Clips January 21, 2003

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips January 21, 2003

ARTICLES

Lobbyists Paid for Bush Official's Party
Courts Split on Internet Bans
Bigger tech budget on table Bush proposes 12.3% increase
2004 IT budget request focuses on homeland defense, cybersecurity
Ban on job competition targets stripped from Senate bill
Swiss Village Holds First Internet Vote
Roommate Service Clients Report E-Mail Barrage of Holocaust Revisionism
Poindexter's Still a Technocrat, Still a Lightning Rod
TSA preps $148 million more in grants

*******************************
Lobbyists Paid for Bush Official's Party
Tue Jan 21, 1:47 AM ET
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Just days before going to bat for the wireless industry, the 
Bush administration's top policy expert on telecommunications, Nancy 
Victory, allowed wireless phone company lobbyists to help pay for a private 
reception at her home.

Three lobbyists from Cingular Wireless, SBC Telecommunications and Motorola 
threw the party on Oct. 14, 2001, along with an attorney from Victory's old 
law firm where her husband is a partner specializing in communications law. 
Telecom industry representatives were among the dozens of party guests.

Victory said she regards the lobbyists as personal friends, and cleared the 
private reception in advance with her department's ethics office.

"My friends paid for this party out of their personal money," Victory said 
in an interview last week with The Associated Press.

Ten days after the catered reception at Victory's million-dollar home in 
Great Falls, Va., she asked the Federal Communication Commission to 
immediately repeal restrictions that Cingular, SBC and other major cellular 
companies had long complained about.

In today's market, "rules such as these that draw arbitrary lines in the 
name of ensuring competition are simply not needed," Victory wrote the FCC 
(news - web sites) on Oct. 24, 2001.

The FCC voted two weeks later to phase out by Jan. 1, 2003 restrictions on 
how much of the spectrum individual carriers could own in a geographic area.

The carriers argued that more airwaves would give them the space to provide 
advanced mobile services, but critics said the change would squeeze out 
smaller competitors and drive up rates.
Casting the single vote against the change, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps 
said that the agency had not done enough to study the shortage of airwaves.

"This is, for some, more about corporate mergers than it is about anything 
else," Copps said at the time.

Victory did not report the October 2001 party as a gift on her government 
ethics disclosure form, and said it was "ridiculous" to draw a connection 
between the party and her letter to the FCC.
"Many of the attendees had nothing to do with that issue," she said, 
declining to further identify the guests.

Ethics experts said the arrangement at the very least heightens public 
concerns about the appearance of a conflict of interest, and may have run 
afoul of federal ethics standards.

"Accepting this gift seems to be insensitive in light of public concern 
about whether this Bush administration is in the pocket of corporations and 
lobbyists. It doesn't look good for her or the administration," said 
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who 
teaches legal and government ethics.
In a statement, Victory said "the Commerce Department (news - web sites) 
ethics office has confirmed that, under the ethics rules, the benefit to me 
did not qualify as a reportable gift." But Clark questioned that conclusion 
and Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University's law school, 
stated flatly that Victory had a legal obligation to disclose the 
lobbyists' largesse on her financial disclosure form.

"Victory's industry friends could pay for the party out of their own 
pocket, but she had a duty to reveal their contribution to the public," 
Gillers said.

Clark called the Commerce Department's advice "a very strange 
interpretation" and "a bizarre legalistic search for loopholes where there 
are none."
If the outside legal experts are correct, Victory can correct the omission 
by revising her financial disclosure form.

As an assistant secretary of commerce, Victory is administrator of the 
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (news - web 
sites) and is the administration's policy representative before the 
independent FCC.

A copy of the party's invitation, obtained by AP, clearly names at the top 
lobbyists Brian Fontes of Cingular Wireless, Priscilla Hill-Ardoin of SBC 
Telecommunications and Rich Barth of wireless phone manufacturer Motorola.

At least one company whose lobbyist helped pick up the tab, SBC, is 
checking to see if the approximately $480 Hill-Ardoin spent came from 
corporate funds. Fontes and Barth said they don't remember how much they 
paid or whether the money came from corporate funds.

"A group of folks who either worked with Nancy or have known her for many 
years just got together to toast her," said Fontes, the Cingular lobbyist. 
Victory had been confirmed by the Senate for her new government post two 
months earlier.

Cingular and SBC both had formally urged the FCC to end the restrictions. 
Motorola did not weigh in on the issue, but it's largest commercial 
cellular customers, including Cingular, advocated repeal.
*******************************
New York Times
January 21, 2003
Courts Split on Internet Bans
By MATT RICHTEL

If a person goes to prison for using a computer and the Internet to commit 
a crime, can he be barred from using the Internet after the sentence is served?

Courts are increasingly facing the question as the Internet age gives rise 
to an explosion of cybercrime. But appellate courts in different parts of 
the country are coming up with different answers. And in the process, they 
are showing how an emerging technology can cause rifts in the legal 
landscape and pose difficulties in monitoring offenders.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, whose opinion 
interprets law in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, has ruled that people 
on probation may be barred from using computers and the Internet. The court 
argued that while this prohibition can greatly restrict a person's freedom 
and ability to find work, it also protects society from criminals who have 
turned the computer into a weapon.

But two other federal appeals courts, including the one governing New York, 
have recently concluded that such a prohibition is too broad. In 
overturning the sentence of a child pornographer last year, the Court of 
Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the Internet was as vital to 
everyday existence as the telephone and that while the government could 
monitor an offender's computer use, it could not stop it completely.

And the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey and 
Pennsylvania, has issued conflicting opinions in cases involving child 
pornography. In one case in 2000, it allowed a complete ban to stand, 
saying that it was necessary to deter a public threat to children. But in 
another  issued earlier this month  it argued that such a condition was 
overly broad. In this case the court said these sentences would have to 
depend on the facts in each individual case.

The courts have noted that computers now pervade virtually every area of 
life, suggesting a reason they have found a complete ban excessive, said 
Jennifer S. Granick, director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

"Computers are everywhere," she said. "The A.T.M. is a computer; the car 
has a computer; the Palm Pilot is a computer. Without a computer in this 
day and age, you can't work, you can't communicate, you can't function as 
people normally do in modern society."

The issue emerges just as Kevin Mitnick, the hacker once called by the 
government "the most-wanted computer criminal in U.S. history," is poised 
to start using the Internet again. Mr. Mitnick served five years for 
breaking into computer networks of major corporations and stealing 
software; he was released from prison in January 2000. As a condition of 
his probation, he has not been allowed to use the Internet  a restriction 
that expires today.

Differences of opinion among federal courts are not unusual, though this 
rift can mean that two people living in different states may receive 
different sentences, even if they commit similar crimes. But the offenders 
are not the only people directly affected by the changing landscape.

The impact has been felt, too, by probation officers, whose job it is to 
monitor offenders' activities after they are released from prison. Where 
they cannot rely on a complete Internet ban, probation officers are being 
forced to pioneer ways to make sure that offenders on probation or on 
supervised pretrial release do not use computers and the Internet to commit 
new crimes.

That has meant finding technologies to monitor what Web sites offenders 
visit and what e-mail messages they send.

"This made our jobs more difficult," Brian Kelly, a federal probation 
officer in New York, said of the decision last spring in the case of 
Gregory Sofsky by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 
which includes New York, Connecticut and Vermont. Initially, Mr. Sofsky, 
who was convicted of receiving child pornography on his home computer, was 
sentenced to 10 years in prison, after which he would not be allowed to use 
the Internet for three years.

His successful appeal means not only that he will be allowed to use the 
Internet after his release from prison, but that sentences prohibiting 
Internet use were invalid for other offenders, too. The ruling has resulted 
in modified sentences for at least seven other people in the region, who 
were originally prevented from using computers while on supervised 
release  a term that can refer to probation or pretrial release.

Under the modified sentences, they still cannot use computers or the 
Internet at will. They are restricted in what Web sites they can see, chat 
rooms they can visit, and people they can associate with online.

In the Eastern District of New York, which includes Brooklyn, Staten 
Island, Queens and Long Island, the job of monitoring has fallen to Mr. 
Kelly and several colleagues, who employ technologies that let them observe 
an offender's computer activity remotely. For instance, they have installed 
software on several offenders' computers that lets them dial into an 
offender's computer and get a log of Web surfing and other online activities.

"I see every e-mail, every chat, every instant message," Mr. Kelly said 
recently, while sitting in his office, bringing the log onto his screen. 
"This person was on Google at 8:15. Here's an e-mail he received earlier 
today."

Mr. Kelly is planning over the next 60 days to add biometric fingerprinting 
equipment, which scans a person's fingerprint before allowing access to a 
computer. Mr. Kelly said the technology would help him know exactly who was 
logged on to a computer, and thus prevent an offender from asserting that 
an illegal activity, like downloading child pornography, took place when 
someone else was using the computer.

The monitoring technology is still far from foolproof, Mr. Kelly said, 
noting that a sophisticated computer user can probably find ways to evade 
it. Still, he said that he received calls "once or twice a week" from 
jurisdictions around the country looking to start or upgrade their computer 
supervision efforts.

Some other jurisdictions are using decidedly less high-technology methods. 
Ms. Granick, the professor at Stanford, who is a lawyer and has defended 
computer hackers, said she came upon some methods of restricting her 
clients' use that are not foolproof. In one case, she said, a San Diego man 
accused of hacking into corporate computers was put on pretrial release and 
told not to use the Internet. The way the government enforced the 
restriction was by putting black and yellow police tape on the computer to 
ensure he did not attach an Internet connection.

But even the high-technology monitoring methods leave much to be desired, 
said Scott Charney, chief security strategist for Microsoft and a former 
federal prosecutor who headed the computer crime and intellectual property 
section for the Justice Department. They "can be easily circumvented," he 
said, noting, for example, that a child pornographer could find ways to use 
the computer to obtain, then eliminate, offending images before being 
caught. "If a guy is technically sophisticated, he can delete and wipe away 
all the files."

Still, Mr. Charney added that from a legal standpoint, there is a very good 
reason to sentence people to limited Internet access "even if the 
technology is not there to enforce it." He said the sentence was an 
important deterrent because an offender knows that if he is caught, he will 
go back to prison without getting another trial.

Ross Nadel, chief of the division of computer hacking and intellectual 
property for the United States attorney for Northern California, said he 
believed that good reason still existed in certain cases to sentence 
offenders to a complete Internet ban. And he argued that banning someone 
from the Internet was not the same as banning someone from use of the 
telephone.

"There are not cases where people are using the phone to harm sensitive 
computer networks," he said, asserting that computers and the Internet have 
become integrated and inseparable in some cases from the crime.

The views of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Fifth Circuit 
Court of Appeals, covering Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, show the 
differing reasonings being applied. In the Sofsky case in the Second 
Circuit, the court granted that allowing Mr. Sofsky access to the Internet 
could "facilitate his continuation of his electronic receipt of child 
pornography."

But the court said that not allowing Mr. Sofsky to use the Internet would 
prevent him access to e-mail, "an increasingly widely used form of 
communication," and prevent his performing tasks like getting a weather 
forecast or reading a newspaper online. The ban, it said, "inflicts a 
greater deprivation on Sofsky's liberty than is reasonably necessary."

In May 2001, the Fifth Circuit reasoned differently in the case of Ronald 
Scott Paul, a Texas man who was caught in 2000 with a large number of child 
pornography images on his computer. According to court records, Mr. Paul 
also had fliers advertising himself as a lice-removal specialist who would 
spray children for lice, a process that would require children to undress 
completely.

In its sentence, a lower court ruled that when Mr. Paul was released from 
prison, he should not only be prohibited from using the Internet, but even 
a computer. In its ruling, the Fifth Circuit court agreed, noting Mr. Paul 
used the Internet to exploit children and seek out "boy lovers."

The Internet and computer ban "is reasonably related to Paul's offense and 
to the need to prevent recidivism and protect the public," the court ruled.

The rift among the courts may not be resolved any time soon, Mr. Charney of 
Microsoft said. He said such differences are not uncommon, particularly in 
an emerging area of law. In this case, he said, he would not be surprised 
to see the split continue for many years.
*******************************
San Francisco Gate
Bigger tech budget on table Bush proposes 12.3% increase
January 21, 2003

President Bush will propose a 12.3 percent increase in technology spending 
for fiscal 2004, partly to beef up the cyber-frontier of the war on 
terrorism, a White House official said Monday.

Word of the proposed $59.1 billion information technology budget for 2004, 
up from Bush's 2003 budget of $52.6 billion, was music to the ears of 
strapped Silicon Valley firms.

"We're moving to take more advantage of technologies coming out of Silicon 
Valley, as opposed to the government trying to jury-rig our own versions of 
technology," said White House official Mark Forman, who presented a preview 
of the budget at a conference hosted by Oracle Corp. in San Diego.

The proposal includes $4.7 million for security products such as fire walls 
and intrusion-detection systems. However, homeland security initiatives 
outlined in the budget are not limited to security products, said Forman, 
associate director for IT and E-Government at the White House Office of 
Management and Budget.

"So many of the lessons learned since 9/11 are that agencies need to work 
together to share information, to leverage knowledge management 
techniques," said Forman. For example, the increased IT spending will be 
used to better analyze entries and exits into the country to keep out 
terrorists, or to monitor disease outbreaks to identify biological attacks, 
he said.

The White House also has added $1.6 billion to its 2003 budget to make up 
for monies already being spent on technology, Forman said. That would bring 
the total to $54.2 billion, retroactively. Much of the 2004 increase would 
actually be spent in 2003 because government agencies have already received 
White House approval to begin some IT improvements that are part of the 
2004 budget.

Bush's 2003 IT spending proposal was about 15 percent more than the 
government spent on technology the year before.

Congress is still working on the 2003 appropriations for most government 
agencies. But Forman said that because IT projects usually come out of an 
agency's overall operating budget, many can go ahead before approval by 
Congress.

Silicon Valley companies applauded news of the increase.

"Our companies are really excited about it," said Taryn Lynds, spokeswoman 
for AeA, the high-tech trade association formerly known as the American 
Electronics Association. "In this economy, companies are really searching 
for any means of revenue that they can get."

"I think it's a very, very positive step for the government," said Harris 
Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, an 
advocacy group whose members include most Silicon Valley leaders such as 
Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp. and Oracle Corp.

Oracle Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson praised the government's 
growing emphasis on secure products.

"That forces vendors to change the way they build products. It's good for 
the industry," Davidson said. Oracle sells databases and computer programs 
used to run large offices to the federal government.

Tech companies have been hoping to see major federal spending increases 
since Sept. 11. But salespeople are still fighting to get their hands on 
some of the 2003 budget, much of which has still not been appropriated by 
Congress. Another delay in technology spending has been the government's 
reorganization.

"While the Homeland Security Department has been forming, it has caused 
some complexity in doing business with the departments that will become 
part of that. . . . The overall budget process is just a little bit 
garbled, quite frankly," John Thompson, chief executive of Cupertino 
security firm Symantec, said in a conference call with analysts last week.

E-mail Carrie Kirby at ckirby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
*******************************
Government Computer News
01/20/03
2004 IT budget request focuses on homeland defense, cybersecurity
By Jason Miller

The Bush administration's 2004 IT budget request will put the majority of 
funding increases into homeland defense and cybersecurity, a senior 
administration official said.

Mark Forman today said homeland security, the war on terrorism and other 
modernization increases, and cybersecurity would account for more than $9.6 
billion in the 2004 request.

In all, the administration's 2004 IT budget request would be $59 billion, 
an increase of 14 percent over the 2003 request, Forman, the Office of 
Management and Budget's associate director for IT and e-government, said.

Forman, who released the IT budget at the Oracle AppsWorld Conference in 
San Diego, said the request for homeland security IT funds would increase 
to $4.9 billion and cybersecurity to $4.7 billion. OMB also attributed the 
overall increase to realizing $1.6 billion in IT spending not previously 
reported by agencies, Forman said.

Non-defense discretionary spending, however, will increase only by a "few 
hundred million," he said.

"Last year was the first year we put in place rigorous budget reporting 
requirements," Forman said. "Capital planning is a critical element of that 
and we also took action to strengthen the roles of CIOs at the departments 
of Energy and Veterans Affairs, so we got better reporting."

For the second straight year, cybersecurity will see a significant 
increase, up from $4.2 billion in 2003 and $2.7 billion in 2002.

"The increase in security spending represents a increased commitment and 
need to do more cybersecurity," Forman said.

The overall budget, which the administration will release Feb. 3, will see 
only a modest increase, OMB director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said last 
week. This is the third straight year the administration's IT budget 
request has increased dramatically.

OMB also wants to increase the funding for work on agency enterprise 
architectures. The $1 billion request would make sure every agency receives 
at least $15 million to $25 million for work on their modernization 
blueprints, Forman said.

Forman said the administration also is requesting $37 billion for mission 
projects and $21 billion for office automation and infrastructure initiatives.
*****************************
Government Executive
January 17, 2003
Ban on job competition targets stripped from Senate bill
By Jason Peckenpaugh
jpeckenpaugh@xxxxxxxxxxx



The Senate has removed language from an omnibus fiscal 2003 appropriations 
bill that would have blocked the White House from putting thousands of 
federal jobs up for competition with private firms.

But Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., an opponent of the administration's 
initiative, plans to reintroduce the language as an amendment to the bill, 
according to spokeswoman Amy Hagovsky.

The provision, which was part of the Treasury-Postal bill, would prevent 
the Office of Management and Budget from setting numerical targets for 
competitive sourcing. OMB has told agencies to compete or directly 
outsource 15 percent of their commercial jobs by October 2003, although it 
has said that some agencies may fall short of this target.

The full House approved the provision in July as part of the 
Treasury-Postal bill.

OMB has strongly condemned the contracting provision. OMB Director Mitch 
Daniels said last year that advisers to President Bush would recommend that 
he veto the Treasury-Postal bill if it contained the ban on targets. In 
September, OMB officials said the administration might order agencies to 
compete all commercial work in government850,000 federal jobsif the measure 
became law.

Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., led Senate efforts to remove the provision from 
the appopriation bill. "Sen. Thomas is very pleased that the appropriators 
have stripped this provision," said Chris Jahn, Thomas' chief of staff. "It 
would have prevented the President from establishing targets for increasing 
government efficiency."

Federal employee unions favor the provision and are backing Mikulski's 
efforts to reintroduce it as an amendment. "The House repudiated the OMB 
privatization quotas on a bipartisan basis," said John Threlkeld, a 
legislative analyst for the American Federation of Government Employees. 
"The Senate should follow that example."
******************************
Associated Press
DVD Kid's Acquittal to Be Appealed
Mon Jan 20, 1:43 PM ET
By DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer

OSLO, Norway - Norwegian prosecutors will appeal the acquittal of a 
Norwegian teenager charged with digital burglary for creating and 
circulating online a program that cracks the security codes on DVDs.


Rune Floisbonn, a prosecutor with Norway's economic crimes police, told the 
NTB news agency Monday that an appeal would be filed. He did not 
immediately return calls from The Associated Press.


Jon Lech Johansen, 19, was found innocent of violating Norway's data 
break-in laws Jan. 7 in a ruling that gave prosecutors two weeks to decide 
whether to appeal the high profile case. That deadline expires Tuesday.


"An appeal was expected," Johansen's attorney, Halvor Manshaus, told AP by 
telephone. "I haven't gotten it confirmed ... but I believe it is correct 
and that there will be an appeal."


Floisbonn told Nettavisen, a Norwegian online newspaper, that prosecutors 
would challenge the Oslo City Court's interpretation of the law and the 
evidence presented in their case against Johansen.


In its unanimous 25-page ruling, the three-member court found 
Johansen  known in Norway as DVD-Jon  innocent on all charges.


The ruling was a key test in how far copyright holders can go in preventing 
duplication of their intellectual property. It said that consumers have 
rights to view legally obtained DVD films "even if the films are played in 
a different way than the makers had foreseen."


Johansen, who was 15 when he developed and posted the program on the 
Internet in late 1999, said he developed the software only to watch movies 
on a Linux (news - web sites)-based computer that lacked DVD-viewing software.


The short program Johansen wrote is just one of many readily available 
programs that can break the film industry's Content Scrambling System, 
which prevents illegal copying but also prevents the use of legitimate 
copies on unauthorized equipment.


Charges against Johansen were filed after Norwegian prosecutors received a 
complaint from the Motion Picture Association of America and the DVD Copy 
Control Association, the group that licenses CSS.

The court ruled that Johansen, who works as a programmer in Oslo, could not 
be convicted of breaking in to DVDs that were his own property, since he 
had bought them legally.


Manshaus said he did not know when the appeal would be heard.
*******************************
Associated Press
Swiss Village Holds First Internet Vote
Sun Jan 19, 2:35 PM ET

ANIERES, Switzerland - A small Swiss lakeside village made history Sunday 
with the country's first legally binding Internet vote.


Authorities said that 323 voters cast their ballot through the Internet, 
370 by mail and just 48 went to the polls.


There was a 61.3 percent majority in favor of awarding a taxpayer funded 
grant to renovate an expensive restaurant, officials said.


Under Switzerland's system of direct democracy, voters routinely cast their 
ballots on national questions such as asylum or abortion laws and local 
issues like funding for schools or new roads.


In Anieres, a wealthy suburb of Geneva, more than 90 percent of the 
1,162-strong electorate traditionally votes by mail. Sunday's vote marked 
the first time they could vote online, through a special Geneva state Web 
site using a regular home computer.


Residents had to type in a series of security codes, their date and place 
of birth, then cast their vote on whether $3.1 million of taxpayer money 
should be spent to renovate a municipal property housing the restaurant.
*******************************
New York Times
Roommate Service Clients Report E-Mail Barrage of Holocaust Revisionism
By DAVID F. GALLAGHER

Users of a well-known roommate-matching service in Manhattan say that after 
signing up with the service they began receiving e-mail messages from a 
Holocaust-revisionist Web site run by the service's founder.

Michael Santomauro, who started the Roommate Finders service in 1979, also 
runs a Web site called RePortersNoteBook.com that is critical of Jews and 
Israel, with headlines like "How Kosher Is the Holocaust Story?" Several 
users of Roommate Finders said similar material began landing in their 
electronic mailboxes soon after they gave their addresses to the service.

The e-mail messages were mostly articles taken from Web sites, including 
material from mainstream news outlets and sites that question historical 
accounts of the Holocaust. One message discussed the role of Jews in 
prostitution in the last century, while another concluded, "The Hitler `gas 
chambers' never existed." At the bottom of the messages were offers of 
related books in exchange for a donation, along with Mr. Santomauro's name 
and a link to his site.

Mr. Santomauro denied that he had knowingly added users' e-mail addresses 
to his RePortersNoteBook .com mailing list, which he said had more than 
140,000 people on it.

"The bulk of my client base happens to be Jewish," he said, "and I'm 
sensitive to that." He said he bought addresses from mailing list brokers 
and sold his customers' addresses to others. "When I'm compiling or buying 
lists, there may be names that are overlapping," he said. The Roommate 
Finders Web site, at roommatefinders.com, says nothing about how the e-mail 
addresses will be used, only that personal information may be shared with 
prospective roommates.

Mr. Santomauro said he saw nothing wrong with sending such material to 
people who had not requested it as long as he gave them the option of 
removing themselves from the list.

"It's just an e-mail," he said, "and you have the opportunity to unsubscribe."

Some people who ended up on the list took a different view. Svetlana 
Lebedeva, 24, said that when she began receiving e-mail messages from 
RePortersNoteBook.com in October, she immediately made the connection with 
Roommate Finders, where she had recently signed up. "Nobody asked for my 
permission to be on it, and something as absolutely outrageous as this, I 
shouldn't have been on it to begin with," she said. "It was very disturbing."

Another subscriber, Harla Rozner, 30, said she signed up with the service 
twice in the past year seeking roommates to share her Upper East Side 
apartment. Both times she began getting e-mail messages from 
RePortersNoteBook.com. "I would open my mailbox and there would be tons of 
them," she said.

Ms. Rozner said that after she wrote to Roommate Finders this month 
complaining about the messages and asking to have her apartment listing 
removed, she received in response an article on Jewish slumlords, sent from 
a Roommate Finders' address.

John Mozena, a founder and vice president of the Coalition Against 
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, an advocacy group, said those examples show 
how Web users need to look for a site's privacy policy before turning over 
personal data.

"This seems like the best example I've seen yet on how not to use your 
customers' information," he said.

Roommate Finders charges $300 for access to listings of people with 
apartments to share, but adding a listing is free. The site says the 
service has had more than 217,000 clients, and lists dozens of companies 
and universities "that put their trust in us," including American Express 
and Columbia University.

Mr. Santomauro said he was "an amateur Holocaust revisionist" who believes 
that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis has been overstated. He 
characterized his mailings as noncommercial because they asked only for 
donations. But he said the books he offered were generating more income 
than Roommate Finders, which he said has been hurt by a real estate slump.
*******************************
New York Times
Poindexter's Still a Technocrat, Still a Lightning Rod
By JOHN MARKOFF

The pursuit of a technological solution to the nation's military challenges 
is nothing new for Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter  nor is the attending 
controversy.

Admiral Poindexter, 66, is the force behind the Total Information Awareness 
project, an experimental system being developed by the Pentagon that seeks 
to scan information on billions of electronic transactions performed by 
millions of people here and abroad each day, analyze them and flag 
suspicious activity for possible investigation.

He is being vilified by civil liberties groups, Democrats in Congress and 
even some Republicans as the personification of a new type of Big Brother. 
But the roots of his new enterprise actually lie well in the past, in a 
vision he pioneered for building a Star Trek-style command and control 
system while working as the national security adviser for President Ronald 
Reagan two decades ago.

"From the beginning Poindexter has been a technocrat involved with the 
manipulation of information," said Dr. John Prados, a military historian at 
the National Security Archive, a research organization in Washington.

It is a vision he continued to pursue as a consultant after he left the 
government in 1986 because of his role in the Iran-contra affair, in which 
sales of arms to Iran were used to finance rebels fighting in Nicaragua at 
a time when Congress had barred such assistance.

For over two decades the admiral has been preoccupied with giving 
battlefield commanders  including the commander in chief  better 
information during times of crisis. For the last year, he has once again 
been pursuing that goal, from within the Pentagon.

"Whenever I would talk with him he would tell me, `The president doesn't 
have enough information during a crisis to make decisions,' " said a former 
official of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known 
as Darpa.

According to several scientists who have worked with Admiral Poindexter at 
the Pentagon, that vision, to surround military decision makers with 
high-tech computer systems that make sense of the battlefield and are able 
to display vast quantities of information, led directly to the idea of 
Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A.

"He wanted real-time intelligence feeds in the White House, feeds that were 
under direct White House control rather than being filtered through the 
C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies," said a scientist who works closely 
with Darpa. "This really has strong links to his current views on T.I.A."

Between 1981 and 1983, Admiral Poindexter was involved in the modernization 
of the White House Crisis Management Center  also known as the Presidential 
Emergency Operations Center  in the Executive Office Building. It was 
equipped with video equipment, computers and electronic message systems  a 
more novel concept then  to connect to the Pentagon and State Department 
and intelligence agencies.

In the 1990's, as a military consultant, he promoted a variety of efforts, 
including the Command Post of the Future project, to provide more 
information to military planners via computer networks. Another project, 
known as Genoa, which was also intended to give intelligence planners and 
decision makers better information, preceded the more ambitious Total 
Information Awareness project, which Mr. Poindexter now directs.

"He may be the only guy in government who deeply understands computers and 
what they are good for," said John C. Dvorak, a personal-computer industry 
columnist who met and became friends with Admiral Poindexter after the 
Iran-contra scandal.

But his technical skill has not been complemented by political deftness. As 
the national security adviser, he clashed with civil libertarians over a 
variety of initiatives, including a 1984 national security directive that 
gave agencies broad authority to control "sensitive but unclassified 
information" in addition to the classified variety. And he is battling 
civil liberties groups again over the Total Information Awareness concept.

"John Poindexter is a brilliant nuclear engineer who is also politically 
tone-deaf," said a former high-ranking naval officer who served with the 
admiral during the 1970's and 1980's.

Admiral Poindexter would not comment for this article and has been 
forbidden to respond to his critics by his superiors at the Defense 
Department. But he has told a number of people that he believes the attacks 
on him by civil libertarians are based on a distortion of the way the Total 
Information Awareness technology would operate.

He has argued that because the system would look only for certain patterns 
in commercial databases  not create any centralized record-keeping system 
of American citizens' activities  it would not violate civil liberties.

But that has not overcome discomfort over the admiral's premise that the 
battlefield command center must now watch the private activities of 
American civilians to detect potential terrorists. Civil liberties groups 
worry that preventing the system's misuse will be difficult because it 
breaks down the traditional separation among law enforcement, military and 
intelligence agencies.

While this particular surveillance system has become a lightning rod for 
criticism, Admiral Poindexter's ambitious push for a technological solution 
to the terrorism threat is more broadly emblematic of the Pentagon's 
struggle to find the right information tools to fight a new kind of warfare 
that may take place on American soil.

"John Poindexter was a pioneer in thinking about threats to national 
security that didn't look just like us," said John Arquilla, an expert on 
unconventional warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. 
"The Pentagon is full of people who accept his view quite fully today."

What makes the admiral's critics wary, however, is that his skill at 
technology and his misuse of it partly led to his undoing during the 1980's.

While spending time at President Reagan's ranch in California as the 
national security adviser, according to several former military officers 
who worked with him, the admiral would sit for hours with his Grid laptop 
computer, then very high-tech. Connected to a mainframe computer by a 
satellite phone, he would patiently program and polish the software that 
controlled the White House's newly installed e-mail system.

It was Admiral Poindexter's technological expertise that permitted him to 
create a back door, named "private blank check," in the e-mail system to 
circumvent normal White House channels, according to David A. Wallace, a 
specialist in electronic records at the School of Information at the 
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The system made it possible for the 
admiral to oversee the illegal activities of Col. Oliver North.

Admiral Poindexter's legal troubles later stemmed in part from the 6,000 
messages he destroyed with Colonel North. He was convicted on five felony 
counts, including lying to Congress, destroying documents and obstructing 
Congress in its investigation, but his conviction was overturned on appeal.

"Clearly Poindexter consciously manipulated the system to act in a way to 
hide information," Mr. Wallace said. "When faced with a system of checks 
and balances, he decided to act illegally. What does this say about the 
person who we are putting in charge of designing the most comprehensive 
surveillance system on U.S. citizens ever?"

It was a spectacular fall for the admiral, who was first in his class at 
the Naval Academy in 1958 and later received a Ph.D. in nuclear physics at 
the California Institute of Technology. Early in his military career, he 
became a protégé of the civilian Pentagon planners and military officers 
who were putting a high-technology face on the Pentagon in the late 1960's.

He was briefly one of the "whiz kids" nurtured by Secretary of Defense 
Robert McNamara, who believed that winning the war in Vietnam was a matter 
of engineering and quantitative methods.

Admiral Poindexter came of age when the Navy was leading the military in 
deploying broadband communications and advanced command and control 
systems. Later, when he arrived at the White House, he became one of the 
original participants in the planning behind President Reagan's Strategic 
Defense Initiative, called Star Wars by its critics. He was present at the 
initial meetings when the plan was first conceived in 1983.

While in the White House, he was offered the coveted command of the Sixth 
Fleet but turned down the offer, a move that still baffles military 
officers who knew him.

"Working in the White House can be very intoxicating," said a military 
officer who worked with Admiral Poindexter during his years on the National 
Security Council. "A lot of military people turn down great career jobs to 
stay there."

Now, with his return to government, the admiral's actions are under close 
scrutiny, which has even focused on his choice of an emblem for the 
Information Awareness Office at Darpa.

The emblem featured a human eye, embedded in the peak of a pyramid, 
scanning the globe. It carried the motto "scientia est potentia," or 
"knowledge is power."

Admiral Poindexter told several people that he had not thought about the 
Big Brother implications of such an image. In his mind, the eye had 
represented the letter I, the pyramid the letter A and the globe the letter 
O  a way of describing his new organization. The emblem has since been removed.
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Federal Computer Week
TSA preps $148 million more in grants

The Transportation Security Administration will dole out $148 million in 
new grants for port and bus security, Transportation Department Secretary 
Norman Mineta announced Jan 14.

The money will include $28 million for Operation Safe Commerce, a pilot 
program focused on protecting ports in Los Angeles; Long Beach, Calif.; New 
York; New Jersey; Seattle; and Tacoma, Wash.

"These grant programs will help [TSA] identify critical infrastructure, 
provide transit personnel security training, harden our seaports, enhance 
vehicle tracking and driver protections and increase security throughout 
the supply chain," Mineta said in a news release.

President Bush established TSA in November 2001 when he signed the Aviation 
and Transportation Security Act, which mandated improvements in securing 
the nation's transportation systems. Congress provided the agency with 
funding for the grants programs in the fiscal 2002 Supplemental 
Appropriations Act.

The first round of grants was awarded in June 2002, with $92.3 million 
going to 51 ports nationwide. Of that money, $9.3 million paid for "proof 
of concept projects" to explore the use of new technologies, including 
vessel tracking and electronic notification of arrivals.

About the same time, the department completed a test of e-seals  radio 
frequency devices that enable agencies to determine if a container has been 
tampered with  and began work on a transportation worker identification 
system that includes smart cards.

A board, with representatives from TSA, the Coast Guard and the Maritime 
Administration, will judge the latest grant applications.
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