Clips March 3, 2003

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips March 3, 2003

ARTICLES

Lawmakers' Web Sites Improving, Report Finds 
Norwegian Teenager to Face Retrial for Film Piracy
IETF creates antispam research group
Going to Extremes to Fight Spam  
Lawmakers move to tax Net, catalog sales
Bush launches HSD, pledges incident system 
Pondering Value of Copyright vs. Innovation
Online Library Wants It All, Every Book
TSA awards passenger screening contract
EDS exec puts Homeland on alert
Wireless security on Homeland Security?s agenda 
Homeland Security is on track, Cisco chief says 
Monster.com warns of ID theft
To Cash This Paycheck, Find the Nearest A.T.M.
Experts: Copyright law hurts technology 
Beaming Video at Speed of Light  
*******************************
Washington Post
Lawmakers' Web Sites Improving, Report Finds 
By Brian D. Faler
Monday, March 3, 2003; Page A17 

It is not the Internet Revolution on Capitol Hill that we have been promised. But over the past year, scores of lawmakers have vastly improved their Web sites, transforming them from little more than fancy advertisements into "virtual offices" that provide an array of services to their constituents.

That is the conclusion of a report to be released today by the Congress Online Project, a nonpartisan group that monitors, studies, pokes and prods lawmakers' Web sites, with an eye toward making them more useful to the public.

And it is a sharp contrast from last year, when the group first rated 605 lawmaker, leadership and committee sites, based on their content, how easily information could be found and how much opportunity they gave users to interact with their representatives. Those results, at best, were mixed. The group gave A or B grades to just 10 percent of those sites. This year, the project gave A or B grades to half those sites, while handing out more than twice as many -- 75 -- of its Online Mouse Awards.

"At the member level down to the Web designer level, there has been a completely different level of attention and commitment to making [the Internet] an effective communications tool," said Rick Shapiro, executive director of the Congressional Management Foundation, which, with George Washington University, conducted the study. "This really has been a dramatic, rapid change."

The group found more lawmakers focusing less on posting heroic biographies and pictures from local ribbon-cuttings -- what had been standard fare for so many sites -- and more on providing useful information targeted to their constituencies. Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), one of the lawmakers who won the group's highest award, the Golden Mouse, has a site that allows users to choose news and links specific to the county in which they live.

Rep. George Radanovich (R-Calif.), who also won a Golden Mouse, has a "Life Events" page that provides links to government services for every stage of life, from birth to marriage to death. And Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.), also a winner, has an "Education Resource Center" that allows users to search for college financial aid, track federal education initiatives and find information on local school programs.

Not everyone passed the group's tests with such flying colors. The project still considers about one-fourth of the sites to be substandard -- only slightly fewer than last year. It is not naming names, but said those sites still tend to focus on promoting the boss, be weighed down by elaborate graphics that take too long to load and give users little opportunity to interact with their representatives.

Even the best sites could be improved, Shapiro said. More lawmakers, for example, are providing at least some access to their voting records -- about 37 percent of House members and 14 percent of senators. But that is only a small minority, he said.

More broadly, he said, there is not a single, easy-to-use Internet gateway to the legislative branch. Unlike the administration, which has its FirstGov.gov site, Shapiro said, Congress's online presence is a tangle of different sites that take a fair amount of patience and familiarity with the institution to navigate.

But on the whole, the group said it was impressed with what it found.
*******************************
Reuters
Norwegian Teenager to Face Retrial for Film Piracy
Fri Feb 28,10:35 AM ET

OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian teenager cleared of cyber piracy charges in a landmark ruling is to be tried again in an appeals court, his lawyer said on Friday. 



Jon Johansen, aged 19 and dubbed "DVD Jon," was acquitted by an Oslo court in January of charges of theft after he developed a computer program to copy DVD movies which has been outlawed in the United States. 


Johansen had admitted copying only legally-purchased DVDs using his program, and the Oslo district court ruled that he was entitled to do this. 


Prosecutors, on behalf of Hollywood studies, lodged an appeal in the Borgarting appeals court in Oslo, objecting to the application of the law and the presentation of evidence. 


"The appeals court has decided to bring up the case again," Johansen's lawyer Halvor Manshaus told Reuters. The appeals court screens cases before deciding whether to hear them. 


The first ruling was a blow to the movie studios who have launched a global effort to crack down on piracy and were hoping to establish a legal precedent in Europe to fight future cases. 


The new trial is expected to start after the summer. 


"We have a victory behind us and we are confident with regard to the final outcome," Manshaus said. He said Johansen, who was 15 when he developed the program that unscrambled manufacturers' security safeguards on DVDs, had been prepared for an appeal. 


The Motion Picture Association of America, representing major Hollywood studios like Walt Disney Co., Universal Studios and Warner Bros, filed the complaint against Johansen at Norway's Economic Crime Unit. 


The group estimates that piracy costs the U.S. motion picture industry $3.0 billion annually in lost sales.

"This case is about important principles, and we are very pleased that it will be tried again," said Rune Floisbonn, acting chief of the Economic Crime Unit's data department. 


Johansen has become a symbol for hackers worldwide who say making software such as his -- called DeCSS -- is an act of intellectual freedom rather than theft. There is no specific legislation in Norway to protect digital content, but Johansen's program has been criminalized in the United States under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act. 


Norway is currently evaluating the implementation of the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) regulating distribution of films over the Internet. 
*******************************
Computerworld
IETF creates antispam research group
By TODD R. WEISS 
FEBRUARY 28, 2003

As spam problems worsen for businesses and consumers, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is going on the offensive by creating a panel called the Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) to look for new ways to beat back unwanted e-mail. 
The IETF, the main standards body for the Internet, has created the ASRG under its research wing, the Internet Research Task Force, which explores various issues for the IETF and seeks answers to Internet-related problems. 

The chairman of the new research task force, Paul Judge, director of research and development at Alpharetta, Ga.-based antispam vendor CipherTrust Inc., said he came up with the idea because spam is rapidly worsening. "The problem of spam has tremendously altered the way we use the Internet," he said. "It's now common to see that half of all Internet traffic is spam." 

Many of today's commercial antispam products deal with the problem locally on a server or PC by filtering e-mail and trying to sort it into wanted messages and spam. "But that really doesn't solve the problem globally, because all those messages are still traveling the Internet, hogging bandwidth" and wasting resources, Judge said. 

What the new group plans to do is re-examine the problem and existing solutions in an effort to find new spam controls. Some fixes may not involve much more than tweaking existing protocols or technologies in new ways. "People really haven't taken a research approach or view of the spam problem," Judge said. "There's a large audience seeking solutions to this problem." 

He cited Internet service providers, businesses and mail system vendors as all having a vested interest in devising new solutions. One idea, he said, would be to devise antispam tools that could communicate consent or a denial for an incoming e-mail before it even reaches a corporate firewall or user's mailbox. 

"We're not looking for a buy-in from the spammers," he said."We're looking for an infrastructure that will give protection to the users." 

Judge said he hopes to have some answers by the end of the year. Although the research group won't actually create new Internet-related standards, its work can be used by the IETF to do so later on. 

Analysts called the move good news, but were mixed on whether it will succeed. Eric Hemmendinger, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston, called the decision "a small milestone" but added "let's not overrate it." 

"It's conceivable that some technical innovations will come up," he said. But that will depend on whether they can be implemented by vendors or will make sense to IT leaders trying to run businesses more efficiently. One problem, he said, is that with so many vendors already marketing antispam products, the research group may have arrived too late. 

"They're already past the opportunity to have dealt with standards," he said. 

Chad Robinson, an analyst at Robert Frances Group Inc. in Westport, Conn., said the group's success will depend on whether it can find answers quickly. If it takes too long to reach a consensus, the problem will worsen and the group won't have a big impact. "I view this work as important, but only as a step in the right direction," he said. 

Michael Osterman, an analyst at Osterman Research Inc. in Black Diamond, Wash., is more hopeful. "The market is very much in flux. There can really be an advantage to a standards-based approach to this [problem]. Some solutions today are very good. I could see standards only improving that." 

The Anti-Spam Research Group's first gathering will be March 20 during the IETF's 56th conference in San Francisco. 
*******************************
Wired News
Going to Extremes to Fight Spam  
02:00 AM Mar. 03, 2003 PT

SAN FRANCISCO -- Felix Lin and Linus Upson want to make it harder to send and receive e-mail. They believe it's the best way to deal with the problem of spam. 

On Monday, the two co-founders of AvantGo launched a new spam filter that takes the most drastic anti-spam approach possible: Users only receive e-mail from people on a list of pre-approved senders.

Lin and Upson's Qurb, a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, is known as a "whitelist" -- an approach considered by some as a highly efficient way to eliminate spam. Almost nothing gets through except messages sent by those on a pre-approved list. 

But it's also the most extreme way to filter out spam. Sending e-mail to people using such a system means getting on their list of approved senders, an extra step that undermines the speed and convenience that makes e-mail so useful. It can also mean that no new correspondents get through at all. 

"The good thing about whitelists is they keep out spam," said John Levine, a member of the board at the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "The problem is that such strict filters are a sign of the increased damage spam is doing to the Internet.? We're going to have a Balkanized Internet where no one can talk to anyone else through fear of spam." 

When first installed, Qurb builds a list of approved senders by looking at the user's address book and all the mail they've saved. From then on, messages from anyone not on the list are directed to a "quarantine" folder. 

To guard against false positives, the system periodically prompts users to check the quarantine folder for messages wrongly identified as spam. After a few weeks of tinkering, the system will build a comprehensive list of regular contacts, Lin and Upson claim. 

To get on a Qurb user's approved list, new correspondents must respond to a "challenge" e-mail automatically dispatched in response to an initial message. The new correspondent merely hits reply to the challenge message. On receipt, the Qurb user is asked whether or not they want to add the correspondent to their approved list. 

According to Lin and Upson, Qurb's challenge/response system is difficult for spammers to circumvent. And for potential correspondents, it is no more inconvenient than the confirmation e-mails commonly used by mailing-list servers. 

"What we're driving for is the social acceptance of these confirmation messages," Upson said. "People already accept confirmation for joining mailing lists. We want this kind of double opt-in to be standard practice for e-mail." 

Such systems already exist. Spam Arrest, for example, is a server-side spam-filtering system with a challenge/response component. 

However, some spam experts regard them with disdain. 

Steve Atkins, a spam consultant, said Upson and Lin's approach is fraught with problems. Atkins, who runs Word to the Wise, said he was surprised that two Silicon Valley veterans had managed to combine what he considers two of the worst approaches to spam filtering - whitelists and challenge/response. 

"These systems are considered pretty much a waste of time in the spam community," he said. "There's half a dozen out there and no one's using them. 

He adds, "These guys are from AvantGo. They aren't stupid. So they may have something we haven't seen. I'm willing to wait and see, but I've seen (similar systems) come and I've seen them go, and they've all been bad."

Atkins said such systems are useful only to people who correspond with a limited number of people, and to those who rarely receive e-mail from people they don?t know. For people who don't fall into those categories, such filters make receiving e-mail too cumbersome. 

Another problem with Qurb is that the system downloads all the e-mail sent to the recipient, spam and all, before filtering it, a problem for laptop or low-bandwidth users. Server-side filters like Spam Arrest filter before sending the user their e-mail. 

Also, Atkins said, in general, whitelist filtering systems that quarantine e-mail don't offer much convenience because users are always looking for important messages that might have been wrongly tagged as spam. 

In addition, challenge/response systems are generally impolite -- most people won?t respond to them. And a response system based on a simple reply message is easily circumvented by an auto-responder, a system commonly used by spammers that replies automatically to incoming messages, Atkins said. 

Worse, Atkins said, a lot of spam these days forges real people's e-mail addresses in the "from" or "reply-to" line, and it is these people who would become the unwitting recipients of numerous "challenge" messages sent out by Qurb's clients. 

"If it's marketed well, people will download it and use it," Atkins said. "And that will be a bad thing."
*******************************
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Lawmakers move to tax Net, catalog sales
By Richard Locker
locker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
February 26, 2003

NASHVILLE - Hoping to cash in on an estimated $600 million in lost taxes this year, Tennessee is considering joining a national plan to collect sales taxes on most Internet and catalog purchases. 

But don't rush online yet. Your Lands' End chinos and L. L. Bean boots bought online or through a catalog aren't likely to be taxed this year - but Tennessee and most other states are moving in that direction. 

After nearly three years of work, a coalition of state governments and groups representing large online and mail-order retailers reached an accord last November on model legislation to streamline state and local sales tax systems and make it much easier to collect sales taxes from purchasers. 

It is now up to legislatures to enact the plan for their states. 

In Nashville, state Rep. Tommy Head (D-Clarksville), Sen. Bill Clabough (R-Maryville) and others are drafting the Tennessee version and said Tuesday they hope the General Assembly will act on it this year. 

As savvy Internet shoppers know, retailers don't have to collect sales taxes unless the company has some physical presence in the buyer's state. Tennesseans, for example, don't pay sales taxes on purchases from Lands' End shipped here, but residents of Wisconsin, where the company is based, and several other Midwestern states where it has retail outlets do. 

That situation resulted largely from a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that concluded the sales tax systems of the 50 states and thousands of cities and counties are so different and complex that it would be an undue burden on remote retailers to charge them local sales taxes. 

Online purchases were unheard of 36 years ago, along with computer software programs that make differentiating among tax jurisdictions easier, so the 1967 case revolved around mail-order sales. The Supreme Court reaffirmed the same principle for "E-tailers'' in 1992, but made it clear that Congress could enact a nationwide system that would be fairly uniform and not present a burden on businesses. 

So far, Congress has refused to do so. With E-commerce skyrocketing in the 1990s and states losing more revenue, the National Conference of State Legislatures began working on a multistate approach in 2000 that climaxed with the Nov. 11 Streamlined Sales & Use Tax Interstate Agreement. 

Under the proposal, if states expect to collect sales taxes from Internet retailers and mail-order companies, they would have to adopt the NCSL agreement. If they do, then most Internet retailers and mail-order companies would voluntarily agree to collect their sales taxes. North Carolina, Minnesota, Wyoming and South Dakota have adopted the agreement; 12 state legislatures have introduced bills and 10 others - including Tennessee - are drafting legislation, Neal Osten, a senior policy official at the NCSL told the House Finance Committee Tuesday. 

At the same time, NCSL and state officials are lobbying Congress to enact the agreement as national legislation, which would make the tax collections mandatory. 

University of Tennessee professor Bill Fox, a national expert on tax policy, told the committee that if Tennessee was able to collect state and local sales taxes due on all Internet and mail-order purchases by Tennessee consumers and businesses, it would bring in $600 million in new revenue this year - more than enough to close a $480 million budget deficit. 
*******************************
Government Computer News
02/28/03 
Bush launches HSD, pledges incident system 
By Wilson P. Dizard III 

President Bush today welcomed employees to the Homeland Security Department and announced that he will soon order ?the establishment of a unified national incident management system? to give federal agencies a common set of procedures for emergency response. 

Since Jan. 24, HSD has been operating with a skeleton crew of a few hundred officials, mostly detailed from other agencies. Homeland secretary Tom Ridge and the White House have been scouting out names for leadership positions, including deputy and assistant secretaries, CIO personnel and others. 

Ridge and his staff have also started building the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, which will fund much of the new department?s IT research. 

Tomorrow, HSD will cut over most of the component agencies that will carry out its mission, including the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the Transportation Security Administration. 

The next milestone in the transition plan is June 1, when HSD will take control of the Agriculture Department?s Plum Island Animal Disease Center and establish the Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee. 

As of Sept. 30, the department is mandated to wind up any other transfers of personnel, assets and liabilities specified by the Homeland Security Act.
*******************************
New York Times
March 3, 2003
Pondering Value of Copyright vs. Innovation
By AMY HARMON

BERKELEY, Calif., March 2  Technology scholars, business leaders and policy makers gathered at California conferences this weekend to argue whether a mismatch between two different technologies and the legal policies that govern them could inhibit free expression and innovation.

At one conference, held here at the University of California at Berkeley, the technology in question was software known as digital rights management, which allows copyright holders to set rules on how people can use a wide range of products, from DVD's to garage-door openers.

The use of such software has grown since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed by Congress in 1998. The law, aimed at restraining Internet piracy, made it illegal to break the digital locks protecting copyrighted material.

Carey Sherman, a lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of America, defended both the law and the technologies that have sprouted since it was passed. He said they enable copyright holders to offer users a wide range of digital material that would otherwise stay locked up for fear that it might be pirated.

But many speakers at the conference, sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, expressed concern that such technologies interfered with a tradition in which innovators figure out how a competitor's product works by taking it apart.

Joseph Liu, an assistant professor at Boston College Law School, said that the law could have a chilling effect on academic researchers. "When you're regulating activity this far upstream," he said, "you have to be careful of downstream effects."

Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said digital rights management could be pushed too far. She cited as an example a preliminary injunction issued to Lexmark International by a federal judge in Kentucky on Friday against a company that makes generic replacement cartridges for Lexmark printers.

The court found that an electronic chip in Lexmark cartridges, which marks them as authentic, could be protected under the 1998 statute.

"We have ceded too much power to copyright owners," said Ms. Lofgren, who plans on Tuesday to reintroduce a bill that would amend the 1998 law. "People are afraid to proceed on innovative measures."

At the other conference, held at Stanford University, technologists, economists and lawyers clashed over how the airwaves should be allocated with the advent of technology that may make the traditional notion of "interference" between bands obsolete.

Some economists argue that rather than have the Federal Communications Commission allocate licenses, large chunks of the spectrum should be sold outright, creating a market economy for spectrum that, they argue, would drive down prices and spur innovation.

Others argued that as technology like software-enabled radios make it easier to communicate over the airwaves without interfering, such ownership rights are unnecessary and would only serve to limit the wide-ranging uses of the spectrum by requiring cumbersome transaction costs for whoever wanted to use it.

This conference  organized by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and titled "Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?"  featured a moot court that pitted Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, and Yochai Benkler, a New York University law school professor, representing the public-ownership side of the debate against Gerald R. Faulhaber, a business professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas W. Hazlett, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, taking the side of property.

One judge, Harold Demsetz, professor emeritus at U.C.L.A. business school, who acknowledged that his bias leaned heavily toward the property side, said he had been impressed with the debate, but he asked for more clarification.

"Go back to work and clear up this mess for us," Professor Demsetz said. "And don't take too long to do it because we're losing ground fast." 
*******************************
New York Times
March 1, 2003
Online Library Wants It All, Every Book
By ROBERT F. WORTH

The legendary library of Alexandria boasted that it had a copy of virtually every known manuscript in the ancient world. This bibliophile's fantasy in Egypt's largest port city vanished, probably in a fire, more than a thousand years ago. But the dream of collecting every one of the world's books has been revived in a new arena: online.

The directors of the new Alexandria Library, which christened a steel and glass structure with 250,000 books in October, have joined forces with an American artist and software engineers in an ambitious effort to make virtually all of the world's books available at a mouse click. Much as the ancient library nurtured Archimedes and Euclid, the new Web venture also hopes to connect scholars and students around the world.

Of course, many libraries already provide access to hundreds or even thousands of electronic books. But the ambitions of the Alexandria Library appear to surpass those of its rivals. Its directors hope to link the world's other major digital archives and to make the books more accessible than ever with new software.

To its supporters, the project, called the Alexandria Library Scholars Collective, could ultimately revolutionize learning in the developing countries, where libraries are often nonexistent and access to materials is hard to come by. Cheick Diarra, a former NASA engineer and the director of the African Virtual University, said he plans to begin using the Alexandria software this year at the university's 34 campuses in 17 African countries.

Still, the idea faces staggering logistical, legal and technical obstacles: copyright infringement, high costs and language barriers, to name just a few. Its success will depend on its ability to raise money from foundations and to forge links with governments and major universities that can offer access to their own books and materials. At the moment, the project is paid for mainly by the library, which is supported by the Egyptian government and Unesco. Its American founder, Rhonda Roland Shearer, also raised seed money from several private philanthropists, including $800,000 from the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who died in 1999. Its annual operating budget of about $500,000 is more than enough to start the first phase of its online collection, said Ms. Shearer, the American artist who designed the software. She is seeking grants from foundations as well but has no commitments, she said.

An effort so ambitious, though, is likely to require considerable capital as it grows, said David Seaman, the director of the Digital Library Federation. David Wolff, a vice president of production at Fathom, an online learning company owned by Columbia University and other institutions, agrees. "To maintain and grow such an ambitious Web service for a worldwide audience is going to require major infusions of capital," Mr. Wolff said.

The project's creators hope its philanthropic ideals and access to the Islamic world will help raise money. "When people are concerned about violence and fundamentalism, the library is a historical symbol of ecumenism and tolerance and rationality," said Ismail Serageldin, director of the Alexandria Library.

But the Internet venture may also be shadowed by some of the controversies that have plagued the entire library undertaking since it was first conceived three decades ago. Critics have often questioned its cost and asked whether its Enlightenment ideals can survive in a country where censorship is common. And a contribution from Saddam Hussein before the Persian Gulf war hase also raised eyebrows.

Although the library's administrative independence was established by law last year, its paper collection is still small and full of cheap, cast-off paperbacks.

The creators of the new database hope to leave those problems behind by making digital books and scholarly materials more accessible. Users of the Alexandria software will visit the Web site and see a sumptuously illustrated library, with calling cards and stacks, that will link them to online texts much like a standard commercial browser. They will store their digital selections from the library's collection on shelves in an on-screen personal locker.

The software also includes colorful virtual auditoriums, classrooms and offices with lamps where scholars can exchange information, teach classes or hold office hours. The rooms and lecture halls can easily be customized for the universities that choose to use the library's software for remote learning, said Ms. Shearer, whose nonprofit group, the Art Science Research Lab, will run the collective with the library.

Few people have used the software. But Richard Foley, a dean at New York University, said it was more sophisticated and easier to use than Blackboard, a tool to post academic material. "The real trick is not just to post information but to make it usable and interactive," he said. "This is a much less passive approach to information storage, retrieval and transmission."

The library has scanned only about 100,000 pages of its own material, mostly medieval Arabic texts, Mr. Serageldin said. But it has embarked on a plan to digitize thousands of books over the next several years, most of them Arabic texts, with French and English translations, he said. Other works are scheduled to be scanned elsewhere in Africa, including a whole library of crumbling medieval manuscripts in a monastery in Timbuktu in Mali, Mr. Serageldin said.

The library will also have access to one million books that are now being scanned by Carnegie Mellon University, which is creating its own vast digital archive and is one of Alexandria's partners. And the library has a vast trove of Web material already donated by the Internet Archive, a California partner with similar universal ambitions. The collective then plans to begin bargaining for access to digital collections at other libraries and universities around the world, offering access to its own materials and its network of scholars in exchange.

Eventually, Ms. Shearer hopes that private companies wanting access to its material will join, helping build revenue for the nonprofit collective and the library.

Not everyone is thrilled by the thought of their works ricocheting around the world free. In the United States, publishers have begun to find ways to seal off access to their copyrighted works. But unlike some for-profit digital libraries that have sprung up in the last decade, the cooperative is interested mostly in books that are already out of copyright, at least at first, said Frederick Mostert, a London lawyer who advises the group on copyright issues. In the meantime, the cooperative plans to begin urging authors to donate their digital rights in the hopes that the courts will let them be used.

Another possible obstacle may arise from the sheer breadth of the project's goals: digital library, lecture hall, international scholars' hub, gateway for ordinary readers and new software package. "It's hard enough to make an offering in any one of those categories," said Mr. Wolff of Fathom. "To combine them all is challenging, particularly in light of the fact that the decision makers in those areas may be different at any given institution."

But Ms. Shearer says the library's large ambitions are also an advantage. The current welter of different approaches to electronic books and resources is a problem for scholars, who will make use of the Web only if it can be made easy. The software she developed, called CyberBook Plus, was designed to allow its use in different formats and languages, with a heavy emphasis on visuals rather than posted text.

And putting everything in one place is no longer as risky as it was in the predigital era, said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. "One lesson of the original Library of Alexandria," he said, "is don't just have one copy."
*******************************
Federal Computer Week
TSA awards passenger screening contract
BY Colleen O'Hara and Megan Lisagor 
Feb. 28, 2003

The Transportation Security Administration announced Feb. 28 that it awarded Lockheed Martin Management and Data Systems a contract to build a system to prescreen and perform risk assessments on airline travelers.

The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening II program, called CAPPS II, is a substantially advanced version of the system now in use, one that has been criticized for its seeming tendency to subject the elderly and children to increased scrutiny.

With CAPPS II, the focus will turn to authenticating people's identities, being able to truly distinguish between two Mary Smiths, for example, officials said. Passengers will activate CAPPS II when they make flight reservations, with their travel information passing from airlines to TSA. The agency will then run individual searches, scanning government and commercial databases for data that could indicate a potential threat. Based on its findings, the agency will assign a red, yellow or green score to travelers, ultimately appearing on their boarding passes.

The determination for red  a branding that prevents passengers from flying  will rest on a watch list, compiled by intelligence and law enforcement authorities, officials said. TSA plans to automate the list of "individuals that should deserve greater scrutiny," said Transportation Department Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson, who outlined the program at a media briefing Feb. 26. 

Passengers placed in the yellow category will face additional screening before being allowed to board. "Green" passengers will be free to go, officials said. "We're trying to answer a simple question: Is this individual a known and rooted member of the community?" Jackson said. 

Under the terms of the competitively awarded contract, Lockheed Martin will assist TSA in developing the program technology infrastructure and will administer it for TSA through a five-year task order contract. The first task order was awarded for $12.8 million. TSA will assess the passenger risk assessment.
*******************************
Federal Computer Week
EDS exec puts Homeland on alert
BY Judi Hasson 
Feb. 27, 2003

John Engler, the new president of EDS' state and local government division, urged the Homeland Security Department today to pinpoint terrorism alerts for specific areas that may be threatened and not issue warnings nationwide.

Engler, a former Republican governor of Michigan, said the cost of raising the alert level nationwide has been enormous for state and local governments at a time when they are facing severe budget crises. State governments are facing a collective $60 billion budget shortfall.

"America is a vast country," Engler told AFCEA International Inc.'s Homeland Security Conference in Washington, D.C. "Some of our states are larger than a European country. Consideration should be given to a refined system of threat alerts, which could be focused on specific states, counties, municipalities or even unique locations like monuments and American icons of interest to terrorists."

Engler said that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge must act judiciously when he decides to raise the warning because it costs millions of dollars to increase security.

When security threat levels are raised nationwide, first responders end up working overtime, vacations are canceled and in some cases, more people must be hired, he said. "For example, I don't believe the threat in Butte, Mont., to be the same as the threat to New York City, and both are under the same threat condition," Engler said.

Engler also said the federal government should avoid imposing federal security requirements on the states unless they can help pay for them. 

"The added burden of doing that to meet the many unique contingencies associated with terrorism has become more than most state budgets can bear in this economy," Engler said.

The Homeland Security Department decided today to lower the national alert level to "yellow" from "orange" where it had been for the past three weeks.

There was no immediate comment from the department on Engler's suggestion. However, a joint statement by Ridge and Attorney General John Ashcroft said the decision to raise the alert status Feb. 7 was based on "specific intelligence corroborated by multiple intelligence sources."

The White House, meanwhile, acknowledged that there is not enough money to adequately protect against terrorist attacks on American soil. In a speech to the National Governors Association, President Bush blamed Congress for failing to come up with enough money for state and local governments to pay for counterterrorism training and equipment.
*******************************
Federal Computer Week
Colonel leading digital troops
BY Dan Caterinicchia 
Feb. 27, 2003

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Future Combat Systems (FCS), the centerpiece of the Army's transformation to the Objective Force, won't be ready until the end of the decade, but one colonel already is virtually commanding thousands of digital Objective Force troops.

Col. George Lockwood, commander of the 16th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Knox, Ky., is also the commander of the Objective Force's first unit of action -- 3,499 digital troops.

Lockwood said his daily job is training officers, and the "first part of that training is exercising battle command." 

"The [Objective Force] unit of action piece for me is battle command," Lockwood told FCW during a Feb. 27 interview here at the Association of the U.S. Army's winter symposium. "Anything with C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] is where I get involved and how it relates to battle command and how we fight."

Currently, that means running digital experiments with virtual troops, but this work will directly impact how live soldiers are trained and fight in the future through the development of tactics, techniques and procedures, said Gen. Kevin Byrnes, commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command.

The Objective Force is a strategy to develop advanced information technology tools, vehicles and weapons that will make the Army's armored forces better able to survive an all-out fight. The first unit is scheduled to be equipped in 2008, with initial operational capability by 2010. 

FCS will equip Army vehicles with information and communications systems to give soldiers capabilities for command and control, surveillance and reconnaissance, direct and nonline-of-sight weapons firing, and personnel transport.
*******************************
Government Computer News
02/28/03 
Wireless security on Homeland Security?s agenda 
By Vandana Sinha 

Trade groups are talking to Energy Department laboratories in what could be a yearlong effort to evaluate commercial wireless security. 

Four groups in a public-private security forumthe Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, Telecommunications Industry Association, Information Technology Association of America and United States Telecom Associationhave begun meeting with the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center and other Energy organizations, said Kathryn Condello, vice president of operations for CTIA. 

The four groups are part of the Information Sharing and Analysis Center for the information and communications sectors. The ISAC currently has no industrywide way to review security gaps in the networks and services of wireless carriers. But that?s just what the Homeland Security Department will likely need to know to toughen security as more government employees adopt mobile devices and agencies integrate wireless platforms into their programs. 

Individual companies ?know what their problems are,? said Condello, who spoke yesterday on a panel about asset security at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association?s homeland security conference. But expanding individual assessments to a competitive telecom market with a half-dozen major carriers, each operating its own distinct network elements, is ?really tough,? Condello said. ?That?s a lot of data points.? 

She said HSD must consider how to fund such a vulnerability assessment. Although that is not in the purview of trade groups such as CTIA, Condello said, its insider knowledge could show the new department?s leaders a clearer picture of the commercial wireless sector. 

?We can scope this out for them so they know what they?re up against,? she said.
*******************************
Government Computer News
02/28/03 
Homeland Security is on track, Cisco chief says 
By Vandana Sinha 

Cisco Systems Inc. president John Chambers said this week that the Homeland Security Department is well on its way to merging the infrastructures of its 22 component agencies. 

?They truly get it,? said John Chambers, president and chief executive officer of the San Jose, Calif., networking vendor, speaking at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association?s homeland security conference. 

But Chambers said the relocated employees ought to be told the reasons and methods for breaking down the informational and architectural stovepipes to which they?re accustomed. 

?They may get more of a common architecture than, perhaps, the groups originally wanted,? he said, ?but the agency leaders actually understand the challenge.? 

He said the separate agencies and bureaus need help from networking, telecommunications and software companies to iron out the wrinkles in the merger. The president?s National Infrastructure Advisory Council, of which Chambers is a member, could remove roadblocks to transforming HSD?s architecture end to end, he said. 

That transformationand securing the networks as they evolve against intensifying threats and attackscould take as long as a decade, he said. 

?It?s not a technology problem,? Chambers said. ?The technology is already there to do quite a bit of what needs to be done. No one organization can do this by itself.?
*******************************
Computerworld
Monster.com warns of ID theft
By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service
FEBRUARY 28, 2003

Responding to a growing problem, online job site Monster.com is warning new and existing users about phony job listings that are being used to steal personal information from job seekers. The company has posted a warning on its Web site that says, in part: "Regrettably, from time to time, false job listings are listed online and used to illegally collect personal information from unsuspecting job seekers." 
The message goes on to warn users not to provide prospective employers with any information that isn't pertinent to the job opening. Social security numbers, credit card numbers and personal information not related to one's work history shouldn't be disclosed, the statement said. 

Monster.com sent a copy of the message to each of its users in an e-mail message that was received yesterday, according to The Associated Press. In addition, an e-mail message to new Monster.com users also contains a warning to "always be safe when searching for a job." A link to the company's statement regarding identity theft is provided. 

Online job hunting message boards such as Monster.com, a subsidiary of New York-based TMP Worldwide Inc., and Careerbuilder.com have come under scrutiny in the past for poorly protecting the personal information of those who post resumes on the sites. 

In a Feb. 19 letter to U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Timothy J. Muris, the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse asked the agency to act on a number of alleged abuses, including the sale of job seekers' e-mail addresses, registration data and resumes and the resale of resumes and resume information to employers, bogus recruiters and start-up job sites. 

The letter's authors, including Pam Dixon, a research fellow with the Denver-based Privacy Foundation, recommended that the FTC look in to reforming, and even regulating the job-search industry to better protect the privacy of job seekers. 

Careerbuilder.com, which is run by Chicago-based Careerbuilder Inc., said that it had already taken measures to protect the privacy of its users. The company's Web site offers tips to job seekers to protect themselves, according to company spokeswoman Jennifer Sullivan. 

That list of tips, which is almost identical to the list provided by Monster.com, has been posted on the Careerbuilder.com site at least since December, Sullivan said. 

Careerbuilder.com also offers a number of posting options, ranging from ones that offer low security and high visibility to anonymous and private posting options that prevent personal contact information from being disclosed or retrieved using searches, Sullivan said. 

In addition to its posted warning, the company is looking to provide additional measures to protect job seekers, Sullivan said. She couldn't provide details or say when the new measures might be ready. 

Sullivan said she wasn't aware of any complaints about identity theft resulting from a bogus job posting on Careerbuilder.com, but she didn't rule out that such thefts might have occurred. 

Careerbuilder is owned jointly by Gannett Co. Inc., Knight Ridder Inc. and Tribune Co. 
*******************************
New York Times
February 24, 2003
To Cash This Paycheck, Find the Nearest A.T.M.
By JENNIFER BAYOT

More than half of American workers have given up paychecks for the convenience of direct deposits. But for an estimated 25 million employees without bank accounts, payday usually still means visits to payroll then hefty fees at check-cashing windows.

To reach those workers, some companies on payday transfer wages to plastic cards that work like debit cards. Employees, who typically pay a monthly fee if they make more than one withdrawal, use them to obtain money from automated teller machines and, in many cases, shop wherever Visa or MasterCard is accepted.

The idea has been slow to catch on but is gaining momentum. The Coca-Cola Company, in an apparent expansion of its strategy, is expected to announce today that it will market payroll cards to restaurants, hotels and entertainment sites nationwide.

"Coca-Cola has built incredible relationships with its customers by being more than just a beverage provider," said Ken Plunk, innovation leader for the food service sales group of Coca-Cola North America. "We have an obligation to help them solve their business problems, and a very serious problem is the cost of labor in the food service industry."

Paperless payrolls, he said, will mean savings for businesses and convenience for employees.

A handful of employers, including a Dairy Queen franchisee based in Bryan, Tex., and eight Subway restaurants in Arizona, said they had already signed contracts to use the cards. Coca-Cola also said that the National Franchisee Association, which is based in Marietta, Ga., and represents Burger King's franchisees, planned to recommend the cards to its members. 

"The restaurant business is one of the key sectors for payroll cards, especially in the quick-service industry, where employees are more transient," said Ariana-Michele Moore, a research analyst with Celent Communications in Boston. The industry's enormity  it employs 11 million people  and its concentration of employees without bank accounts makes it fertile ground for the cards, Ms. Moore said.

Citibank EFS, a unit of Citigroup, will issue the payroll cards that Coca-Cola plans to market, and will brand them with MasterCard logos, guaranteeing their acceptance in most stores and online. The payroll cards will not include lines of credit.

Employers that use the card do not pay Coca-Cola. Instead, Coca-Cola will receive an undisclosed portion of the transaction fees that merchants who accept the cards must pay Citibank and MasterCard. 

"The payroll card is a really super deal, I think, all the way around," Mr. Plunk of Coca-Cola said. "It's a benefit to the employee, and it's a safe and secure way of paying folks."

Using the cards, workers can avoid check-cashing services that often charge 2.5 percent of each check as commission  likely more than the $1.50 a month that the Citibank payroll card will cost employees, Mr. Plunk said. 

Moreover, the cards make employees' wages available to them immediately, saving them trips to work to pick up their paychecks, and are insured against fraud. 

Still, many employees hesitate, usually because of language barriers, a distrust of banks and, most of all, confusion over how the cards work, Ms. Moore said. She added that only about 6 percent of workers without bank accounts currently use payroll cards. 

Companies like the cards because they eliminate mailing costs and the expense of issuing checks, which have been priced at $1 to $2 a check.

While many companies can cut payroll costs by encouraging employees to sign up for direct deposits to their bank accounts, employers with young, low-income or part-time workers can have a harder time, as a Dairy Queen franchisee in Texas learned last year when it tried. 

Mary Ferro, controller of the Dairy Queen franchisee's 34 ice cream stores, said: "The deeper we dug, the more problems we found. We realized that most of our young, hourly employees didn't have checking accounts." 

When Coca-Cola told the company about payroll cards, it "pretty much offered us the perfect solution," Ms. Ferro said, and so, beginning next month the company will electronically transfer its 500 workers' wages to payroll cards instead of printing checks. 

A number of other employers, including McDonald's, FedEx and Sears, Roebuck, currently offer their employees payroll cards, and enrollment has quickened since Visa and MasterCard entered the arena in 2001 and widened the cards' acceptance to all locations that accept their brands. 

Offering the cards are payroll processors like Paychex in Rochester, human resource companies like Ceridian in Minneapolis, and more than a dozen banks, including the Chicago-based Bank One and Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. And even more businesses specialize in payroll cards. 

All the activity suggests that many more workers may soon hear this option: paychecks or plastic? 
*******************************
News.com
Experts: Copyright law hurts technology 


By Robert Lemos 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
March 1, 2003, 4:30 PM PT


BERKELEY, Calif.--Attempts to protect copyrighted material have strayed from their original purpose, say lawyers, technologists and academics, but few can agree on the solution. 
Speaking Friday at a University of California at Berkeley conference on the law and policy of digital rights management, experts from all circles seem to agree that more is going wrong than right with the current approach to protecting digital content. Moreover, they argue that current laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--which makes cracking copyright protections illegal, even when otherwise acceptable under other laws--are serving the extremes, not the mainstream populace.

"There has to be a way between the lunatics at the two extremes," said Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University and well-known opponent of the DMCA. "We need to build a layer of reasonable copyright law on top of this background of unreasonable extremism." 


Such sentiments for loosening the control of copyright holders are finding far more fertile ground these days, in the wake of a number of lawsuits that illustrate the dangers of the DMCA. Far fewer people believe that the DMCA is an appropriate method to stave off digital pirates in the Internet age. 

For the most part, Lessig and others seemed to have more problems with the law than with the technology behind digital rights management, which regulates what people can do with information. The Stanford professor has created an organization called the Creative Commons to offer alternatives to strict controls backed by laws such as the DMCA. He and other experts taking part in the two-day policy debate, even those sympathetic to the plight of copyright holders, could cite several cases where the DMCA has been used to exert control in a way never intended by the creators of the law. 

On Friday, a Kentucky court granted a preliminary injunction to Lexmark International against a company that makes generic replacement cartridges for Lexmark printers. The court found that a chip in Lexmark cartridges that identify the refills as "official" could be protected under the DMCA, and thus, cannot be cloned. 

Misapplication of the law
Even RealNetworks, a company that has a digital-rights management system for protecting video and audio delivered over the Internet, found fault with the ruling. "This is a travesty," said Alex Alben, vice president for the Seattle-based firm. "This is not what we intended when we created the DMCA." 

The Lexmark case is the latest in what many legal experts and technologist argue is a misapplication of the law. 

For example, security researchers have many more hurdles to overcome under the DMCA to publish research, said Joseph Liu, a law professor at Boston College Law School. Researchers can circumvent protections in order to study the security measures under an exemption of the DMCA, but the exemption favors those researchers with a good academic pedigree. Moreover, the researcher has to inform the copyright holder of the research and requires predisclosure of results, which could lead to censorship. 

"There are so many flaws in the statute that you can censor yourself more than you really need to" because of the fear that you will be sued, Liu said. 

Another speaker, Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, experienced such fears firsthand when the Recording Industry Association of America told him that publishing results that showed the weaknesses in several secure digital music candidate technologies could violate the DMCA. 

The courts disagreed that such a notice entailed a threat and threw out the case, but the tactic has become commonplace. Software companies have cited the DMCA to researchers who discover holes in their programs, and have frequently sent out blanket notices to anyone who appears to host a pirated program. A site that offers the open-source OpenOffice program received such a notice from Microsoft, according to reports on Friday, because an automated program searching for MS Office triggered on a simple keyword.

Increasingly, however, people receiving such notices are fighting back. 

Ben Edelman, a Harvard law student and researcher, filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against a filter company to defend his research into the company's encrypted lists of blocked sites. And telecommunications and Internet service provider Verizon Communications has battled requests by the music industry to reveal the names of peer-to-peer sites that the RIAA alleges are offering pirated music online. 

Concern for innovation
Such incidents have increased the resistance by consumers and rights advocates to the creation of a highly secure digital rights management system. In the current policy landscape--with such laws as the DMCA on the books--strict controls could lead to greater stifling of innovation and free speech, experts argued. 

Even Microsoft--which is pushing for a security platform that could result in a extremely difficult-to-crack digital rights management system--wants to duck the policy issues. 

"We have a clear focus that we don't want to restrict what people can use their computers for," said John Manferdelli, general manager for Microsoft's Windows Trusted Platform Technologies group. "We have found out in talking to customers that whatever the methods that you use, they cannot impose policy. It should be under the nuser's control." 

Yet, solving those issues will not be easy. The issues are not simple, and regulating every fair use of copyrighted content would lead to a complex law that wouldn't help, said Boston University's Liu. 

"If we tried to spell out fair use in law, I think we would come up with something that would resemble the tax code in its complexity," he said. 

Despite such sentiments, others stressed that the law needs to shift to put the rights of the citizens over those of the copyright monopolists. 

David Farber, law professor for the University of Pennsylvania, said that digital rights management systems need to be in place to protect not the minority of big corporations but the masses of people. 

"I am not talking about protecting the media companies from people using their content," he said. "I am concerned with protecting my information and finding out who made copies of it." 

Until copyright policy tilts back to the populace, people will likely resist such systems, said John Erickson, a system program manager for Hewlett-Packard Labs, who spoke on one of four panels Friday. "We are taking the human being out of the equation...and putting a chastity belt on technology," he said.

He stressed that laws and technology, such as digital rights management, need to take constitutional issues into account. 

"There is not social governance of what goes into a rights management language," he said. "If we are to have the regimes, we need to figure out how to have people in the loop." 
*******************************
Wired News
Beaming Video at Speed of Light  
02:00 AM Mar. 03, 2003 PT

HAMILTON, New Zealand -- On the large television screen, a Kiwi singer strummed a guitar and sang an old country favorite. Looking away from the monitor, the audience could barely pick out a tiny red light in the tall building 1.4 kilometers -- a little less than a mile -- away. 

It was this light that brought the singer's performance to the 100 or so in the audience this week in what is believed to be the first live broadcast of high-quality television images over visible light spectrum.

The free-space optics system developed by New Zealand company Power Beat International works by modulating a beam of visible light -- the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be seen by humans -- to carry a digital or analog signal. 

"When a video recorder is looking at something, it is reading the voltages that are being transferred from light onto a surface of photo cells. We take all of those voltage changes and use them to modulate our light," said Peter Witehira, managing director of Power Beat. 

Free-space optics has had uses elsewhere: After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Merrill Lynch used an FSOlink provided by Terabeam to connect two offices 2.6 kilometers apart. AirFiber helped transmit images of the 2002 MTV European Music Awards from the stadium to the telecommunication provider's headquarters using a 1.65-kilometer laser connection. 

One of the technology's key benefits is the amount of data that can be transmitted over short distances: The Merrill Lynch link transmitted data at a rate of 1 Gbps, nearly 1,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection. The lack of bureaucracy is another plus -- there are no spectrum licenses to buy. There are also no cables to lay, making installation cheap and simple relative to the potential connection speeds. 

"Say you want to get it across the motorway, even if it's only a hundred meters, digging a trench under a motorway to put a fiber-optic cable in costs you nearly a million dollars, but the cost of deploying this thing (FSO) is next to nothing," said John Harvey, professor of physics at the University of Auckland. "Some one rigs it up on a power pole and it's done." 

On the other hand, bad weather, or anything that might block the light's path, can cause slowdowns or power failures. 

"There are a number of problems," said Australia independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde. "The technology is definitely not stable, so it is very difficult to do it in a commercial sort of environment. It needs continuous fine-tuning." 

But by using light-emitting diodes as the light source, instead of lasers, Power Beat says the system, dubbed Megamantis, is easier to align. Light concentrators at the receiving end also mean that less accurate alignment is required than what's required with lasers. And by using LEDs, which are cheap, Power Beat aims to keep the cost of Megamantis low and the speed high. 

"With one LED today it is possible to get up to 400 Mbps in modulated speed," Witehira says. 

And Witehira says his company's system isn't affected by rain, and can be adjusted for fog. 

"You can overcome that by having a combination of two different wavelengths at the extremes you can get with light -- far infrared and near ultraviolet, which is a deep blue. If you have both of those running at once, you don't have a problem with fog. You may still have a problem with whiteout," he said. 

Getting around corners, Witehira said, is just a matter of bouncing light off glass or by making a network of lights. And the line-of-sight possibilities are growing: Eighteen months ago the company's technology could send data just 3 meters; now it can span 4 kilometers. The maximum line of sight at the moment is probably 11 kilometers, the company reckons. 

The only time during the Hamilton demonstration that the picture went fuzzy was when one of the Power Beat team members put his hand across the light source -- and even that, Witehira pointed out, has a plus side. "There is no stray radiation here," he says. "We can send more data and you can put your hand right in front of it."
The University of Auckland's Harvey said FSO technology works well in certain niches -- such as on distributed university or hospital campuses. 
"If you are just ringing your mother-in-law, that probably doesn't matter. But if you are dialing 111 (emergency), it probably does," Harvey said. "What I think people would accept with free-space optical is a high-speed link, which is available 97 percent of the time, and still have your ordinary telephone." 
Power Beat plans to promote Megamantis in its first incarnation for closed-circuit television and for data links between buildings. The company has a test system working at the local airport, relaying an image of the airport parking lot back to the Power Beat office across the road. In the Australian state of Queensland, the Peanut Company of Australia has used a Megamantis test link to transmit data from one building to another at its Kingaroy site. 

Witehira sees possibilities for his company's system as moving beyond a niche: "Much of the free-space optics out there have been concentrating on data transfer point-to-point, but we can spread it across the whole city. We could actually have a 360-degree array around the city. That then means that, for very low cost, you can establish your own community television broadcast system. 

"Ultimately this technology will make it possible for households in small communities to reach an enormous amount of information, at the speed of light, of course." 

The crowding of the radio spectrum may leave a light-based technology as the only option, said Megamantis investor Ross Palmer, an Australian businessman. "There may be a day when light is the only thing that works." 

Budde was more reserved about FSO's potential. 

"Something might happen technology-wise that stabilizes the technology and therefore makes it more commercial. That is quite possible," he said. "But at the moment the scientists have to go a very, very long way to make it work." 

Power Beat's Witehira shakes off such skepticism. 

At the Hamilton demonstration, he urged the guests -- who included New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark and the Maori Queen Te Arikuini Dame Te Atairangikaahu -- to "remember this night." 

"This is the beginning of the changing of the course of history in free-space communications," Witehira said.
*******************************