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which had to delay the publication of its Sunday first edition, the newspaper said. News updates to the paper's Web site also were delayed by the worm. The Associated Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer also experienced publishing problems as a result of the worm.

E-mail and Web traffic move around the Internet using a standard that breaks the data up into tiny packets of information before sending them on to their destinations. The data flood produced by a worm or virus often crowds out some of these packets, resulting in returned -- or "bounced" -- e-mails, and slowed Internet traffic.

The average packet loss at the height of Saturday's attack was a debilitating 20 percent, according to a senior executive at Matrix NetSystems, a Web monitoring firm based in Austin, Texas.

"When routers are dropping one-fifth of their packets, you're going to see mail servers hammered, and in many cases (e-mail) attachments will be lost in the sending," said Tom Ohlsson, vice president of marketing and business development.

Major Web site delays occurred at more than 45 times the normal level at numerous government sites Saturday, including the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, the firm reported. Several Defense Department sites were particularly hard hit, including the Defense Logistics Agency, the DoD Teleprocessing Center and the Defense Information Systems Agency, which acts as the computer network operations center for military Web sites.

A spokeswoman for the Defense Department's Strategic Command in Omaha declined to discuss the affected Web sites, or provide details on what action the department is taking against the worm, but said there was "minimal impact on the DoD domain."

The worm, in its structure and method, resembled Code Red, a worm released on the Internet in the summer of 2001 that attacked the White House Web site.

The worm unleashed Saturday did not delete files or harm computers, but overwhelmed systems with huge numbers of requests for information.

The speed and efficiency with which the worm randomly scanned Internet addresses for other vulnerable systems caused network degradation over much of the Internet, said Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering at Symantec Security Response.

Many businesses that blocked access to Microsoft SQL servers likely will experience a few problems adjusting their firewalls to allow legitimate traffic from affiliates and off-site offices that need to draw information from their parent company's database servers, Allor said.

"It's probably not going to be business as usual, as companies work through patching their systems and figuring out exactly which parts of their business needs to have access to these servers," he said.

South Korea sustained the most damage from the worm, losing almost all of its Internet service. With 70 percent of its households connected to the Internet, South Korea is one of the world's most wired nations.

Businesses in South Korea are among the first to open for business in the new work week, and could face complications caused by lingering infections, experts said. Overall, however, network traffic associated with the worm has dropped off nearly 90 percent, according to Symantec.
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Associated Press
White House Security Adviser to Resign 
Fri Jan 24, 3:11 PM ET

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON - Richard A. Clarke, a blunt-spoken White House adviser who raised warnings about Islamic terrorism and biological weapons years before they became nightmare headlines, will resign from government soon, people familiar with his plans said. 

  

Clarke, the president's counterterrorism coordinator at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, was disinclined to accept a senior position in the new Homeland Security Department and planned to retire after three decades with the government, these people said. He has not yet solicited an outside job, they said. 


These people, working both inside and outside government, spoke on condition of anonymity but said Clarke personally described his plans to them. Clarke did not return telephone calls from The Associated Press over three days. 


Clarke, currently the nation's top cyber-security adviser, is best known for his success in identifying emerging issues and outlasting his critics. He has focused most recently on preventing disruptions to important computer networks from Internet attacks. But he has tempered warnings about a "digital Pearl Harbor" after some industry experts mocked them as overblown. 


With much of the White House evacuated for safety in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke worked in the situation room there with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) and Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) as stunned leaders planned what to do next. His supporters said Clarke played a central role in the unprecedented decision to quickly ground the nation's airliners. 


Clarke previously led the government's secretive Counterterrorism and Security Group, made up of senior officials from the FBI (news - web sites), CIA (news - web sites), Justice Department (news - web sites) and armed services, who met several times each week to discuss foreign threats. 


"It was really the engine room of the anti-terrorism effort," said Sandy Berger, Clinton's former national security adviser and Clarke's former boss. "He's not an easy guy. He's very demanding. More than once people would come to me and complain, but that's why I wanted Dick in that job: He was pushing the bureaucracy." 


Clarke also had the ear of President Clinton (news - web sites) about the risks from a biological attack, years before anthrax poisoned the U.S. mail. 


"Dick was the single most effective person I worked with in the federal government," said Jonathan M. Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state. "When he was given the authority, he would stay with something every day until it got done. He's efficient and tough-minded. I never saw anyone else as good." 


Clarke is known for his aggressive  sometimes abrasive  personality and for his willingness to bypass bureaucratic channels. Under Clinton, he was known to contact Special Forces and other military commanders in the field directly, irritating the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon (news - web sites). 


Clarke was "a bulldog of a bureaucrat," wrote former national security adviser Anthony Lake in a book two years ago. He said Clarke has "a bluntness toward those at his level that has not earned him universal affection." 


Some senior CIA officials under Clinton complained that Clarke pressed them to launch covert programs without adequate preparation or study, said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. 


"He gave the impression he was somewhat of a cowboy," Cannistraro said. "There was no love lost between Clarke and the CIA." 


Clarke managed largely to avoid Washington's finger-pointing over failures to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks, even though he was the top counterterrorism adviser and he was replaced by the White House in that role less than one month later. 


"Dick in both the Clinton and Bush administrations was the voice pushing this forward, calling out about the dangers," said William Wechsler, a former director for transnational threats on the National Security Council. 


"There's an easy reason why no one is pointing the finger at him." 


The security council's director for counterterrorism under Clinton, Daniel Benjamin, described Clarke as "a visionary in terms of pushing hard to recognize the dangers of al-Qaida; certainly the new administration should have attended to his thoughts a little more." 


Clarke already has submitted his resignation letter to the president, one person said. Clarke is among the country's longest-serving White House staffers, hired in 1992 from the State Department to deal with threats from terrorism and narcotics. 

A spokeswoman, Tiffany Olson, said Clarke, who reports to Rice and Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, hasn't told White House staff at the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board that he plans to leave.
*******************************
Associated Press
New Monitoring Law Concerns Librarians 
Mon Jan 27, 3:37 AM ET
By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer 

PHILADELPHIA - A federal law aimed at catching terrorists has raised the hackles of many of the nation's librarians, who say it goes too far by allowing law enforcement agencies to watch what some people are reading.


The USA Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, gave the FBI (news - web sites) new powers to investigate terrorism, including the ability to look at library records and computer hard drives to see what books patrons have checked out, what Web pages they've visited, and where they've sent e-mails. 


The Department of Justice (news - web sites) says the new powers are needed to identify terrorist cells. 


But some librarians, who were meeting in Philadelphia for an American Library Association convention, worry that the FBI has returned to routinely checking on the reading habits of intellectuals, civil rights leaders and other Americans. 


Those tactics, common in the 1950s and 1960s, were occasionally used to brand people as Communists. 


"Some of this stuff is pretty scary, and we are very concerned that people's privacy is being violated," American Library Association President Maurice J. Freedman said. 


Some 10,000 librarians from around the world were expected in Philadelphia for the association's midwinter meeting, which began Friday. The group will discuss the Patriot Act at a forum Sunday and is likely to draft a resolution condemning sections of the law that open library records to police inspection, Freedman said. 


Judith Krug, director of the group's Office of Intellectual Freedom, said routine government inquiries into library records could have a chilling effect on patrons. For example, she said, some might be afraid to take out books on Islam out of fear that they might wind up on an FBI watch list. 


Speaking to reporters in Philadelphia last week, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller sought to play down concerns that the bureau would abuse its powers. 


Mueller said he couldn't recall a case where agents had sought library records to see what books someone had been reading. Most recent FBI inquiries into library files, he said, involved tracking suspects who had used public-access computers to communicate with conspirators or send threatening e-mails. 

He said agents "would not be doing our duty" if they didn't follow leads into libraries, if that's where an investigation takes them. 


The government's new surveillance powers are also limited. The Patriot Act only gives agents the power to research the library habits of "agents of a foreign power." Proponents of the law say that should offer ordinary Americans protection from unwarranted surveillance, although critics said the term could apply to anyone. 


Agents also must obtain a search warrant from a judge, although the act lets them do so in a secret federal court without the library's knowledge. 


"What's next, installing cameras in libraries so we can see what books people are reading?" Freedman said. "Sure it sounds far fetched, and it smacks of Stalinist Russia, but look at what's going on now and you'll see many things that you never would have believed a few years ago." 


Similar outrage has been expressed overseas. On Thursday in Vienna, Austria, the media watchdog in Europe's leading security organization criticized the United States for snooping on the private lives of Americans. 


Freimut Duve of the Organization for Security and Cooperation (news - web sites) in Europe condemned the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for monitoring library records and bookstore receipts under the Patriot Act. 


"This goes much too far," he said. "It may invite other governments to do the same." 


The library convention in Philadelphia is scheduled to run through Monday. Participants are also expected to protest cuts in library funding, discuss how to incorporate Internet-based books into their collections and announce the winners of several awards.
*******************************
New York Times
January 27, 2003
Health Data Monitored for Bioterror Warning
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER

To secure early warning of a bioterror attack, the government is building a computerized network that will collect and analyze health data of people in eight major cities, administration officials say.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to lead the multimillion-dollar surveillance effort, which officials expect to become the cornerstone of a national network to spot disease outbreaks by tracking data like doctor reports, emergency room visits and sales of flu medicine. "Our goal is to have a model that any city could pick up and apply," a senior administration official said of the plan.

Officials would not disclose the program's cost or which cities will be involved. But experts say Washington is likely to be one of the eight.

Such surveillance is now possible because of an explosion in commercial medical databases that health authorities, with permission and under strict legal agreements, are starting to mine. In ambition and potential usefulness, the health network goes far beyond an environmental surveillance system, disclosed by the administration last week, that will sniff the air for dangerous germs.

The emerging health monitoring network, officials and experts say, will provide information that could save lives if terrorists strike with deadly germs like smallpox or anthrax. In detecting attacks, a head start of even a day or two can greatly lower death rates by letting doctors treat rapidly and prevent an isolated outbreak from becoming an epidemic. A senior official said President Bush was expected to refer to these new bioterrorism defenses in his State of the Union address.

The disease centers' initiative represents a sharp swing to civilian leadership in a field the military pioneered and once dominated. But even in civilian hands, the emerging network has raised concerns that such surveillance may violate individual medical privacy rights.

Officials said concerns were initially heightened because of the Pentagon's central role in the genesis of many systems, and especially because Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, architect of the much-criticized Pentagon computer surveillance effort known as Total Information Awareness, is in charge of the Defense Department agency that finances some of the government's disease monitoring research.

In November, as the Bush administration came under fire for Admiral Poindexter's project, White House officials ordered the military to drop plans to link four cities into a $420 million health monitoring network and shifted responsibility for such work to the new domestic security agency. The transfer was not motivated by privacy concerns, administration officials say, but by a judgment that the military was ill suited to exploit monitoring for public health.

"We all agreed that doing this surveillance in the civilian sector was not the military's job," Dr. Anna Johnson-Winegar, a Pentagon biodefense official, said in an interview.

Experts say the prospect of war with Iraq, and the chance that Baghdad might retaliate with germ weapons, are accelerating the effort to expand and integrate scores of rudimentary disease surveillance systems being developed by cities, states and the federal government. But public health experts argue that even if the United States never suffers another bioterror attack like the anthrax strikes of late 2001, the emerging network can still help doctors better track, treat and prevent natural disease outbreaks.

"We want as much protection as we can afford," said Dr. Daniel M. Sosin, director of public health surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Dr. Sosin is helping to expand the nation's health surveillance to incorporate the new systems.

Supporters of the emerging surveillance network insist it raises few privacy issues, saying that the data are laundered of names and identifiers. People are not tracked as individuals, they say, but their symptoms are, and often their age, sex and ZIP code as well. But computer surveillance itself has drawn criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, members of Congress and others.

The system is needed, proponents say, because few cheap, reliable sensors exist for detecting deadly germs in such likely target areas as subways and shopping malls. Sensors are also prone to false positives, or incorrect germ identifications.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the health commissioner of New York City, which has one of the nation's most highly developed rapid surveillance systems, said the emerging network could help authorities gauge the dimensions of germ attacks and reassure the public.

He pointed to a case in November in which a New Mexico man visiting New York was found to have bubonic plague, a deadly contagious disease. "We were concerned this was bioterrorism," Dr. Frieden said. "But we didn't see any signals. We didn't see any alarms. That added to our confidence to rule out bioterrorism."

Experts say most of the new systems, military and civilian, are still experimental. A critical challenge is finding needles in the haystacks of data about common ailments like respiratory infections, which can rise and fall with great suddenness in winter.

Dr. Marcelle Layton, New York City's assistant health commissioner for communicable diseases, said another challenge was ensuring that there are enough public health officials to respond to alarms that the new environmental and medical surveillance systems might sound.

"The best system will be useless if it's only a fire alarm with no firefighters to put out the flames," Dr. Layton said.

Nonetheless, expectations run high.

"We think this will be important," said Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, a physician at the Sandia National Laboratories who helped develop a widely used surveillance method, the Rapid Syndrome Validation Project, which is now used in California, New Mexico, Texas, Singapore and Australia. "We need to get disease reporting from the 19th to the 21st century." 

For decades, disease surveillance has valued accuracy over speed. Nurses, doctors and public health officers gather raw data, often using paper forms sent by mail. In the background, federal, state and private laboratories use advanced technologies to determine the causes of disease and confirm diagnoses. But the process tends to take days or even weeks.

Moreover, the system is narrow, revealing little about the nation's overall health. While the federal disease control agency has more than 100 surveillance systems, most are designed to track a single organism or condition, like heart disease or flu virus. In addition, most are independent of one another.

The system has serious gaps. While laboratories usually comply with federal rules to report certain illnesses to health authorities, physicians often do not.

The military and the national weapons laboratories, increasingly worried about germ attacks, tried a new approach in the late 1990's. To learn of impending trouble quickly, they decided to scrutinize populations for clues of diseases before they were officially diagnosed. Experts zeroed in on how clusters of such symptoms as fever, cough, headache, vomiting, rash and diarrhea could suggest  but not prove  the presence of particular diseases, some of them lethal. The method was called syndromic surveillance.

An early military system was the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics, or Essence. It drew medical data from some 400,000 members of the military and their dependents who lived in the Washington area  a major potential terrorist target, but hard for civilians to scan medically because of "the numerous city, county and state jurisdictions," according to a Defense Department statement.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency put $12 million into an experimental program, Essence 2, which tracked millions of civilians in the Washington area for signs of bioterrorism. The program now reports to Admiral Poindexter, whose Total Information Awareness program was dealt a setback by the Senate late last week, its future now in doubt. Joe Lombardo, a civilian who runs Essence 2, which is based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said that although Admiral Poindexter's office finances the system, Essence 2 shares no data with his computer surveillance project. Essence 2, he said, gathers electronic records from drugstore chains, hospitals and physician groups. Mr. Lombardo said about a dozen people were developing the technology and collecting and analyzing the data.

"We're not Big Brother," he said. "Our objective is to support public health. The information we receive has been sanitized by the provider to ensure that it is impossible to identify individuals."

Privacy, though a goal, is apparently not yet guaranteed. A Pentagon planning document on the surveillance effort for fiscal 2002 and 2003 said the Defense Department was working to develop "enhanced automated privacy protection methods" that will "assure the anonymity of records accessed by the data monitoring software."

Experts say that privacy can, in theory, be violated when connections are made between disparate databases  for instance, between those of physician payment and disease diagnosis, or health and law enforcement. They also say the potential for personal identification increases as the surveillance becomes a two-way street in which not only are problems detected but physicians are notified about potential problems involving individual patients.

This fall, the military sought to incorporate the Essence 2 program into an expanded program, the Biodefense Initiative. Costing a projected $420 million, it was to deploy environmental sensors and wire four major cities, including Washington, into a disease-surveillance network.

But after Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program came under criticism by privacy advocates, White House officials moved the Biodefense Initiative out of military hands. That step, said Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, "just seemed to make sense." Dr. Winkenwerder added that the military has often pioneered technologies, like the Internet, that move into the civilian sector.

Privately, some military officials grumble that transferring the Pentagon's effort to civilians will be wasteful. "It could be reinventing the wheel," a senior officer said.

Administration officials say the new eight-city disease control network will deal with the privacy issue directly. "We have to satisfy the legal constraints, and also people's concerns," a senior official said.

Other civilian surveillance systems are emerging quickly. In Boston, the Harvard Medical School faculty and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health are working closely with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a health maintenance organization. For more than a year, the team has studied data from 175,000 people in eastern Massachusetts, and it will soon cover as many as 20 million people coast to coast.

In October, the disease control centers awarded the Harvard team $1.2 million to expand its pilot network nationally. The expansion will not monitor cities, but will concentrate on patients calling an after-hours medical advisory service.

Health officials say civilian emphasis in the developing surveillance field will help ensure privacy and enhance routine disease monitoring.

"It's the practical stuff that's most promising," Dr. Sosin of the disease control centers said. "Whether this is going to detect terrorism is unclear. But as a safety net and for tracking an event once it's going on, it's very promising."
*******************************
New York Times
January 27, 2003
Editors and Lobbyists Wage High-Tech War Over Letters
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Newspapers and political organizations are engaged in technological one-upmanship over "AstroTurf"  letters to the editor that look like authentic grass-roots responses from readers but are not.

Groups like the Republican National Committee and Planned Parenthood are using Web sites and e-mail lists to help disseminate form letters to publications across the country. With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, individuals can send preprogrammed letters under their own names to editors. Some Web sites even preselect local publications, depending on the person's ZIP code and address.

Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said the committee is proud of its outreach efforts. "You want to make it easy for them to participate," he said. "That is a good thing."

Lisa Boyce, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, said, "If an editor receives 10 letters that may be the same, they at least know there are 10 people that are concerned about the issue and would take the time to send a letter." 

The people who edit the letters pages disagree, generally believing that letters should be the work of those who sign them. Armed with Internet search engines and e-mail lists of their own, they are mapping Web sites and alerting each other about the form letters appearing in their mailboxes. 

"We type phrases into Google all the time," said Susan Clotfelter, the letters editor at The Denver Post. "We hate to be fooled." The Post published at least two form letters last year: one in support of the budget proposal of President Bush and one in support of the terrorism stance of Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota.

Organized letter-writing campaigns have been around for decades. But the Internet has sped up both their scope and pace. At any time, editors are being bombarded by at least two or three campaigns covering any range of topics, among them immigration, school prayer and politics in general. The large campaigns are easier to spot because many identical letters appear at once. It is the isolated letter that editors have to keep an eye out for.

The editors issue alerts and queries on a 600-member e-mail list run by the National Conference of Editorial Writers. Last week, for example, an editor from Nebraska posted a questionable letter about the Pledge of Allegiance and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Within minutes, editors from Wisconsin, Tennessee, Illinois and Nebraska responded, saying they had received the same letter.

"It's instant communication among us," said Lynnell Burkett, the editorial page editor of The San Antonio Express-News. "It's extremely helpful, every day, several times a day."

Despite these efforts, some form letters still sneak into print. One letter praising President Bush, distributed by the Republican National Committee at the www .gopteamleader.com site, has appeared in more than 20 papers since Jan. 8, including The Boston Globe, The Cincinnati Post, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Press-Democrat of Santa Rosa, Calif., and The Star Press of Muncie, Ind. The letter begins, "When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership."

Several editors said the letter had slipped through partially because it seemed specifically tailored for letters pages. "It was timely," said J. R. Hill, an editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "It was short. We didn't need to do a lot of heavy editing. It stuck to basically one point."

"We were burned," she said.

Editors say some readers simply do not understand the ethical issues of sending a letter written by someone else. "They had no idea that they were bending any sort of rules whatsoever or that they were trying to put one over on us," Ms. Clotfelter said. "I e-mailed back and forth with one woman who was distressed that we wouldn't print her letter because it was really how she felt."

Others defend their use of form letters. "I've seen the same thing from the other side," said Trevor D. Carlson, who signed one of the pro-Bush form letters to The Press Democrat.

Editors say the groups are becoming more sophisticated and the letters harder to spot. Last week, The Wisconsin State Journal of Madison received a number of letters in support of abortion rights that referred to the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion.

The editors were suspicious. But no two letters were exactly alike. A few technical errors in some of the later e-mails, however, showed that they had come from www.ppwi.org, operated by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.

At its Web site, users were encouraged to mix and match paragraphs from about 10 form letters. They could send their newly created letters to any of a number of publications in Wisconsin.

The complexity and the creativity of the site surprised Tim Kelley, the paper's editorial page editor. "Maybe you can call them genuine letters because they are encouraged to cut-and-paste," he said.
*******************************
USA Today
Internet firms woo Hispanics
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO  Hispanics are growing in numbers  and influence  online. Internet use among Hispanics has surged the past two years, according to poll results to be released Monday.

Nearly half of 300 Hispanics polled say they logged online for the first time since 2000  twice the national average. Hispanics also spend more time online  at home and at work, says the study by America Online and market researcher RoperASW.

Like many American businesses, Internet firms hope to mine a market that is growing, according to the Census Bureau, much faster than anyone expected. Hispanics edged closer to outnumbering blacks among U.S. minority groups in 2001, according to Census Bureau estimates released last week. The nation's Hispanic population grew to 37 million, up 4.7% from Census 2000. The number of people who claim any black racial identity grew 1.7% to 37.7 million.

The cybergrowth of Hispanics has intensified a scramble among leading Web sites to tailor content to woo them  and their buying power  which is expected to grow to almost $1 trillion by 2007, says the University of Georgia's Selig Center for Economic Growth.

Also, the rise in Hispanic users could offer Internet companies much-needed relief from a steep decline in new online users the past few years. "It's becoming more difficult to find first-time users online, so this is a potential windfall for AOL and Yahoo," says analyst Jonathan Gaw of market researcher IDC.

Taking steps to woo Hispanic users:

AOL. Though it says that 45% of Hispanics online use its service, AOL recently hired its first Hispanic ad agency to attract even more. AOL also has a toll-free number for customer-support in Spanish. The keyword Ayuda offers help in Spanish. And keyword Latino converts a users' screen into Spanish headlines. AOL 8.0 features Spanish-language services, including Latin American news, sports and entertainment. About 60% of Hispanics polled say they want bilingual online service. 

Yahoo. The No. 1 Web site has parlayed marketing deals and high-profile promotions to reach about 60% of Hispanic online users in the USA, says Nielsen/NetRatings. It developed the official site of the 2002 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament  easily the most popular sport among the Hispanic population. Yahoo also heavily promoted Hispanic Heritage Month last fall. Additionally, Yahoo en Español publishes news from La Opinion, the nation's largest Spanish-language newspaper, and Notimex, Mexico's leading wire service, says Jorge Consuegra, general manager of Yahoo en Español. 

Microsoft MSN. The software giant's YupiMSN Internet service recently made a deal with uDate.com to launch a Spanish-language personals site in February. Last year, it unveiled auto services and yellow pages in Spanish. YupiMSN (yupi is an expression of joy in Spanish) includes CiudadFutura, one of the first Spanish-language online communities, and MujerFutura, a specialized site catering to Spanish-speaking women. 

Terra Lycos. The portal, based in Spain, has cultivated a strong Hispanic following the past three years with online services, such as money transfers and calling cards to Spanish-speaking countries, and content partnerships with television network Telemundo and cable network Fox Sports en Español. "Services and content shouldn't be mere translations but specifically tailored to Hispanics," says Manuel Bellod, CEO of Terra.com, the U.S. portal of Terra Lycos. "The purchasing power of Hispanics  at close to $600 billion today  is undeniable." 
Internet media companies are especially keen to woo Hispanics because they are avid consumers of entertainment content and electronics, analysts say.
*******************************
MSNBC
Senate limits Pentagon ?data-mining? 
 Total Information Awareness program sparked privacy fears 
 By Declan McCullagh
  
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24  The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to slap restrictions on a controversial Pentagon data-mining program that critics say would amount to a domestic spying apparatus. By unanimous consent, the Senate inserted a moratorium on the program into a massive spending bill, which was approved by a 69-29 vote late Thursday.

       THE VOTE REPRESENTS AN unusual triumph of privacy concerns over the Bush administration?s arguments that the Pentagon?s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program would be useful for national security. If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers and motor vehicle agencies in hopes of snaring terrorists. 
       Final passage of the moratorium is not certain, however. Because the House of Representatives? version of the omnibus appropriations bill does not include any limits on TIA, a conference committee will have the final say.
       ?There?s the potential for some minor changes,? a representative for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the amendment?s author, said Thursday. 
       Wyden?s proposal prevailed over a more modest plan championed by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley?s proposed amendment said only that TIA must not be used for ?domestic intelligence or law enforcement purposes.? 
       On the other hand, the Wyden amendment  co-sponsored by Democrats including Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy of Vermont  bans TIA after two months unless Congress receives a detailed report or President George W. Bush decides that a halt would ?endanger the national security of the United States.? 
       Thereafter, if the Defense Department or any other executive branch agency wishes to release TIA to be used on American citizens, it must seek ?specific authorization? from Congress. Exceptions are ?lawful? military activities conducted overseas, or intelligence operations that target non-Americans inside or outside the United States. 
       Wyden said in a statement that ?as originally proposed, the Total Information Awareness program is the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history. The Senate has now said that this program will not be allowed to grow without tough congressional oversight and accountability, and that there will be checks on the government?s ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans.? 
       
MORE LEGISLATION LIKELY
       Privacy worries about the Pentagon system, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), came to a head this week after the FBI indicated it wanted to use TIA domestically against U.S. citizens. In a letter to Grassley, Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz said the FBI is considering ?possible experimentation with TIA technology in the future.? 
       Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., said after the vote that he would continue to pursue a standalone bill that would also place restrictions on TIA.
      In a statement posted last month on the TIA Web site, the Defense Department defended the project as privacy neutral. 
       ?The DoD recognizes American citizens? concerns about privacy invasions,? the statement said. ?To ensure the TIA project will not violate the privacy of American citizens, the department has safeguards in place. In addition, (we) will research and develop technologies to protect the system from internal abuses and external threats. The goal is to achieve a quantum leap in privacy technology to ensure data is protected and used only for lawful purposes.? 
       The TIA project became public in early 2002 when Bush chose Adm. John Poindexter, who was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, to run DARPA?s Information Awareness Office. But criticism of the project from privacy advocates and newspaper editorial pages has spiked in the last two months, with politicians becoming increasingly interested in TIA?s details after the 108th Congress convened this month. 
       Groups like the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association for computer scientists, had urged Congress to place limits on TIA. In a letter to the Senate on Thursday, ACM warned: ?Because of serious security, privacy, economic and personal risks associated with the development of a vast database surveillance system, we recommend a rigorous, independent review of these aspects of TIA.?
*******************************
Sunspot 
Baltimore Sun
Police arrest student for threats on Internet
N.Y. teen calls his plan for in-school attack a lie
Associated Press
Originally published January 26, 2003



LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - High school junior Lauren Hess says she grew increasingly alarmed as her new friend on an Internet chat room told her he wanted to re-create a Columbine-like massacre at his high school in New York City. 
"I told him 'It's not worth it to kill all these people. You need to really think about this,'" said Lauren Hess, 17. 

She contacted police, and honor student Lukasz Lagucik, 17, was arrested at his home early Friday. 

Authorities said no weapons were found in a search of Lagucik's home in New York's borough of Queens. He was charged with making a terror threat and other offenses and if convicted could face seven years in prison. 

In a handwritten statement he gave to police, Lagucik apologized and said he had tried to scare girls he met online by talking about buying guns and making bombs, said Patrick Clark, a spokesman for Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. 

"I realized what kind of big mistake I made, and I'm really sorry, it was really foolish to do such a thing," Lagucik said in the note, read in court Friday. He told police that he had made no plans with anyone, Clark said. 

Clark said bail was set at $15,000. Lagucik's relatives were trying to raise the money to free him, but it was unclear last night whether they were able to do so, said Ken Finkelman, a Legal Aid Society attorney who is representing the teen. 

Lagucik is due in court Feb. 7. 

A woman answering the telephone at Lagucik's home declined to comment yesterday. Finkelman called him "really a great kid. He's a straight-A student; he's an altar boy in his church." 

Finkelman said he wants to see transcripts from the chat rooms and is dubious of Lagucik's written statement, made after he was "in custody for hours." 

But whatever was said in the chat room, Finkelman said, Lagucik is not guilty of making a terror threat because his statements were not intended to terrorize a population. 

Hess said that she had been chatting with Lagucik since Monday, and that he said he and a friend planned to kill classmates with guns and homemade bombs Thursday. 

She said she took that to mean that they were planning a copycat school shooting, "except they wanted to make it kill more people," she said. 

Hess' hometown in Arkansas is about 60 miles south of Jonesboro, where two boys killed four classmates and a teacher March 24, 1998. The Jonesboro shootings came about a year before the Columbine school massacre in Colorado. 

Hess said Lagucik often quoted Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine High students who shot to death 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. 

"He kept telling me to watch the news," Hess said. "I was like, 'Well you don't need to do this.' I kept telling him over and over again." 

At one point, she said, Lagucik told her he and his friend loaded the guns and bombs into his car and drove to school but turned around and drove back to his house. 

She said she was skeptical of his account. "I told him I'm glad you didn't do it and I think you need help," she said. "Apparently I was fed a bunch of lies, but he was very convincing at times, and I was concerned and knew I needed to tell someone." 
*******************************
Sunspot
Baltimore Sun
Court program to hear cases that specialize in technology
Judges steep themselves in topics and inventions
By Stephanie Hanes
Originally published January 19, 2003

Judge John F. Fader II shows pictures of his baby granddaughter on his Hewlett-Packard laptop - a computer the 61-year-old bought for his Baltimore County chambers because he thought the Circuit Court-issued Dells were not up to his speed. 

Next door, Judge Lawrence R. Daniels, 55, dictates a document onto his computer through the voice-recognition Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, a skill at which he became so adept that his secretary was starting to get worried. 

And down the hall, Judge Michael J. Finifter, a 45-year-old former state lawmaker who sponsored technology legislation while in the House of Delegates, sits in front of his certified public accountant certificate. 

These three Baltimore County judges, self-described left-brainers all, are at the forefront of the Maryland judiciary's efforts to adapt to what legal and business experts expect will be a growing number of complicated - some might say mind-numbing - technology and accounting cases going through the court system. 

Fader, Daniels and Finifter, along with a handful of other judges in the state's largest counties, have volunteered to preside over the circuit court's newly created Business/Tech- nology Case Management Program, a system designed to deal with such litigation. 

In doing that, the judges put themselves in a position to hear the most complex business and technology cases coming into circuit court. 

They agreed to be the ones to help implement courtroom technology needed to hear these cases, such as digital exhibits, electronic pleadings and, eventually, Web cam video conferences. 

And they promised to bone up on topics such as cyber-squatting, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, genetic modification technology and shareholder inspection rights. 

They couldn't be more excited. 

"I'm a geek in the corner," Daniels said with a laugh. 

"I'm a semi-geek," Fader said. 

They're not the only ones looking forward to the change. 

Business lawyers, used to seeing eyes glaze over when testimony turns to source codes or virtual property, are happy to have judges interested to hear their cases. 

"I think this court [that] they are going to set up will have the ability to deal with tedious facts," said Michael Oliver, a business lawyer in Towson. 

A court administrator will decide whether a case should go on the business and technology track, the same way the court decides whether a case should go into the "standard mediation track," the "civil extended standard track," and so on. 

The business and technology cases will be assigned to one of the program judges and will remain with that judge for the whole court process, rather than bouncing from judge to judge depending on the hearing. 

This way, judges and lawyers said, litigants don't have to keep explaining terms and technology. 

"It's just unbelievable how much time you spend saying, 'What does this mean,' 'I don't know what this word is,' " Fader said. 

The business and technology judges will figure out ways to preserve court proceedings and evidence - much of which they expect to be online, virtual or otherwise electronic - for Court of Appeals review. The judges will also publish their decisions online, creating a resource for businesses and lawyers. 

"It's a new area of specialization that the courts are going in," Finifter said. 

Finifter said he was a state delegate in 2000 when the General Assembly passed legislation to create new provisions for expanding e-commerce in Maryland. 

Out of that legislation, a commission of lawyers, judges and business people was formed to look at whether the state's court system needed a special way of dealing with the complicated business and technology cases. 

The answer was a resounding "yes," and the court system put together a group of judges to work out ways to implement the task force's recommendations. 

The business and technology track, along with the education programs for judges and the technological changes for the courtrooms, was the result. 

Approved by judicial officials, the Business/Technology Case Management Program took effect Jan. 2. 

Baltimore County has not assigned its first case yet, but the judges expect them soon. 

Fader said his "wild guess" is that the county will start out with 10 to 15 special business and technology cases a year. 
*******************************


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          ACM TechNews; Friday, January 24, 2003


************************ Headlines ************************

"Senate Votes to Curb Project to Search for Terrorists in
Databases and Internet Mail"
"Tech Firms Rally to Fight Hollywood's Antipiracy Demands"
"Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server"
"Women Spurning Tech Jobs"
"Is There Hope for Java?"
"Tiny 'Braille' Opens New Space for Storage"
"Of Pawns, Knights, Bits, Bytes"
"Japanese Manufacturers Back Off Proprietary OSes"
"A New Wireless Web Link"
"Instead of a Radio D.J., a Web Server Names That Tune"
"Predictions for 2003: Service-Oriented Architecture is Changing
Software"
"ACLU: Surveillance Devices Multiply"
"Internet Content in Peril in Non-Competitive World"
"Sen. Edwards Introduces Information Security Bill"
"Laptops Cool Off with 'Smart' Heat Pipes"
"Research Project Promises Faster, Cheaper, and More Reliable
Microchips"
"Promise of Security"
"Straining to Hear Digital Radio"

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

"Senate Votes to Curb Project to Search for Terrorists in
Databases and Internet Mail"
New York Times (01/24/03) P. A12; Clymer, Adam

The Senate voted unanimously on Thursday to constrain the
implementation of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness
(TIA) Program, an initiative to conduct searches for terrorists
by mining Internet mail and online financial, health, and travel
records.  The legislation gives a 60-day window for the Defense
Department to furnish a report detailing the program's costs,
motives, its prospective chances for successfully thwarting
terrorists, and its impact on civil liberties and privacy;
failing to do so after the deadline would result in the
suspension of TIA research and development.  Meanwhile, use of
the system would be restricted to legally sanctioned military and
foreign intelligence operations, barring congressional
authorization to employ the system within the United States.  The
restrictions were bundled into a series of amendments to an
omnibus spending bill, and authored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.),
who attributed their swift passage to the dismay Republican
senators felt over the project's implications for surveillance on
innocent U.S. citizens.  Included in his amendment was a
statement that Congress should be consulted in matters whereby
TIA programs could be used to develop technologies to monitor
Americans.  "I hope that today's action demonstrated Congress'
willingness to perform oversight of the executive branch and
challenge attempts to undermine constitutional liberties,"
declared People for the American Way leader Ralph Neas following
the vote.  Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.), both sponsors of Wyden's bill, agreed that
the legislation ensures that the TIA program will balance civil
liberties with efforts to protect Americans from terrorism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/politics/24PRIV.html


"Tech Firms Rally to Fight Hollywood's Antipiracy Demands"
Wall Street Journal (01/23/03) P. B1; Mathews, Anna Wilde

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) struck a tenuous
balance between the interests of copyright holders and technology
companies, but the two sides disagree on how consumers can be
prevented from unlawfully copying and distributing digital works
of entertainment.  Hollywood is pushing for legislation that
would require tech companies to embed copy protections in all
electronic devices; in response, a group of tech companies today
will announce the formation of a lobbying organization called the
Alliance for Digital Progress set up to fight the effort.  At the
heart of the battle is the debate over the rights of copyright
holders to protect their content and the fair-use rights of
consumers, which critics say the DMCA is trampling on.  Adding
urgency to the issue is the emergence of broadband Internet
service and new digital-media technology, as well as the
popularity of digital file-swapping.  All these factors have
panicked movie studios that want to curb piracy of their
intellectual property.  The FCC is currently examining proposed
safeguards to prevent the online transmission of digital TV
broadcasts.  Meanwhile, the music industry is focusing on
curtailing online song-swapping through legal action, and this
week won a major case when a court ruled that Verizon
Communications had to reveal the name of a customer accused of
distributing songs online.  Tech companies and the Consumer
Electronics Association support proposed legislation from Rep.
Rick Boucher (D-Va.) that would make it legal to circumvent media
companies' digital protection for reasons of fair use, and
require music companies to label compact disks with copyright
blocks.
http://www.wsj.com


"Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server"
Newswise (01/24/03)

Scientists at the University of California's San Diego
Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have found that 98 percent of the
address mapping requests sent to the Internet's 13 root servers
are unnecessary.  The researchers studied 152 million requests
sent on Oct. 4, 2002, to one root server in California for their
analysis, which they will present to Richard A. Clarke, chairman
of the federal Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, later
this month.  Clarke has warned that the Domain Name System (DNS)
and its 13 root servers are vulnerable and could disrupt the
entire Internet if attacked simultaneously.  Such an attack did
occur in October of last year, but damage was minimal.  The SDSC
scientists discovered that about 70 percent of all received
traffic was duplicated, and suggested that ISPs and lower-tier
servers could cache the answers to these queries in order to
reduce the load at the top level.  The study also found that
approximately 12 percent of requests were for nonexistent
top-level domains, and that 7 percent had the IP address embedded
within the request, making it frivolous.  SDSC researcher Duane
Wessels says a major source of the bad requests was the result of
misconfigured firewall and packet filter software that bounced
back responses from the DNS.  The system requesting the data
therefore kept sending queries.  Wessels created a tool for
server administrators called dnstop that can help identify and
fix these misconfigurations.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/2003/1/SDSCROOT.UCD.html


"Women Spurning Tech Jobs"
BBC News (01/23/03); Wakefield, Jane

The retention of women in IT jobs is equally important to getting
young girls interested in IT careers, said speakers at the third
annual Women in Information Technology conference in London.
Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt estimated that more
then one-third of new tech employees are female, but said they
eventually quit their profession to concentrate on family life or
other interests.  This attrition must be stopped if the U.K.
female tech workforce is to achieve an equitable level with the
male workforce, she insisted.  Hewitt explained that many women
believe tech jobs cannot balance demands of work and family, and
they must be given "the confidence to challenge a workaholic
culture."  Speakers from major tech companies delivered the
sobering news that women account for fewer than 20 percent of
their management staff.  Meanwhile, a new female technology
recruit makes 3,000 pounds less than her male counterpart, on
average.  More promising was the success of the Computer Clubs
for Girls project, which is supported by 24 schools and may soon
be established throughout the United Kingdom.  "Girls are more
independent and more creative than in traditional information
technology lessons," observed Katy Baker of the Kendrick School
for Girls.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2687247.stm
To learn more about ACM's Committee on Women and Computing, visit
http://www.acm.org/women


"Is There Hope for Java?"
Salon.com (01/21/03); Manjoo, Farhad

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz recently ruled that
Microsoft must ship Sun Microsystems' Java runtime environment in
Windows, thus solidifying the debate over whether Microsoft has
long pursued a campaign to neutralize the cross-platform
programming language, or whether Java's failure to penetrate the
desktop computer market is its own fault.  Motz appears to favor
Sun in his statement that "anticompetitive conduct" on the part
of Microsoft is likely responsible for the market's
fragmentation; furthermore, the company appears to have leveraged
its Windows dominance to cut off "Sun's channels of distribution"
for Java, and is planning to exploit the situation even further
by introducing C#, a Java alternative.  His mandate that
Microsoft bundle Java into Windows "is designed to prevent
Microsoft from obtaining future advantage from its past wrongs
and to correct the distortion in the marketplace that its
violations of the antitrust laws have caused," he wrote.  Working
against Microsoft are internal documents cited by Motz that
suggest the company has been trying to offer developers
"extensions" to Java that promise cross-platform capability, when
in reality they only run on Windows.  Others argue that a slow
graphical interface and overall poor performance are the real
culprits behind Java's troubles, yet it has done well in markets
not dominated by Microsoft.  Carnegie Mellon's Robert Harper adds
that Java has been a godsend to universities desperate to train
people on object-oriented languages, but whose only option was
the overcomplicated C++.  If Motz's ruling is sustained, the
rivalry between Java and Microsoft's .Net could heat up; on the
other hand, it is possible that Sun's programming language could
be crippled beyond repair, whether attributable to
Microsoft-directed interference or its own disadvantages.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/21/java/index.html


"Tiny 'Braille' Opens New Space for Storage"
ZDNet (01/23/03); Junnarkar, Sandeep

In a breakthrough that could pave the way to systems capable of
storing 100 GB of data per square inch, scientists at Scotland's
University of Edinburgh and Italy's University of Bologna claim
to have found materials in which predictable patterns of bumps
can be induced.  Data can be encoded in these bumps, allowing for
a Braille-like, molecular-scale storage device.  The thin film
media is composed of molecules called rotaxanes, which resemble
barbells with handles encircled by rings; the scientists report
that this abacus-like configuration could be used as switchable
elements for information storage.  They add that they are able to
stabilize the pattern for several days under laboratory
conditions, and hope to make it last even longer by modifying the
rotaxane structure.  Other scientists say this breakthrough
cannot be commercialized until the process is refined, and that
can only happen if it is better understood.  It would also help
to find a way to write the information in parallel faster, and
using different rotaxanes could be essential to such a
development, according to University of Bologna researcher Fabio
Biscarini.  It could take more than five years to commercialize
the research, which will be detailed in the online edition of
Science Magazine on Thursday.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-981832.html


"Of Pawns, Knights, Bits, Bytes"
Wired News (01/23/03); Kahney, Leander

International chess champion Garry Kasparov will face off against
a machine in a six-game tournament beginning Jan. 26.  His
opponent will be Deep Junior, an aggressive chess-playing program
considered to be the best in the world, and the computer chess
champion for three years running.  Deep Junior, which was
developed by Israeli programmers and a chess grandmaster, is
different from the usual computerized players because of the
human way it plays, often sacrificing pieces instead of
preserving them.  It also assesses the moves that have the most
potential, unlike early programs that relied on brute force
searches.  Artificial intelligence expert Jonathan Schaeffer, who
will act as a judge during the tournament, believes Deep Junior
evaluates chess positions with standard weighting algorithms,
such as the mobility of pieces and the safety of the king; the
former is highly rated by aggressive programs such as Deep
Junior.  More sophisticated algorithms enable programs to only
consider the most promising maneuvers.  Schaeffer notes that the
tournament offers Kasparov an opportunity to get some payback
after his 1997 loss to IBM's Deep Blue program.  The event is
also the first human/machine chess competition to be endorsed by
the World Chess Federation, a distinction that chess experts say
is a sign of respect toward computers as worthy players.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57345,00.html


"Japanese Manufacturers Back Off Proprietary OSes"
EE Times (01/23/03); Yoshida, Junko

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Sony and Matsushita
Electric Industrial separately announced that they will stop
investing in their proprietary operating systems (OSes) and
instead embrace open-source by joining forces to develop a
consumer electronics version of Linux.  "We just can't keep on
developing different software for every new product," said
Matsushita CTO Paul Liao.  Sony COO Kunitake Ando declared that
Samsung, Philips Semiconductors, LG Electronics, and other CE
manufacturers will add their support to the Linux CE OS
initiative.  Support for industry-wide alliances to develop
projects such as HAVi or the Java TV application programming
interface have also eroded.  Thus ends a vision many Japanese
companies had of building a proprietary OS that would influence
the direction of next-generation digital consumer electronics.
Leon Husson of Philips commented that "an open platform" provided
by a real-time OS is basically the only real option CE makers
have.  "As a [consumer] system becomes more complex, functions
are converging, and boundaries of existing boxes are blurring,"
he noted.  One obstacle to Sony and Matsushita's effort to
develop a CE version of Linux is the difficulty in getting
thousands of software engineers to rally behind one platform.
http://www.eetonline.com/sys/news/OEG20030123S0034


"A New Wireless Web Link"
Washington Post (01/23/03) P. E1; Stern, Christopher

Lucent Technologies' Evolution Data Only (EvDO) technology, which
promises wireless access at 10 times the speed of a conventional
modem, has attracted a great deal of interest from carriers such
as Verizon Wireless, which was encouraged by Washington area
market tests.  However, the technology's drawbacks include an
investment of billions of dollars to acquire more spectrum and
update the software in wireless companies' networks.  EvDO would
also face intense competition from Wi-Fi, even though it is
faster and can function over existing cell phone networks;
Wi-Fi's advantages include cheap and easy deployment, and Cometa
Networks intends to build a national wireless network of over
20,000 Wi-Fi "hot spots."  Nevertheless, EvDO is being adopted
both nationally and internationally:  It is widely deployed in
South Korea, while Monet Mobile Networks rolled out EvDO networks
in seven Midwest U.S. markets in October.  Verizon's Bill Stone
says EvDO has the potential to "jump-start the [mobile
communications] industry all over again," and could make the same
splash that cell phones did.  Parties that stand to benefit from
a U.S. takeoff of EvDO include equipment suppliers such as Nortel
and Lucent, cell phone manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia,
and patent holders such as Qualcomm.  Lucent expects the
technology to be widely used by business travelers who are
currently restricted to dial-up Internet service in hotel rooms
or temperamental wireless networks from Sprint and Verizon.
Still, Verizon Wireless CEO Denny Strigl says his company's
adoption of EvDO service will be gradual.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30446-2003Jan22.html


"Instead of a Radio D.J., a Web Server Names That Tune"
New York Times (01/23/03) P. E8; Eisenberg, Anne

Audio fingerprinting technology is improving in affordability and
accuracy, to the point that researchers say it will soon be
embedded in all consumer electronic devices that play music.
Royal Philips Electronics unveiled an Internet radio prototype
with the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas.  The audio fingerprinting was so sensitive and accurate it
was able to distinguish between a single Pearl Jam song performed
once in Milan, Italy, and once in Verona.  Although different
companies take slightly different approaches to audio
fingerprinting, the basic idea is the same.  Unique song
characteristics, such as relative volume and note range, can be
translated into digital code stored on a server.  When snippets
of a song are captured and digitized, they can be compared
against the songs on file for identification.  Dr. Richard Gooch
of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry says
the technology is able to identify music despite a number of
distortions and lack of sound quality.  Even if radio
broadcasters speed a song slightly in order to fit commercials
in, audio fingerprinting can still identify it.  Gooch says the
technology has been deployed for some time in the music industry,
where it is used to identify radio broadcast songs so that
royalties can be applied, but new uses are cropping up with
improving technology.  Shazam Entertainment in the United
Kingdom, for example, offers a cell phone-based service where
users dial in when listening to a song.  Shazam's system captures
the tune, identifies it, and then sends back the information as a
text message within 30 seconds.  California-based Audible Magic
is also developing audio fingerprinting technology to help PC
owners manage song collections on their hard drives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/technology/circuits/23next.html


"Predictions for 2003: Service-Oriented Architecture is Changing
Software"
TechRepublic (01/15/03); Schulte, Roy

Application systems will receive an agility and efficiency
upgrade thanks to the emergence of new software technology, the
repackaging and repositioning of products, and the maturation of
Web services.  These next-generation applications will boast a
service-oriented architecture (SOA) whose components are designed
for modularity and encapsulation; the former allows large
problems to be broken down into smaller, more manageable units,
and the latter can hide each module's data and logic from
unregulated outside access and misuse.  Through SOA, design is
simplified, teams can more easily collaborate, and software can
be reused.  Driving SOA's penetration into the mainstream are
business units' demand for application system agility, the
acceptance of Web services standards by all vendors, and the
advent of flexible, SOA-based Web services to support
multichannel applications that encompass various access
techniques.  It is recommended that this year software vendors
develop features that will take advantage of the expected growth
of business activity monitoring (BAM), which will be driven by
advances in event management software, application servers,
application integration, and business process management (BPM)
tools, among other things.  BPM products will be increasingly
used by companies so that they can exploit the next wave of
application servers, enterprise service buses (ESBs), and
integration brokers.  Web services are expected to become
pervasive not only in software products, but in rapidly evolving
business-to-business (B2B) value-added networks (VANs) as well.
Meanwhile, a shakeout is taking place in the integrated broker
suite market, which almost matches the application server market
in terms of size.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00720030115jdt01.htm&fromtm=e1
01-4&_requestid=141044


"ACLU: Surveillance Devices Multiply"
ZDNet (01/16/03); Bowman, Lisa M.

U.S. citizens face increased monitoring by both public and
private groups due to an influx of surveillance technologies,
suggests a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU).  The report says "computers, cameras, sensors, wireless
communications, GPS, biometrics, and other technologies" have
been in use over the past 10 years as surveillance tools.  The
report also refers to other activities used to monitor Americans,
such as video surveillance, the gathering and selling of personal
data, and federal databases that hold information about
individuals.  In addition, the ACLU report mentions emerging
technologies such as radio frequency ID tags--minuscule chips
that allow computer systems to identify items--as new tools that
can be used by marketers to track people's movements.  The study
also criticizes the proposed central database of personal
transaction data called the Total Information Awareness project.
The report also features some theoretical situations that people
could encounter in the future, such as an African-American being
questioned about a crime as he attends a friend's party in the
suburbs because face-recognition technology indicates that he is
an outsider.  The study says people can counteract the trend
toward surveillance by supporting the latest privacy laws and
advocating the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable
searches and seizures.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-980964.html


"Internet Content in Peril in Non-Competitive World"
SiliconValley.com (01/21/03); Gillmor, Dan

Yale Braunstein of the University of California-Berkeley's School
of Information Management and Systems warns that the
noncompetitive atmosphere for high-speed Internet access in the
United States could encourage the few companies controlling data
transport to also manipulate Internet content for their benefit.
Central to this trend is the debate over whether telecoms'
control architecture should be vertical or horizontal, the latter
of which forces them to supply Internet access to competing
services.  Cable and phone companies argue that vertical control
is essential if they are going to provide broadband Internet
access to American subscribers, and they appear to have FCC
Chairman Michael Powell and many of his associates in their
corner.  Among the incentives for cable companies to influence
content is the fact that they have content-related ownership
interests.  However, these issues have received little attention
in the media due to a number of factors, including a conflict of
interest and the mostly theoretical nature of the threat in the
United States.  But if the cable and phone companies are allowed
to provide data access as well as Internet service, it is
inevitable that they will abuse this power, writes Dan Gillmor.
For example, SBC Communications has teamed up with Yahoo! for
digital subscriber line (DSL) connection customers.  As a result,
Yahoo! content receives preferential treatment on subscribers'
home pages.  Braunstein says, "It's not an on-off thing.  Yes,
you'll be able to get to the New York Times, but it may be harder
to get there."  Gillmor notes that the problem is mostly the
result of a lack of available data conduit options, a situation
he says won't change for some time.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/5002308.h
tm


"Sen. Edwards Introduces Information Security Bill"
Government Computer News Online (01/20/03); Jackson, William

Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) proposed a National Cyber Security
Leadership Act that would strengthen the IT security standards of
the federal government, requiring agencies to identify and
establish timetables for solving security weaknesses.  Agency
CIOs would be required to adhere to IT security standards set by
the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which would
be given $1 million to set up the guidelines and protocols.
Edwards said recent reports from the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB), the General Accounting Office, and Congress all
show lax IT security standards in the federal government.  This
sets a bad example for the private sector and gives federal
contractors little incentive to increase the security of their IT
products.  The bill complements the Federal Information Security
Management Act, passed in 2002 as part of the Homeland Security
Act.  That law mandated that agencies take measures to shore up
their systems in accordance with the level of risk, and laid the
responsibility of oversight on the OMB director, who would report
to Congress annually.
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/20899-1.html


"Laptops Cool Off with 'Smart' Heat Pipes"
CNet (01/22/03); Junnarkar, Sandeep

Under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency's Heat Removal by Thermal Integrated Circuits project,
Sandia National Laboratories scientist John Rightley has
developed a novel way to disperse heat generated by laptop chips.
His method involves channeling liquid methanol through
finely-etched pipes that absorb chip heat; the process turns the
liquid into vapor, which disperses the heat in a chosen area and
then condensates it back into liquid so that it can collect more
heat.  The pipe architecture can move heat to the edge of the
laptop, where fans can diffuse it into the air.  Smaller notebook
computers could be built using this system, which eliminates the
need for bulky and noisy cooling equipment.  International Data
(IDC) analyst Alan Promisel notes that the consumer notebook
market prefers desktop processors over the more expensive mobile
chips, and Rightley's breakthrough is significant because such
processors generate a lot of heat.  Rightley and analysts say the
technique could also be applied to desktop computers, and enable
designers to make smaller, more powerful systems by stacking
chips vertically.  "It's clear now that the smaller we go, the
more that cooling engineers need to be involved early in product
design," Rightley explains.  Analysts observe that a low-cost
method to mass-produce Rightley's heat pipes has yet to be
formulated.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-981652.html


"Research Project Promises Faster, Cheaper, and More Reliable
Microchips"
ScienceDaily (01/20/03)

Academics are teaming with the semiconductor industry in the
United Kingdom to produce next-generation strained silicon chips,
research at the leading-edge of microelectronics.  The
partnership between Amtel and a five-person team from the
University of Newcastle upon Tyne aims to create chips that carry
electricity faster, use less power, and are cheaper to produce.
Newcastle University microelectronics professor Anthony O'Neill
says the work focuses on adding germanium material to silicon,
which will allow microchip performance to continue to improve
rapidly even as it reaches physical speed barriers.  Strained
silicon means atoms in the silicon layer are separated further
from one another, allowing for higher current in transistors.
The technology does not require costly retooling of the
manufacturing process, and is compatible with other recent
microchip improvements, such as copper interconnect, low-k
dielectrics, and metal gates.  Amtel and the university research
team expect the partnership will benefit both entities because it
will allow Amtel to access top-end research while providing
necessary tools and manufacturing expertise to the academics.
Professor O'Neill also said such a partnership was critical in
the fast-paced semiconductor field, where time-to-market is a
major factor in commercial success.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/01/030120100124.htm


"Promise of Security"
eWeek (01/20/03) Vol. 20, No. 3, P. 37; Coffee, Peter

Computer security and invasive surveillance concerns heightened
by recent government policy has forced corporate users and IT
vendors to reexamine threats and responses.  IDefense CEO Brian
Kelly believes the government should offer "leadership and
guidance" rather than bog things down with new laws, an opinion
shared by enterprise users.  The cost of more security tools is
also justified by legislation that increases corporate
accountability for intrusions while simultaneously ramping up
interaction between IT management and auditors.  Although users
and vendors maintain that perimeter defenses such as firewalls
and intrusion-detection software are gaining in importance,
studies from groups such as the FBI's Computer Intrusion Squad
indicate that a sizeable portion of security problems are
attributable to insiders.  "Users seem to be more tolerant toward
blocking and scanning tools than in the past," notes FN
Manufacturing's Ed Benincasa.  "Publicity of events seems to have
sensitized users more to the issues and risks.  They don't like
it, but they understand the need."  Threats both outside and
inside the corporate network must be evaluated with an
international, multidisciplinary perspective, according to
Vincent Weafer of Symantec; such an approach includes discussing
problems with people at other sites in order to recognize common
intrusion patterns, and looking up online resources as well as
industry-specific sites.  Meanwhile, Kelly insists that a major
source of security problems, misconfigured systems, cannot be
remedied by government mandates.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,838237,00.asp

"Straining to Hear Digital Radio"
Electronic Business (01/03) Vol. 29, No. 1, P. 58; Josifovska,
Svetlana; Harbert, Tam

Digital radio has made slow but significant progress in Europe in
the decade since the European Union adopted the Eureka 147
standard; however, although prices for digital radio equipment
have fallen and governments have started to promote the
technology, the fact remains that it has yet to deliver data
broadcasting and other promised services.  Eureka 147 requires
more spectrum, placing it at a disadvantage in the United States,
where spectrum is limited and the military has exclusive access
to the L-band.  Most insiders expect the country to adopt
in-channel, on-band (IBOC) technology, an analog and digital
hybrid, from Ibiquity Digital, but European critics say that it
is more limited than Eureka 147, though Ibiquity plans to
transition IBOC to a completely digital format.  WorldDAB reports
that European governments will spend $23.3 million to promote
digital radio over the next 18 months; in the meantime,
broadcasters are being awarded long-term digital audio
broadcasting (DAB) licenses ranging from nine to 15 years.
Digital radio rollouts in the United States could move at a
faster pace than in Europe because of a number of factors:
Falling prices, FCC approval of using IBOC with existing
spectrum, a more cohesive market, and corporate and competitive
pressures to adopt the technology.  Penetration in the United
States could unfold over the next 12 months, with digital
broadcasting in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle,
and San Francisco expected to start by the end of 2002.
Meanwhile, the first IBOC receivers are expected to make their
market debut in 2003.  However, U.S. penetration will likely face
the same barrier digital radio faces in Europe, where
broadcasters refuse to adopt until manufacturers build more
receivers, while manufacturers resist doing so until broadcasters
offer more digital radio services.
http://www.e-insite.net/eb-mag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA266524&p
ubdate=1%2F1%2F2003

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Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber:

Welcome to the December 27, 2002 edition of ACM TechNews,
providing timely information for IT professionals three times a
week.  For instructions on how to unsubscribe from this
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACM TechNews
Volume 4, Number 439
Date: December 27, 2002

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Top Stories for Friday, December 27, 2002:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"1.1 Million Jobs Coming for Haggard IT Workforce"
"EU Copyright Law Misses Deadline"
"India Is Regaining Contracts With U.S."
"The Year Ahead: Top Ten Technologies to Watch"
"Critics Fear Broadcast Flag Would Stomp on Consumer Rights"
"Ex-Hacker Will Soon Be Allowed to Use the Internet Again"
"'No-Touch' Typing for Disabled"
"Eyeing the Costs of the Tech Boom"
"The Code That Cuts Both Ways"
"Erasing the Blind Spot: A Driver's Aid Averts Traffic Jams"
"Piracy Foes' Big Legal Stick Cut Shorter by Prudent Jury"
"Sharing the Riches"
"Top Ten Trends 2003"
"Computer Clocks Wind Down"
"Why You Might Soon Feel More Secure about Insecure Software"
"God Is the Machine"

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

"1.1 Million Jobs Coming for Haggard IT Workforce"
Although U.S. firms laid off 500,000 tech workers in 2002, a new
study from the Information Technology Association of America
predicts that 1.1 million tech workers will be hired back in
2003.  After two consecutive years of falling numbers, the size ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item1

"EU Copyright Law Misses Deadline"
Despite aggressive lobbying, the Dec. 22 deadline for the
adoption of the European Union's Copyright Directive has come and
gone, with only two member states, Greece and Denmark,
instituting it.  The directive, which the EU approved in April, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item2

"India Is Regaining Contracts With U.S."
Indian companies and the India-based units of overseas firms are
taking more outsourcing contracts after a lull following the
Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.  In Bangalore and other high-tech nodes
in India, companies such as Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item3

"The Year Ahead: Top Ten Technologies to Watch"
The year 2003 will see continued improvement in wireless
networking, location-based mobile services, radio-frequency ID
(RFID) chips, displays, and other technologies.  More devices
will come equipped with Bluetooth wireless connectivity, and new ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item4

"Critics Fear Broadcast Flag Would Stomp on Consumer Rights"
Inserting broadcast flags into television transmissions in order
to limit or prevent unauthorized distribution of programs will
violate consumers' rights and stifle high-tech innovation,
critics charge.  The flag, which devices would pick up to render ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item5

"Ex-Hacker Will Soon Be Allowed to Use the Internet Again"
Famed and convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick will be released Jan. 20
from probation, which bars him from using computers, software,
modems, or any other devices connecting to the Internet without
prior permission.  He has been granted permission to use a cell ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item6

"'No-Touch' Typing for Disabled"
Programmers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil
have produced a free adaptable software program that disabled
people use to operate computers and home automation systems.
Once downloaded onto a user's computer, the Motrix program allows ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item7

"Eyeing the Costs of the Tech Boom"
Every technological revolution has a downside:  For the
information technology and networking boom, that downside
includes information overload and intense competition that
threatens to inundate unskilled workers and consumers.  Other ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item8

"The Code That Cuts Both Ways"
There is widespread agreement that publicly disclosing computer
security flaws is necessary, but experts disagree on how much
information should be disclosed, and how soon after bugs are
discovered should the public be notified.  Computer vendors such ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item9

"Erasing the Blind Spot: A Driver's Aid Averts Traffic Jams"
Technology firms and automakers are looking into
driver-assistance systems that can make the roads safer and less
congested.  Different types of monitoring devices would help
drivers respond faster to traffic conditions so that isolated ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item10

"Piracy Foes' Big Legal Stick Cut Shorter by Prudent Jury"
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) received a serious
set-back recently as a jury in San Jose acquitted a defendant
prosecuted under that law.  Elcomsoft was standing trial for
selling an e-book copying program over the Internet which ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item11

"Sharing the Riches"
Lotus founder Mitch Kapor is funding the nonprofit Open Source
Applications Foundation (OSAF) that focuses on bringing
open-source software to PC users in order to make information
exchange more intuitive.  OSAF's centerpiece is Chandler, a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item12

"Top Ten Trends 2003"
Red Herring's sixth annual top 10 trends list concentrates on
emerging technologies likely to make a significant impact in
2003; they are expected to balance out some of the more negative
trends, and owe a great deal of their development to the Sept. 11 ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item13

"Computer Clocks Wind Down"
The reliability of the synchronous circuits or "clocks" common in
most computers is more difficult to maintain as chips increase in
size and complexity, and their heat output and power consumption
rise with each new chip generation.  To find a solution, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item14

"Why You Might Soon Feel More Secure about Insecure Software"
The software industry is notorious for releasing products with
inadequate security, and consumers have accepted this as the
status quo.  Software security was lax because there was
initially no call for it, but the growth of networking and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item15

"God Is the Machine"
Digital physicists argue that the universe could well be the
ultimate computer, and that all existence is, in essence, a
function of computation.  Adding weight to such suppositions are
the theories that all things--equations, multimedia works, even ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1227f.html#item16


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From owner-technews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Dec 30 13:29:25 2002
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Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber:

Welcome to the December 30, 2002 edition of ACM TechNews,
providing timely information for IT professionals three times a
week.  For instructions on how to unsubscribe from this
service, please see below.

ACM's MemberNet is now online. For the latest on ACM
activities, member benefits, and industry issues,
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Remember to check out our hot new online essay and opinion
magazine, Ubiquity, at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACM TechNews
Volume 4, Number 440
Date: December 30, 2002

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Site Sponsored by Hewlett Packard Company ( <http://www.hp.com> )
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Top Stories for Monday, December 30, 2002:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Could Diamond Chips Supplant Silicon?"
"Hired Hackers Expose Flaws"
"Removable Hard Disk Group to Show New Device"
"2002 Marked by Sophisticated Attacks"
"2002: The Year in Technology"
"Hi-Tech Ghosts of Christmas Future"
"10 Gig Ethernet: Speed Demon"
"InfiniBand: What's Next?"
"Mind Games"
"Robust Speech Recognition at KAIST"
"The Biggest Hole in the Net"

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

"Could Diamond Chips Supplant Silicon?"
Under the aegis of the New Energy and Industrial Technology
Development Organization, the Japanese government has
earmarked $6 million for fiscal year 2003 for research into
diamond semiconductors.  Japanese electronics companies ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item1

"Hired Hackers Expose Flaws"
Just about any computer system can be broken into given unlimited
time and resources, says Fred Rica, the leader of a 130-member
team for PricewaterhouseCoopers that performs threat and
vulnerability assessments for companies.  He compares the hacking ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item2

"Removable Hard Disk Group to Show New Device"
A prototype 1.8-inch Information Versatile Disk for Removable
usage (iVDR) hard disk will be unveiled at next month's Consumer
Electronics Show (CES), the first time the new removable hard
disk system will be displayed outside Japan.  The technology uses ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item3

"2002 Marked by Sophisticated Attacks"
A report from F-Secure finds that the number of computer virus
outbreaks this year was lower than that of last year, but the
sophistication of the attacks appears to have increased.  A
spokesman for the security company says that the rate of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item4

"2002: The Year in Technology"
The Year 2002 saw more efforts on the part of the music and movie
industries to control the distribution and use of their content.
New copy-protection technologies angered users, and even
pioneering digital storage companies such as Philips, which ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item5

"Hi-Tech Ghosts of Christmas Future"
In 2050, the Christmas meal will probably include synthetic
turkey put together using molecular raw materials.  Christmas
will be different in many other ways as well, according to
British Telecom futurologist Ian Pearson, due to advances in ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item6

"10 Gig Ethernet: Speed Demon"
The10 Gigabit Ethernet technology, which the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) approved in June, has
a lot of potential:  It could provide high-bandwidth remote data
center replication over greater distances than single-mode fiber; ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item7

"InfiniBand: What's Next?"
Vendors and customers alike are taking a wait-and-see approach to
InfiniBand, although smaller companies have begun releasing some
components needed for an InfiniBand environment.  Rather than
migrating data center architectures, companies are considering ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item8

"Mind Games"
Video games are taking advantage of artificial intelligence in
order to become smarter and more entertaining; GameAI.com editor
Steven M. Woodcock explains that such qualities will help game
companies be more competitive as 3D graphics and features that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item9

"Robust Speech Recognition at KAIST"
The Brain Neuroinformatics Research Program at the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is a
multidisciplinary effort to understand how biological brains
process information and to develop intelligent machines whose ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item10

"The Biggest Hole in the Net"
Newsweek columnist Steven Brill writes that civil libertarians
have been so appalled at the idea of a standard national ID card
that they do not even discuss it, even though debate is critical
to the development of a system that both shields civil liberties ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1230m.html#item11


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