Clips March 26, 2003

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips March 26, 2003

ARTICLES

Passenger-Screening Plan Assailed (CAPPS) II
Computer Problems Slow Tracking of Foreign Students
Al-Jazeera Web Site Enduring Hack Attack
Iraq Blog: Hubbub Over a Headlock  
Missouri Lawmaker Creates Virtual Office 
Microsoft rations Hotmail users' e-mails to cut spam
Universities Exporting M.B.A. Programs via the Internet
Future software will shift weapons? directions in midair 
Data mining sparks debate among lawmakers, administration 
Study: E-government projects must advance cautiously 
House hearing offers clash over use of data mining
Dirty bomb? Grab your PDA!
States Seen As Lax on Database Security 
New technology gives birth to 'backpack journalist'


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Washington Post
Passenger-Screening Plan Assailed 
EU, Budget Office Among Those Saying System Is Not Ready
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Wednesday, March 26, 2003; Page A08 


The federal government's plans to develop a computer program to screen airline passengers came under assault yesterday from the European Union, civil libertarians and the Bush administration's own budget office, with each suggesting the government should resolve serious legal, privacy and operational questions before moving forward with the program. 

The Transportation Security Administration is testing a passenger-screening computer system with Delta Air Lines that would provide the government with more information about each passenger who makes an airline reservation, including an individual's personal and financial data. 

The system, which is supposed to replace a current computer program that assesses risk based on one-way tickets and other outdated measures, would then assign a color code to each passenger indicating the threat risk they present: green, yellow or red. 

Civil liberties groups have raised questions about the program, saying they want to know the specific information the government intends to collect, but the TSA has not provided much detail. 

Yesterday, the European Union said it is concerned that the TSA's new program would conflict with EU laws protecting personal data because the computer program would screen foreigners who fly to the United States. A program "with access to data banks in the European Union would raise issues with EU data-protection legislation," said a source with the European Commission. "The U.S. government should consult with us on such matters in order to avoid potential conflict." 

In addition, the Office of Management and Budget raised questions as to whether the new computer program would be effective in fighting terrorism. 

"I have a huge spotlight on that project," Mark A. Forman, associate director of the budget office, told the House Committee on Government Reform's subcommittee on technology and information policy, according to the Associated Press. "If we can't prove it lowers risk, it's not a good investment for government." 

A TSA spokesman said the agency is aware of the concerns and has a long way to go in developing its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II, or CAPPS II. 

"We are working together on this and we have a dialogue that seeks to respond to the issues and concerns raised during that process," said TSA spokesman Robert Johnson. 

Johnson said the TSA has a meeting scheduled with the administration's budget office later this week to continue discussing the concerns. 

Separately, several liberal and conservative organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Eagle Forum, urged lawmakers yesterday to ask the TSA tough questions about CAPPS II before it moves ahead. 

"Although the TSA's recent outreach to stakeholders is welcome, Congress should not allow the TSA to develop unilaterally a tool that could invade individual privacy and brand innocent airline passengers a security risk without meaningful review," the organizations wrote in a letter to the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. 
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Washington Post
Computer Problems Slow Tracking of Foreign Students
By Marcia Slacum Greene
Wednesday, March 26, 2003; Page A06 

A new automated system designed to track the nearly 1 million foreign students in the United States has been plagued by numerous computer problems, prompting some schools to temporarily abandon using it. 

Representatives of colleges, universities and foreign language schools required to use the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), say the program, intended to secure the nation against terrorists posing as foreign students, has been overwhelmed and unpredictable. It has taken hours to enter a single record or the system accepts data and later deletes it, they said. 

Also, a Harvard foreign student's record has suddenly appeared on a computer at Cornell University. George Mason University tried to retrieve its data but pulled up the private record of a Princeton University student. For a time, records crisscrossed the country so frequently that government troubleshooters gave the problem a name -- "bleeding." 

Worried that student records were not being saved, Georgetown University and the University of Maryland stopped entering data in the system for several days. And Southeastern University President Charlene Drew Jarvis is convinced that an error in the system resulted in a student's arrest. 

"They expect us to use a system that is hit and miss every other week," said David Clubb, director of the University of Pittsburgh's office of international services. "That is asking a lot while saying you will not get any more international students if you don't meet our deadlines." 

Congress mandated the $37 million system after authorities discovered that three of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were in the government's foreign student database. The Internet-based system has replaced a dysfunctional paper-based system. 

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- which in part replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- relies on the system for up-to-date information on all foreign nationals who apply for and receive student visas, using it to determine when students are out of status and to detect fraud. 

Academic officials worry that the computer glitches may have serious implications for the international student program. Currently, schools are entering data for new students, and the volume of information is expected to increase dramatically in coming months as they seek to meet an Aug. 1 deadline to enter records for foreign students. Some major universities enroll 1,500 to 4,000 foreign students. 

"Potentially, this could have an effect on our ability to admit next year's incoming class of foreign students," said Victor Johnson, associate executive director for public policy for the Association of International Educators. "In this environment of terrorism alerts, we face the possibility of having thousands of students in this country technically out of status due to SEVIS problems and subject to detention." 

The House Committee on Science has scheduled a hearing for today to review problems related to the computer tracking system and visa backlogs. Last week, the Justice Department's inspector general office concluded immigration officials lack adequate staff and oversight ability to ensure that schools certified to receive foreign students are legitimate schools. In the past, the report noted, "sham schools have been established as covers for alien smuggling operations." 

The report also raised doubts about the computer system's value as a national security measure. Schools are required to inform the government when students fail to report to school or drop out. But the Justice Department concluded that due to limited investigative resources, immigration authorities are "unable to investigate all foreign students who fail to enroll or fail to leave the United Stated once they depart school." 

Bureau of Immigration spokesman Chris Bentley said the agency disagrees with the inspector general's conclusions, and insisted that the computer system is only one phase of the revamped foreign student program. 

Bentley also said the bureau has corrected many of the computer glitches and continues to respond to complaints. "The system is operating the way we had hoped it would," he said. "We did not roll out a perfect system. We rolled out a system that we knew would have to be tweaked." 

International student advisers, however, said the bureau has been reluctant to acknowledge the magnitude of the problems. 

In some cases, the computer system has listed full-time foreign students as terminated. Schools say it has taken days, weeks or, in some cases, months to get the immigration bureau's help desk to make requested corrections. 

Southeastern University first noticed that the system incorrectly listed one of its full-time students as having dropped out and several times requested a correction, said Jarvis. But earlier this month the student, a marketing major from Thailand, was handcuffed and arrested at her home by immigration agents, Jarvis said. 

Bentley said the arrest was unrelated to the tracking system. When interviewed by agents, the student acknowledged she was working at a restaurant, a violation that placed her out of status. She has been released and give a notice to appear in immigration court. 

But Jarvis said she is convinced the student was singled out because of erroneous information in the tracking system. "Not only is the situation serious, it is frightening, " she said. "There is no reason to terrorize students to get at the goal of preventing terrorism."
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Los Angeles Times
Groups Say H&R Misuses E-Filing Data
By Kathy M. Kristof
Times Staff Writer

March 26, 2003

Consumer groups are complaining that tax preparation giant H&R Block Inc. is using personal information gathered via the U.S. government's free electronic tax-filing program to market products.

H&R Block is using the program "to gather the most intimate financial details that a consumer can have -- information on a tax return -- so they can sell these taxpayers all sorts of unrelated products," Jean Ann Fox, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, said Tuesday.

"This is a gross violation of the privacy of these taxpayers."

Fox's group belongs to a coalition that wrote Pam Olson, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary of tax policy, on Monday to protest "the deprivation of privacy protections" on the H&R Block Web site where people can file free electronic tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service.

Coalition members include the National Consumer Law Center, Consumers Union, U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Consumer groups were skeptical of the IRS teaming up with H&R Block and other tax preparation companies to make free electronic filing available to a broad swath of taxpayers, fearing that the firms would use it as a way to market fee-based services to taxpayers.

The groups say taxpayers who use the H&R Block site are confronted with pop-up adds offering mortgages, fee-based tax services and refund loans. The groups complain that users are required to accept a license agreement that allows their personal tax information to be collected by H&R Block and possibly used for marketing purposes.

An H&R Block official said the groups misunderstand the company's policy. Consumers who see the pop-up ads have gone through two consent screens, accepting both.

Only the license agreement is mandatory; the second "consent to receive personalized tax tips" screen is voluntary and is what generates the marketing pitches, the official said.

Nathaniel Norton, a legal aid lawyer from Weslaco, Texas, says he accepted H&R Block's license agreement, which was on the first screen. Norton didn't think much of it, he added, until he typed his mortgage interest information into the tax program and suddenly saw an offer for a refinancing loan through an H&R Block affiliate. And he said he had to respond to the pop-up offer before he could continue filing his tax return.

Along the way, the program also warned Norton that he could be missing tax breaks worth hundreds of dollars and offered another premium service -- for about $20 -- to have a tax expert review his return.

H&R Block spokesman Tom Linafelt said consumers can decline to receive the tips and offers, without jeopardizing their ability to free file.

He said the mortgage offers for fee-based tax advice or other financial services, such as individual retirement accounts, are sent only to those who also click affirmatively on a second screen titled "Consent to receive personalized tax tips and information."

The Treasury Department didn't respond to questions about the H&R Block site. The department said in a written statement:

"Unauthorized use of taxpayer information is a criminal offense.

"We appreciate the comments we receive on the Free File initiative, take them seriously, and have the IRS review them to ensure that there are no violations."
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Associated Press
Nat'l Do Not Call Sign Up Starts in July 
Wed Mar 26, 5:17 AM ET
By DAVID HO, Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON - People fed up with unwanted telemarketing can sign up in July for a national do-not-call list that will block many sales calls, the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday. 

   

The FTC will launch a Web site on July 1 so consumers can register online for the free service, the agency said. 


The FTC also will begin an eight-week rollout of a toll-free phone number where people also can register for the list. The number will first work on the West Coast and then spread across the country until it is available nationwide by the end of August. 


Beginning in September, telemarketers will have to check the list every three months to determine who does not want to be called. Those who call listed people could be fined up to $11,000 for each violation. Consumers would be able to file complaints by phone or online to an automated system. 


The government said it will begin enforcing the do-not-call list in October. 


The Web site address and phone number will be announced in June, the FTC said. People would need to renew their registration every five years. 


More than two dozen states already have their own do-not-call lists or legislation pending that would create them. Most states plan to add their lists to the national registry. 


Telemarketers say the registry will devastate their industry, endanger millions of jobs and send ripples through the economy. The Direct Marketing Association, an industry group, has sued the FTC on grounds the registry amounts to an unlawful restriction on free speech. 


The registry will be financed by fees collected from telemarketers and cost about $16 million in its first year. 


There are exceptions to the FTC's do-not-call protections. 


A company may call someone on the list if that person has bought, leased or rented from the company within the past 18 months. Telemarketers also can call people if they have inquired or applied for something from the company during the past three months. 


Charities, surveys and calls on behalf of politicians also are exempt. 


The FTC has limited authority to police telemarketing calls from certain industries, including airlines, banks and telephone companies. The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites), which oversees calls made by those industries, has been working with the FTC and is considering adding its clout to the program. 
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Associated Press
Al-Jazeera Web Site Enduring Hack Attack 
Wed Mar 26, 5:20 AM ET
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer 

Hackers attacked the Web site of Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera on Tuesday, rendering it intermittently unavailable, the site's host said. 


The newly launched English-language page, which went live Monday and posted images of the corpses of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq (news - web sites), was hardest hit in a bombardment of data packets known as a denial-of-service (news - web sites) attack. 


Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media and Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began Tuesday morning local time. 


Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English Web site, denied that an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. He said it was difficult to access because traffic was almost four times more than expected. 


The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers that host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the United States. Arrashid said he could not determine the attack's origin, but only the U.S. servers were affected, leading him to suspect that the attackers were in the United States. 


He said technicians were working to thwart the attack, but could not estimate when the site would be fully available again. 


In denial-of-service attacks, hackers normally send a deluge of false requests to Web servers, overloading them and making them unavailable to surfers. 


Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, is an unusually independent and powerful voice in the Arab world whose broadcasts of U.S. prisoners and war dead has angered many Americans. 


Earlier, Al-Jazeera said two reporters had their credentials revoked by the New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites) because of the network's coverage of the war. The exchange said the decision was prompted by space constraints. 


Al-Jazeera's English site was unavailable Tuesday from four out of five locations in the United States, said Roopak Patel, a senior analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that tracks Web performance. 


He said the Arabic site had starting Sunday experienced periods of very poor availability  which may have been caused by hackers, Patel said. 
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Wired News
Iraq Blog: Hubbub Over a Headlock  




02:00 AM Mar. 26, 2003 PT

Thousands of people from around the world who are anxious to understand what life is like for ordinary Iraqis in wartime turn daily to an online diary that purports to describe one man's view of life in Baghdad. 

But on Monday night and Tuesday morning, site visitors saw a faked shot of President George W. Bush holding Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in a playful headlock, instead of the authentic photos of Baghdad that normally appear on the Dear Raed weblog.

For the last six months the site's creator, who uses the pseudonym Salam Pax, has chronicled Iraq's political situation from the point of view of an ordinary Iraqi, covering the presidential elections, the effects of U.N. resolutions related to Iraq, the arrival of weapons inspectors and how it feels to know that bombs could strike your hometown any day. For many, the blog has put a personal face on the war. 

In the last couple days, however, parody photos appeared where the site's legitimate images should have been displayed, atop mock captions indicating either that Iraqi TV was showing images of the Photoshopped tussle between the two presidents or that the image portrayed "demonstrations in Iraqi cities." 

Some site visitors wondered whether Dear Raed had been hacked for political reasons, but the image swap was actually carried out by the angry owner of a service that stores photos for some blog creators. 

Taylor Suchan, who runs Industrial Death Rock and Pyxz.com out of Texas, said he redirected the links from Dear Raed's original photos to the parody image out of frustration. According to Suchan, the tremendous traffic to the Baghdad blog since Friday has essentially used up all his available bandwidth, making other sites' Industrial hosts inaccessible. 

Pax uses the image hosting service offered by Industrial and Pyxz to add photos to his blog. Bloggers can upload their images to Industrial's or Pyxz's servers, link to the images and then display photos on their blogs. Most free blogging services do not provide storage space for photos. 

Because of their personal nature, the vast majority of blogs draw a limited audience. But after the war broke out, Pax's site was featured in hundreds of news stories, including pieces by MSNBC, the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. The bandwidth demands caused by the ensuing stampede of visitors overwhelmed Industrial's servers, Suchan said. 

Suchan said he had tried to contact both Pax and Blogger, the free blog service owned by Google that hosts the Dear Raed site, to alert them to the problem, but received no response. 

So on Monday night Suchan changed the links from the photos that Pax stores on Industrial's servers and linked instead to a Bush and Hussein parody photo stored on Stileproject.com, a site that primarily features hard-core pornography. 

Suchan said he put up the parody photos instead of simply removing the links to the original images to draw attention to the load his server's were experiencing. He hoped the action would force some response from Blogger/Google. 

Redirecting the links also moved the traffic off his server and onto Stileproject, a very high-capacity server. Suchan said he doubts Stileproject even noticed the additional traffic. 

"I might be an a--hole for doing it," Suchan wrote in an e-mail interview. "But this guy (Pax) is killing my server." 

Suchan said that at various points over several days his server usage topped 15 megabits. His agreement with his ISP limits his daily usage to 2 megabits. 

"I just want my people to be able to use their websites," Suchan wrote. "On Tuesday morning I received many more e-mails from people wondering why their sites are down or their images are not coming up."

Suchan restored the links to the original Dear Raed images Tuesday morning, shortly after receiving an e-mail from Jason Shellen from Blogger. In the e-mail Shellen told Suchan that Blogger had given Pax an upgraded account that will allow him to upload photos directly to Blogspot.com, instead of having to rely on Suchan's servers. 

"But I need your help, however, as the images on this amazing site have appeared to be recently switched to a joke ... photo," Shellen wrote to Suchan.

"I don't know if this was your doing as a message that you were tired of the amount of traffic going to your servers or if this user's account has been compromised by someone else," Shellen wrote. "I don't care either way, all I am trying to do is obtain the original photos as they appeared on the site a few days ago and restore this site." 

Shellen also said CNN.com pulled a Reuters news story that had been published earlier on Monday "due to the photo replacement issue." 

Suchan grudgingly replaced Pax's legitimate images, and, as of Tuesday afternoon, his servers were still hosting the photos. Blogger requested copies of them to upload on its servers -- but that doesn't completely solve Suchan's problem. 

Several sites have linked directly to images from Raed or created copies (mirrors) of the site. Even if the original images are moved to Blogger's servers, Suchan worries that the links and mirror sites will continue to connect to his servers. 

The images on Suchan's servers are being viewed on average at least 140,000 times a day. "There have been hits in my log from every Internet-connected country on the planet," he wrote. 

Suchan said he hoped people who care about Dear Raed might consider making donations to help him support the increased traffic. Industrial and Pyxz are both hosted on donated space from his employer. 

"I have been trying to explain what's been happening to my employers and they've been really cool. Now that I have a more complete story to tell 'em, they might be a little more sympathetic to the whole cause," Suchan wrote. 

Pax wrote on his blog Monday that he was aware of the problems at Industrial. 

"I really have to apologize to the people at (Industrial) because the amount of traffic this blog has been getting cause their servers to go down," Pax wrote. 

In addition to the flap over the swapped images, there has been speculation over whether Pax is actually blogging from Baghdad. 

Most believe the blog is an authentic record, but others wonder whether it's part of the war propaganda from either the U.S. or Iraqi government. 

Pax addressed the "Is he real?" issue several days ago on his blog. 

"Please stop sending e-mails asking if I were for real ... don't believe it? Then don't read it," he wrote. "I am not anybody's propaganda ploy. Well, except my own." 

Pax temporarily took his blog down in January, after Reuters ran a story on it. According to later posts, Pax was worried the story might draw too much attention to his blog, where he has on occasion openly criticized Saddam's regime. 

Some readers are now concerned that Pax may be putting himself in danger by continuing to blog during the war, especially given the wide publicity the site has recently received. 

On Tuesday, several bloggers urged Pax to lie low for a while. "Zipper it," the bloggers advised. "You'll have lots of time to blog later." 
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Associated Press
Missouri Lawmaker Creates Virtual Office 
Wed Mar 26, 5:19 AM ET
By PAUL SLOCA, Associated Press Writer 

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Stepping into state Rep. Rob Schaaf's office in the stately old Missouri Capitol is like crossing a threshold into the future. 

   

There's no secretary, no filing cabinet. Business cards and meeting notices are promptly scanned into a computer. Visitors sit in front of a digital camera and leave messages on video disc. 


In a building that generates thousands of pounds of documents weekly, Schaaf and his office are virtually paperless. During lengthy debate on the floor or in scattered hearing rooms, Schaaf can get work done electronically. 


"My goal is to be a pioneer," Schaaf said. 


He even puts tech-savvy California lawmakers to shame. 


"I've never heard of anything so far-reaching as what this particular lawmaker is doing, trying to eliminate paper from his office and his life," said Evan Goldberg, chief of staff to California Sen. Debra Bowen, herself a technologically progressive lawmaker. 


Schaaf's legislative assistant, Ray Griggs, scans documents delivered to the office and places them in separate computer folders. 


"When Rob gets back here late at night he can sit there and watch these lobbyists and constituents talk about their problems, and he can turn around and call them back at his own leisure," Griggs said. 


Wherever he may be, Schaaf checks messages, committee schedules and those scanned documents by tapping his personal digital assistant, which he hooks up to a laptop in his office now and then to get new files. 


Schaaf, a 46-year-old freshman Republican, created his virtual office with his own high-powered computer, Griggs' video technology and some equipment provided by the state. 


His office is sparse. He has a pair of desks where the computers sit and two chairs for digital recording sessions. A television rests on a shelf for Schaaf to watch recordings. Nearby is a stack of jewel cases containing video discs. 


Schaaf believes the arrangement lets him sift through information quickly. 


"There is too much work to do and get it all done, so we had to figure out a way to be more efficient, and we are more efficient this way," Schaaf said. "And I think this brings me closer to people because they have greater access to me." 


Besides hearing directly from constituents on video disc, Schaff can send them recordings of himself. 


The Missouri Legislature has grappled for years with technology. 


Members of the Missouri House have been allowed to use personal laptop computers in the chamber since 1997. But the tradition-conscious Senate has repeatedly rejected the idea  even though live debate of both chambers is available over the Internet. 


Many lawmakers prefer to have paper in hand to conduct business  even if that makes their offices cramped. 

   



Pam Greenberg, who follows technology issues for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said more state lawmakers are embracing technology such as the personal digital assistant. 

In some states, like Texas and South Carolina, lawmakers can download updates on committee hearings right into their PDA, Greenberg said. 

Schaaf's approach is partly attributable to assistant Griggs, who runs a video production company and created several of Schaaf's campaign advertisements using computer graphics. 

Schaff's predecessor, state Sen. Charlie Shields, was impressed by the setup. 

"It's an interesting way to do things," said Shields, who is leading efforts to allow laptops in the Senate. "I'm not sure if it's going to work. We'll have to see." 

Schaaf, who had not previously held elective office, said Missouri lawmakers should embrace technology to better serve the public. 

"My colleagues will realize that they waste a tremendous amount of time, that they waste a tremendous amount of paper and that there will be a great cost saving by doing things digitally," Schaaf said. 

"The law will be digital, all of the bills will be digital, instead of all this volume of paper. It's just going to take many years." 
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Seattle Post Intelligencer
Microsoft rations Hotmail users' e-mails to cut spam
By DAN RICHMAN
Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Microsoft Corp. has moved to combat the ever-increasing spread of unsolicited e-mail, or spam, by capping the number of e-mails that users of its free Hotmail service can send each day.

By limiting to 100 the number of messages that can be sent in any 24- hour period, Microsoft's MSN division hopes to stop people from using its service to send spam, lead product manager Lisa Gurry said.

"Spam is an industrywide problem, but MSN and Hotmail are strongly committed to doing everything we can to make sure we're not a source," Gurry said.

She said the 100-message limit will affect between 1 percent and 2 percent of Hotmail's 110 million worldwide users. The company gave users no notice of the limit, which was put into place earlier this month. The limit isn't noted anywhere on the site.

"It affects so few users, we didn't think any notice was required," Gurry said. A previous cap, which she would not describe, set a higher limit.

The limit doesn't apply to users who buy extra Hotmail storage, which costs $19.95 a year, to those who use the $9.95-a-month MSN8 software, or to those who use MSN as their dial-up or broadband Internet service provider. 

Though those charges aren't high, Microsoft hopes they'll be sufficient to deter spammers, who Gurry said "are looking for the easiest route."

The other major free e-mail service, Yahoo! also imposes a limit on outgoing e-mails, but won't describe it. Spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said most users will never know about the limit because they won't reach it. Both services also offer increasingly sophisticated filters that direct spam into "bulk mail" folders for easy deletion.

About 40 percent of all e-mail today is spam, up from 8 percent in 2001, according to San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc., a maker of anti-spam software. A total of 1 trillion spam e-mails will be sent this year, according to International Data Corp. 

"Spam is a bigger problem than ever, and most consumers are sick of it," MSN's Gurry said.

P-I reporter Dan Richman can be reached at 206-448-8032 or danrichman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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New York Times
March 26, 2003
Universities Exporting M.B.A. Programs via the Internet
By OTTO POHL

LONDON  If Jeremy Hallett had his way, he would be sitting on a leafy university campus in the United States with plenty of time to contemplate the theories of business.

Instead, he spends hectic lunch hours and long evenings in his office cubicle here, earning his M.B.A. 

"It's not a perfect world," he says with a shrug.

Driven by the mantra of globalization and enabled by Internet-based technologies, M.B.A. programs in the United States are expanding rapidly into new markets overseas. The schools are looking for full-time, on-campus students seeking an international M.B.A. degree as well as part-timers like Mr. Hallett, who want to learn from afar while they continue working.

Some of the universities are virtual, offering American degrees via the Internet. Mr. Hallett, a London-based senior vice president at Thomson Financial, is earning his M.B.A. from Cardean University, a newly created entity that exists only in cyberspace and markets a course package created by other institutions, including Stanford, Columbia and the University of Chicago.

For Mr. Hallett, it was the availability of these prestigious schools on his computer screen that persuaded him to enroll. "These schools are recognized around the world," he said. "This degree will be truly international."

The M.B.A. is an American creation. More than 100,000 students are enrolled in M.B.A. programs in the United States, and now tens of thousands more are enrolled overseas. Even the threat of global recession has not diminished its popularity, as unemployed workers sharpen their job skills. 

The biggest growth opportunity today for American online universities is inside the United States, but the schools are also looking to carry the prestige of American education overseas.

"We're serving a global market," said Andrew Rosenfield, the founder and chairman of Cardean University. A third of Cardean's students are outside the United States, and he expects the proportion to grow significantly over time.

"The United States certainly has no monopoly on running successful businesses," he says, adding that business students have to get their training somewhere.

Traditional campus-based programs are looking to train them as well. Columbia formed a partnership with the London Business School, and the Stern School of Business at New York University recently inaugurated the Trium M.B.A. degree with the London School of Economics and H.E.C. Paris. Thunderbird, an M.B.A. program in Arizona that bills itself as the oldest international M.B.A. program in the world, established its own satellite campus in France last fall.

These programs are designed to appeal to executives who want globally recognized names on their résumés.

Lawrence Naested, an American Express executive in London, is enrolled in the Trium program, studying in places like Hong Kong, Paris, Brazil, and New York. "This is far and away superior to a traditional M.B.A. program," he says. "Mixing with different backgrounds and nationalities far outweighs spending a year in a book."

Even schools that are very careful about diluting their brand names are looking for new growth opportunities. The Harvard Business School is keeping its campus-based education sacrosanct while offering noncredit Harvard-branded education to managers who can tap into a database for answers to specific questions. Instead of teaching what may be needed one day, they offer continuous assistance to managers confronted with real-life situations. 

"We're moving from just-in-case education to just-in-time education," says Jonathon D. Levy, vice-president of online learning solutions at Harvard Business School Publishing, a subsidiary of the Harvard Business School.

This wealth of new business models centered on education has caught the eye of investors. "Very solid returns, solid profits, and good cash flow," says Richard Close, a vice president of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, summing up why he feels for-profit post-secondary education is a great investment opportunity. "Online, you can leverage that success even more."

Most of the online universities are hoping to emulate the success of the University of Phoenix, whose growth is one of the most remarkable stories in for-profit academia. The university, with 140,000 students, has become the largest university in the country in terms of enrollment. About 60,000 of those students attend classes online and 4,000 are overseas. The stock of Apollo Group, which owns the university, has kept pace, rising 500 percent since January 2000. 

There have also been plenty of failures. Many online programs founded during the Internet boom did little but hemorrhage money. Pensare, an online M.B.A. company using Duke courses, has been scrapped. Quisic, an online program developed with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, was closed.last year, and SUNY Buffalo had an online M.B.A. program that lasted only 18 months. 

Administrators of campus-based programs believe the failure of many online programs highlights the importance of extensive classroom time and personal interaction. And while few of those involved with online degrees dispute the superiority of full-time, face-to-face learning, they point to the much larger market of those who would like an education but cannot quit their jobs or travel to a campus.

Unlike elite campus-based programs, which offer exclusivity along with the degree, the online programs accept anyone with a good credit history and a reasonable likelihood of finishing the program. The online programs are expensive  Cardean's M.B.A. costs $24,000  but that is still much less than a program like Trium, which costs $92,000.

The success of the American M.B.A. overseas already has some foreign schools marketing themselves as alternatives. "We reflect an Anglo-American way of doing business," says Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, the director of the British Open University Business School master's program.

But no nationality or new technology makes getting a job easier these days. Sarah Ferguson, an Open University student, was excited to hear that an American reporter was writing about M.B.A.'s. "Can you mention that I'm looking for a job in the States?" she asked. 
*******************************
Government Computer News
Future software will shift weapons? directions in midair 
By Vandana Sinha 
03/25/03 

Software allowing instantaneous communications makes the war in Iraq unlike any other in history, a federal executive said today. 

The ability to send instant e-mail and handheld communications to the battlefield is a fundamental change, said David H. Crandall, assistant deputy administrator for research, development and simulation for the National Nuclear Security Administration. 

Crandall said software development has much further to go. 

?We?ve come a long way, and this war will test that, but I don?t think we?re finished,? he said at an Arlington, Va., software quality forum sponsored by his agency and the Energy Department. 

?The warfighters? ability to make decisions is still behind the ability to report on what they?re doing,? he said. For example, he said, the military can now change the targeted coordinates of weapons before they've been fired, as may have been done after intelligence data indicated Saddam Hussein?s whereabouts last Wednesday. 

But, Crandall said, development must continue until military software can literally change a weapon?s direction while it?s still in midair. That kind of instant decision-making ability might have prevented the recent hit on a Syrian bus crossing a targeted bridge, he said. 

Whether deployed for war or everyday business use, such software evolutions take time, Crandall said. 

New communications software must fully displace existing paper-based processes. Instead of adding on to them, he said, ?we?ve got to eliminate some of this stuff.?
*******************************
Government Executive
March 25, 2003 
Data mining sparks debate among lawmakers, administration 
By Drew Clark, National Journal's Technology Daily 

Lawmakers and administrators sparred over the use and treatment of government data mining at a hearing held by a House Government Reform subcommittee.

Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., defended the use of data mining at a Tuesday hearing even as the White House Office of Management and Budget's top information official rebuked a controversial project to screen airline passengers.

Speaking of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS II) under development, OMB Associate Director Mark Forman said, "CAPPS II was not approved by OMB to proceed on the pace they seem to want to proceed." 

"I have a huge spotlight on that project. They are late in getting back the information that they need to proceed," continued Forman, who oversees information technology and e-government.

He was responding to a question from Rep. William Clay, D-Mo., who referenced CAPPS II and asked, "What is the OMB doing to prohibit discrimination in air transportation?" 

While touching on CAPPS II and the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) research project, the hearing focused on lesser known federal and state data-mining projects.

"There are a number of proven uses for this technology," said Adam Putnam, R-Fla., chairman of the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census. He added: "We must always be vigilant of any potential encroachment on the privacy of the American public." 

Davis was critical of any attempts to set limits on the use of information systems by either the government or the private sector. Referring to the role of data-sharing in the economy, he said, "The oil of today is information: how we identify it and how we get it out of the ground." 

If we had EPA regulations on oil in the early part of the 20th century, we never would have got it out of the ground," Davis said. "We need to be slow about coming in and regulating" use of data-mining technologies that would foreclose market opportunities. 

The remark prompted a rebuttal from George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen: "The complete transparency of informationwhich many Silicon Valley executives are arguing forwould not be consistent with the Fourth Amendment," Rosen said, referring to the constitutional bar on unreasonable searches.

In his testimony, Rosen distinguished between what he called "personal dataveillance"the targeting surveillance of individuals identified as dangerouswith "mass dataveillance" of the sort contemplated by the TIA.

The Constitution's framers sought to avoid such mass surveillance when they barred "general warrants" that would have allowed British soldiers to rummage through individuals' homes searching for incriminating evidence, he said, adding that CAPPS II, which seeks to check airline traveler information with private databases and an FBI "watch list," might fall into this category. 

But Forman, who testified that government data mining had been effective in cutting fraud and waste, offered a different objection. 

"We could spend $100 million on an information technology system with terrific screens, but at the end of the day, if it doesn't somehow lower the risk, I would have to say that it is not a good IT investment for the federal government."
*******************************
Government Executive
March 25, 2003 
Study: E-government projects must advance cautiously 
By Drew Clark, National Journal's Technology Daily 

Because the federal government provides online services and issues identity documents, it must proceed with caution in providing e-government services that respect citizens' privacy, said a report issued Tuesday afternoon by the National Academies of Science.

Because federal agencies like the General Services Administration issue digital certificates as well as engage in online transactions, "the government has at least these dual roles and must pay attention to its decisions" and their impact on privacy, said Stephen Kent, BBN Technologies chief scientist and chairman of the NAS committee that produced the report. 

Kent said two GSA authentication systems known as Advanced Certificates for Electronic Services (ACES) and E-Authenticate fail to acknowledge the significance of this dual government role.

The report, "Who Goes There? Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy," explored the privacy implications of the increasing use of digital certificates by both the private sector and the government. 

A key committee conclusion is that "the way in which a specific authentication technology is used, and the scope, has a lot more to do with the privacy implications than the specific choice itself," said Kent.

In other words, whether biometrics, identity cards, passwords, or public key cryptography adequately protects privacy has less to do with the technology itself and more to do with how it is implemented.

As an example, Kent cited the contrast between a company deploying a public key infrastructure (PKI) to authenticate its employees or customers on a Web site and a "giant PKI that does everything. That does provide exactly the same kind of implications that can be used to undermine privacy." 

"The same technologyPKIcan be thoroughly supportive of privacy concerns, or detrimental to privacy," he said.

Kent criticized the PKI implementation of ACES and its E-Authenticate system. 

He said that ACES required users to obtain a digital certificate from a private certification authority when it could have issued digital certificates on its own. "Every time a user comes back [to the government Web site], you must pay a fee to whichever private sector certification authority" issued the credential, he said.

"That is providing a whole bunch of information to the private sectorinformation that we really didn't need to do," said Kent. Because individuals are generally not free to avoid doing business with the government, "the government has to be careful to not impose authentication system requirements."

The report also raised concerns about the way in which identity cards have been used in "secondary" ways for which they were not designed, as when individuals are asked to present their drivers' license as proof of age, address or name. 

"Secondary uses of authentication systems often lead to privacy and security problems," the report found. "They can compromise the underlying mission of the original system."

The 16-member committee included top scientists at AT&T, Columbia University, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft and the University of California at Berkeley.
*******************************
Computerworld
House hearing offers clash over use of data mining
By Grant Gross, IDG News Service
MARCH 25, 2003

A coalition of privacy groups wants the U.S. Congress to halt the creation of a federal database of airline-passenger profiles until more details about who would be included and how it would be operated are available. Meanwhile, the White House's CIO questioned today at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing whether that data mining program would be effective. 
At that hearing, a law professor and congressman disagreed over whether Congress should regulate government data mining efforts, while most witnesses praised the use of data analysis for everything from reducing credit card abuse in government to catching terrorists. 

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic magazine, said that "suspicionless surveillance of large groups of people" would violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. 

Rosen said the Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness (TIA) research project, which focuses on surveillance through mass data mining, and the Transportation Security Administration's proposed second version of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) are examples of such "mass dataveillance." 

"It's possible to design data mining technologies in ways that strike better rather than worse balances between liberty and security," Rosen told the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census. That subcommittee falls under the House Committee on Government Reform. 

Congress has decided to put a hold on the hotly debated TIA project, but Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who chairs the full government reform committee, questioned whether regulating data mining would slow the benefits of such technology. 

Calling information retrieval the "oil of the 21st century," Davis said the benefits of data analysis are many. "My theory is we need to be slow about coming in and overregulating sometimes," he said. "You let the industry come up with its own protocols before the government comes in and starts imposing a regulatory and taxing regime that could really stifle the growth and potential of this." 

Rosen asked Davis to consider whether data sharing that's appropriate in private industry would be appropriate in national security agencies. "Much of the history of our privacy laws for the past 50 years have been based on the idea that completely unregulated information sharing is not consistent with the values of the Constitution or American citizens," Rosen said. "We don't want every low-level information officer in the field to know ... that I'm late on my child-support payments or that I'm late on my credit card. Complete transparency of information, total unregulated use, which many Silicon Valley people are urging, wouldn't be consistent with the values of the Fourth Amendment." 

Rosen questioned whether huge government data mining programs would be effective enough to warrant the added intrusion, but Davis argued that most of the information that would be used and analyzed together is available on separate government databases. "We know, for example, with the terrorists on 9/11, the information was out there," he said. "Had we been able to collate that information and get that in one place, we could have prevented that from happening. That's something you list as an infringement on privacy, but what do you say to the victims and the families of the 3,000 people who died that day?" 

Meanwhile, a coalition of civil liberties and privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote a letter to Davis and ranking committee Democrat Henry Waxman, urging Congress to stop the CAPPS II program unless it is proven to be effective and consistent with privacy principles. Saying CAPPS II would attempt to assess the security risk of every single airline passenger based on commercial and government data, the letter asks Congress to "start asking questions about CAPPS II now." 

But Mark Forman, associate director for information technology and e-government in the White House's Office of Management and Budget, said at the hearing that he, too, is waiting for details about CAPPS II, and that the Transportation Security Administration was tardy in answering his request. It doesn't make sense for the government to spend "hundreds of millions of dollars on a new IT system with very pretty screens" if it doesn't protect the U.S. against terrorism, said Forman, who is often referred to as the White House's CIO. 

The Transportation Security Administration did not have an immediate comment on the letter or Forman's comments. 

Beyond the proposed CAPPS II or TIA, the federal government doesn't seem to have the kind of mass data mining programs Rosen is worried about, Forman said. In a search of government resources in preparation for the House hearing, Forman said he found no data mining efforts that searched databases without first pinpointing a suspect. 

A series of witnesses at the hearing praised the potential of data mining applications. Paula Dockery, a state senator from Florida, said her state has used data mining to gather information on suspected criminals, although the state requires a reasonable suspicion before its Financial Crime Analysis Center turns its data analysis on a suspect. 

Gregory Kutz, director of financial management and assurance for the U.S. General Accounting Office, said his agency has used data mining to catch government employees using office credit cards on everything from escort services to Internet gambling to a down payment on a home. Kutz presented evidence of personal purchases a government employee made recently using a government credit card during a four-day shopping spree, in which the user ran up more than $9,100 at various retail stores. 
*******************************
Computerworld
Dirty bomb? Grab your PDA!
By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service
MARCH 25, 2003

Devotees of personal digital assistants (PDA) can now put "survival" alongside "calendar" and "address book" in the list of useful applications, as two companies announced release of Terrorism Survival Plan software for PDAs. 
The new database application is a joint effort by Stephenson Strategies Inc. in Medfield, Mass., and Town Compass LLC in Seattle, according to a statement from the two companies. The software works on handhelds and other portable devices that run either the Palm OS or Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 operating systems. 

Terrorism Survival Plan brings together terrorism response information published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state and local governments. Information from government guides published in the U.K., Japan and Israel is also included in the database, the companies said. 

The idea for the new product has its origin in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when both the federal government and citizens were caught unprepared and uninformed, said W. David Stephenson, principal at Stephenson Strategies, a consulting firm. "The only effective response on 9/11 was from passengers on Flight 93 who, because they were told by families what was happening, took matters into their own hands," Stephenson said. 

The federal government hasn't done a good job of providing citizens with information on how to respond to attacks, which could diminish fear and a sense of vulnerability, he said. 

Terrorism Survival Plan uses Town Compass' DataViewer application to organize and display content from the antiterrorism database on the Palm OS and Pocket PC 2002. DataViewer enables large databases to be easily displayed and navigated on small screens, such as those on PDAs, according to the statement from the companies. 

The software is initially being sold as two separate modules, one for survival planning and a second for response. Each costs $3.95. Alternatively, users can buy the two modules in a bundled package that costs $5.95. The latter price includes free revisions containing updated information, Stephenson said. 

With the survival planning module, users can get information on designing an emergency response plan for families and the elderly and infirm, Stephenson said. 

In the event of an attack, the response module enables users to drill down from top-level categories, such as Assess the Situation, to more specific instructions, such as checking in with a designated emergency contact, evacuating a high rise or checking for fire. 

Stephenson Strategies collected and summarized information for the Terrorism Survival Plan database, boiling hundreds of pages of information down into more than 700 short text summaries on topics such as preparing emergency supply kits, evacuating and finding shelter. 

While he acknowledged that someone's first response during a terrorist attack might not be to pull out his PDA stylus and start tapping, Stephenson said that if people know that reliable information is available they will probably use it. "What I'd like to think is that even though initial reaction may be panic, they'll eventually realize 'Hey, I've got stuff on my Palm Pilot'," Stephenson said. 

Some federal officials appear to have come to the same conclusion. On Friday, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said that his agency will begin a three-month pilot program to transmit urgent information about biological agents to the PDAs of health-care clinicians (see story). The program is designed to test ways for federal officials to communicate with clinicians during a bioterrorist attack. 

For Stephenson, the question is not whether technology will play a role in society's response to a future terrorist attack, but what role it will play. "People will use whatever technology they have at their command. The question is, will they use it out of sheer panic, or are we going to equip them with the information they need to act as calmly and purposefully as possible?" 

The new software is available immediately from PocketDirectory.com, Handango.com and PalmGear.com, the companies said.
*******************************
Washington Post
States Seen As Lax on Database Security 
Study Faults Efforts To Police Insurers 
By Jonathan Krim
Wednesday, March 26, 2003; Page E05 
An overwhelming majority of states have failed to require insurance companies to protect their computerized data from hacking and other attacks, according to a study that raises questions about how aggressively states are tackling cybersecurity overall.

Only 14 states, including Virginia, comply with federal mandates to help ensure the protection of computer systems that hold confidential information about millions of people, the study found. 

Maryland and 20 other states have no such policies even under discussion, while 15 states and the District have pending regulations. The results were similar to those reached by the General Accounting Office last year.

The study does not claim that insurance companies' data are insecure. Rather, the survey shows that most states are not monitoring and evaluating whether the industry's cybersecurity efforts are sufficient.

Two recent incidents particularly alarmed security experts. A University of Texas student hacked into the school's database and stole 55,000 Social Security numbers. And an intruder gained access to 8 million Visa, MasterCard and American Express cardholders after breaking into the data of a company that processes online credit card orders.

"If, God forbid, something should happen, there's nothing in place that is strategic in nature" for coordinating a state response to a major computer virus or other cyber-attack, said Lee M. Zeichner, who heads the Falls Church research and consulting firm that did the study. Nor has there been an assessment of how vulnerable the systems in most states might be, as required by federal law, he said. 

Maryland officials declined to comment.

Although the study looked only at the insurance industry, Zeichner said the results demonstrate a widening gap between state and federal attention to cybersecurity. 

"As the nation engages more directly in Iraq, and continues to fight terrorism in the homeland, state governments must harden local infrastructure, collaborate with the business community and enhance response capabilities," the study concludes.

Texas is one of the states cited by Zeichner as having no cybersecurity planning when it comes to financial institutions.

Ben Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Insurance, said his agency assumes that as a part of complying with rules governing the handling of confidential data, financial institutions will protect their networks.

"We think it's one and the same," Gonzalez said. "Disclosure is a violation whether it is intentional or accidental."

But Gonzalez acknowledged that when the state conducts financial examinations of companies it regulates, it looks only at how firms handle data, not at their policies for protecting computer networks against intrusions.

That's a mistake, according to Zeichner and other security experts. The national organization of state insurance commissioners issued proposed guidelines for network protection, but they have not been adopted in most states.

Roberta B. Meyer, senior counsel for the American Council of Life Insurers, said her industry supports the guidelines and takes cybersecurity seriously. The industry does not, however, have cybersecurity standards for its members.

Gregory V. Serio, New York state's superintendent of insurance and an official in the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said industry regulators often participate in broader state cybersecurity efforts even if they have not adopted separate rules for industries they monitor. New York has adopted separate regulations aimed at the insurance industry.

Richard D. Perthia, director of the CERT Internet security coordination center at Carnegie Mellon University, said that many states are strongly focused on cybersecurity, particularly their own networks and systems.

But he said states need a better set of coordinated systems for responding to cyber threats and attacks wherever they may occur.

John A. McCarthy, executive director of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Project at George Mason University, said states are making great strides. But he said many states still need to more deeply incorporate cybersecurity into their broader terrorism-security programs.

"In a post-9/11 world . . . we provide first responders with powerful tools, and as that process becomes more dependent on technology, you better be talking about security," he said.
*******************************
USA Today
New technology gives birth to 'backpack journalist'
By Rachel Konrad, Associated Press
March 26, 2003

Armed with $15,000 in satellite phones and computers, Preston Mendenhall is a journalistic one-man band, writing stories, taking photographs and shooting video in combat zones. 

The international editor for MSNBC.com has joined other reporters in Iraq, where he is recording the reaction of the Kurds in the northern part of the country to the American-led bombing. 

He represents a new breed of reporter: the "backpack journalist." 

These journalists rely on lightweight laptops, satellite phones, inexpensive editing software and digital cameras  equipment that is a fraction of the cost and size of conventional, shoulder-mounted gear. They file video from some of the most remote spots on Earth, supplying material primarily to the Web, but occasionally to television. 

"You get a connection, set up the camera, point it at yourself and just do it  you're live," Mendenhall said via satellite phone. "But if there's any weapons of mass destruction, I'm outta here." 

The technology often gives them greater mobility than camera crews. 

"The people who can shoot video, write stories, do radio on the side, basically do it all  these are the journalists of the future," said John Schidlovsky, director of the Washington-based Pew Fellowship in International Journalism. "The technology has made journalism much more immediate and instantaneous." 

Backpackers  also called solo journalists, or "sojos"  are a tiny minority of the hundreds of foreign journalists in and around Iraq, and they will not eclipse mainstream media anytime soon. 

Because they often work alone, and do everything themselves, they can fall prey to fatigue, fear and confusion. 

Some experts also worry that less-seasoned backpackers, particularly those who post directly to Web sites and do not file through editors back home, will produce reports that lack context or analysis. 

"Backpack journalists have to know the difference between when you're a lone wolf and when you're part of a greater whole  and they have to file with that in mind," said Jane Ellen Stevens, a pioneer backpack journalist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Stevens specializes in science and technology and has been reporting backpack-style since 1997 from such locales as a research icebreaker in Antarctica and a space camp in Russia. 

Travis Fox, a video journalist for WashingtonPost.com, filed footage on Saturday of coalition troops in Umm Qasr, Iraq, building a prisoner of war camp. 

For most of his stories, Fox uses a Sony PD150: a roughly $7,000, 12-pound digital video camera with a five-hour battery. The gear is less than half the weight and one-tenth the cost of equipment used by crews for large networks. 

But Fox, one of hundreds of U.S. journalists "embedded" with U.S. troops, knows that no medium can mask the limits of human endurance. 

"We're going to make a run for the border tomorrow, early," Fox said wearily from a Kuwaiti hotel before the war started. "There are roadblocks. It's a long shot. I'm not so much nervous or excited as I'm tired." 

Many backpackers worry about battery life and technical hiccups, and having no backup from co-workers. 

CNN correspondent Kevin Sites is a pioneer backpack war correspondent who mixes solo with team coverage and has been frustrated at times by the technical hurdles. In one recent entry on his personal Web journal, he complained, "Iraq = tech hell." 

Other media organizations have shied away from backpacker technology because the images are too grainy. 

London-based Associated Press Television News relies primarily on Sony's broadcast-quality electronic news gathering equipment  a $70,000 package that includes a shoulder-mounted camera, tripod, lens, batteries, lights and microphones. APTN usually dispatches a camera person, who hauls the 30-pound camera, as well as an on-camera journalist, who totes gear as well. 

APTN has purchased smaller cameras, but editorial manager David Modrowski said the company has no plans to switch over entirely to backpack-style equipment. 

"In proper, full sunlight, it's pretty tough for the untrained eye to tell the difference," Modrowski said of the lighter equipment. "But when you notice it is when you get to low-light conditions, and certainly now we're seeing a lot of nighttime activity in Iraq." 
*******************************


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Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber:

Welcome to the March 26, 2003 edition of ACM TechNews,
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ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 474
Date: March 26, 2003

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Top Stories for Wednesday, March 26, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Privacy Groups Fight Government Data Mining"
"Engineers Create World's First Transparent Transistor"
"Data Expert Is Cautious About Misuse of Information"
"Coming of the Green Computers"
"Can IT Still Attract the Best and Brightest?"
"Peer-to-Peer Networks Can't Be Unplugged"
"Web Hacking Is Up as Tensions Rise"
"Antispam Crusaders Call for New Laws"
"DNS Expert: More Sophisticated Internet Attacks Coming"
"E-Mail Patterns Map Corporate Structure"
"Are Wireless Networks Secure Yet?"
"Making Computers Talk"
"Bio-Battery Runs on Shots of Vodka"
"SALT Sets the Standard for Web-Based Voice Applications"
"Seeking Additional Security After a Big Theft, JSTOR Tests
 Internet2's Shibboleth"
"Iraq Still Online"
"E-Mail For Everyone"
"Seizing the Moment"
"The Relentless Storm"

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

"Privacy Groups Fight Government Data Mining"
An alliance of privacy groups including the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the
Electronic Privacy Information Center fired off a letter to Reps.
Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Tom Davis (R-Va.), advising Congress ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item1

"Engineers Create World's First Transparent Transistor"
Oregon State University engineers have built the world's first
transparent transistor out of zinc oxide, and OSU electrical and
computer engineering professor John Wager characterizes the
breakthrough as "a significant new advance in basic electronics ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item2

"Data Expert Is Cautious About Misuse of Information"
In-Q-Tel CEO Gilman Louie told PC Forum attendees on Monday that
a proposal favored by some technology executives--one calling for
a large database on citizens' activities that government
officials would have unrestricted access to--is "very dangerous." ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item3

"Coming of the Green Computers"
Spurred by the enactment of the European Union's Waste Electrical
and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Restriction of Hazardous
Substances (RoHS) directives last month, the U.S. computer
industry is giving serious consideration to designing more ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item4

"Can IT Still Attract the Best and Brightest?"
The IT industry's salad days may be over, which raises the
question of whether it can continue to bring in top talent.
Exacerbating the situation are morale-dampening mass layoffs and
salary declines plaguing the IT sector.  "I think a lot of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item5

"Peer-to-Peer Networks Can't Be Unplugged"
Despite legal and technological assaults against them,
peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks are not going to be shut
down any time soon, according to industry experts.  Late last
year, a team of four Microsoft researchers, working ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item6

"Web Hacking Is Up as Tensions Rise"
As the war with Iraq continues, defacement of Web sites is
increasing in frequency, and many security experts claim that
greater damages could be perpetrated in the near future.
Currently, hackers are focusing on replacing original Web ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item7

"Antispam Crusaders Call for New Laws"
Outspoken critics of unsolicited commercial email are urging
Congress to enact a federal ban against spam, arguing their case
with a March 21 appeals court ruling that supports a federal
regulation against "junk" faxes.  Electronic Privacy Information ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item8

"DNS Expert: More Sophisticated Internet Attacks Coming"
Domain Name System (DNS) designer Paul Mockapetris argues that
the denial-of-service attacks launched against the DNS last
October were but a foretaste of more advanced assaults in the
future.  He contends that future attacks will target DNS ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item9

"E-Mail Patterns Map Corporate Structure"
Graphing the flow of email exchanges within an enterprise could
yield a blueprint of the company's corporate framework, according
to a study from Hewlett-Packard researchers Joshua Tyler, Dennis
Wilkinson, and Bernardo Huberman.  The scientists note that their ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item10

"Are Wireless Networks Secure Yet?"
The wired equivalent privacy (WEP) security standard--seen by
many as the reason wireless local area networks (WLANs) are so
insecure--will be replaced by the Wi-Fi protected access (WPA)
protocol when it is rolled out in April by the Wi-Fi Alliance, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item11

"Making Computers Talk"
Synthetic-speech systems are increasing in sophistication thanks
to the emergence of faster computers and cheap data storage, and
one of the most advanced systems is IBM's Supervoices, which
boasts natural-sounding speech and unlimited vocabulary--elements ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item12

"Bio-Battery Runs on Shots of Alcohol"
St. Louis University researcher Shelley Minteer and colleagues
revealed at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting on
Monday that they have created an enzyme-catalyzed ethanol fuel
cell that could eventually be used to power laptop computers and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item13

"SALT Sets the Standard for Web-Based Voice Applications"
The Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) standard, a new voice
interface technology under consideration by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), is a Web technology designed to enable voice
interfaces on embedded devices such as those used for telematics ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item14

"Seeking Additional Security After a Big Theft, JSTOR Tests
 Internet2's Shibboleth"
In the wake of a raid on JSTOR's online subscription databases
last fall, in which roughly 50,000 digitized articles were stolen
before the intrusion was detected and halted, the nonprofit
scholarly journal licenser has equipped its Web servers with ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item15

"Iraq Still Online"
As of March 21, Iraq's major Web sites were still operating
despite the continuing war, including Uruklink.net, the
government's official site.  The site featured the current date
and also displayed links to video streams of the recent interview ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item16

"E-Mail For Everyone"
Some companies are trying out streamlined email access so that
all members of the workforce--not just the higher-ups--are better
informed, and have a closer connection to employers that fuels
productivity growth; other hoped-for benefits of such a tool ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item17

"Seizing the Moment"
The Justice Department's Domestic Security Enhancement Act
(DSEA), a follow-up to the USA Patriot Act, calls for a dramatic
expansion of domestic law enforcement powers that threatens to
further undermine civil liberties, critics charge.  As currently ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item18

"The Relentless Storm"
The question of whether Bell Labs Research could survive being
shorn of parent company AT&T has been tested over the last
several years, when economic fallout led to the shutdown of its ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0326w.html#item19


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Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber:

Welcome to the March 17, 2003 edition of ACM TechNews,
providing timely information for IT professionals three times a
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 470
Date: March 17, 2003

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Top Stories for Monday, March 17, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Internet, Wireless to Play Key Role In an Iraq War"
"Network Guardians Face Thorny Job"
"Does Cyberterrorism Pose a True Threat?"
"Tech Firms Tackle Spam"
"Paper Speeds Video Access"
"U.S. Nanotech Funding Expected to Hit $1 Billion"
"Grid Computing Shows Mettle, ROI In Research-Focused IT
 Organizations"
"Programmers to Compete in Calif."
"PCI-X Marks the Spot for IBM, HP"
"Lilith Stirs Interest in Technology Among Girls"
"Sustainable Computing Consortium Hosts Workshop on Trust and
 Dependability in Wireless Environments"
"Green Plans for Tiny Tech"
"Homeland Cybersecurity Efforts Doubted"
"Turning Out Quality"
"Spambusters"
"Presence Technology"
"2003 and Beyond"
"Can Sensemaking Keep Us Safe?"

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

"Internet, Wireless to Play Key Role In an Iraq War"
The U.S. military will showcase a number of digital war-fighting
technologies in the event of an Iraqi war.  Analyst Steve Sigmond
says, for example, that systems will be melded to give carrier
battle groups a consolidated, real-time view of the action, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item1

"Network Guardians Face Thorny Job"
A gathering of communications industry officials under the
auspices of the Federal Communications Commission is discussing
how the sector can improve reliability and security--and avoid
government regulation.  Representatives at the Network ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item2

"Does Cyberterrorism Pose a True Threat?"
A cybersecurity panel at the CeBIT technology show in Germany
said the threat of cyberterrorism was overblown, and that
terrorists would more likely use bombs than initiate an Internet
attack.  The representatives gathered from IT security firms, the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item3

"Tech Firms Tackle Spam"
In an effort to tackle the growing problem of spam, various
technology firms on Friday gathered at the JamSpam forum to
discuss the development of an "open, interoperable antispam
specification" that would curtail what ePrivacy Group President ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item4

"Paper Speeds Video Access"
Ricoh Innovations and the University of California-Berkeley
teamed up in a research project to augment digital video with
traditional book interfaces.  "While historians consider the
primary research artifacts to be audio or...video recordings, the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item5

"U.S. Nanotech Funding Expected to Hit $1 Billion"
U.S. nanotechnology research is ramping up as government,
commercial, and academic forces line up and gather steam.
Government spending dedicated to nanotechnology has increased to
$849 million approved by Congress, and Richard Russell of the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item6

"Grid Computing Shows Mettle, ROI In Research-Focused IT
 Organizations"
Early adopters of grid computing and virtualization architectures
say that not only are the technologies working, but they are also
reducing costs and boosting IT options.  Phil Emer, chief
architect of the North Carolina BioGrid Project, says grid ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item7

"Programmers to Compete in Calif."
Some 70 student teams from around the world will meet in Beverly Hills,
Calif., next week (March 22-26) to compete in the 27th Annual
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored by IBM.
The competition requires students to find solutions ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item8

"PCI-X Marks the Spot for IBM, HP"
IBM and Hewlett-Packard have lined up behind the
backwards-compatible PCI-X technology for new chipsets that
connect network cards and other devices into servers.  The PCI-X
2.0 technology will first appear next year in a PCI-X 266 ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item9

"Lilith Stirs Interest in Technology Among Girls"
The Lilith Computer Group is a  local program in Madison,
Wisconsin, that is working to encourage females to study
information technology.  Women hold just 20 percent of IT jobs,
and groups such as Lilith have formed in an effort to get more ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item10

"Sustainable Computing Consortium Hosts Workshop on Trust and
 Dependability in Wireless Environments"
Carnegie Mellon University's Sustainable Computing Consortium
(SCC) will host a two-day seminar beginning March 31 to discuss
issues related to mobile, wireless, grid, and other "always-on"
computing systems.  The SCC seminar, to be held in Tempe, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item11

"Green Plans for Tiny Tech"
Environmentally safe nanotechnology is the goal of Rice
University's Center for Biological and Environmental
Nanotechnology, according to statements by executive director
Kevin Ausman at this week's meeting of the American Physical ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item12

"Homeland Cybersecurity Efforts Doubted"
Experts worry that cybersecurity is taking a backseat at the new
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has engulfed most of
the government's computer protection centers.  Of the five
directorates built into the DHS, the Directorate of Information ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item13

"Turning Out Quality"
Carnegie Mellon University fellow Watts Humphrey is espousing his
Team Software Process (TSP) and Personal Software Process (PSP)
as new software development methodologies that can help improve
the quality of code while getting projects out quickly.  Often, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item14

"Spambusters"
Hackers despise junk email, or spam, with a vengeance, and
programmer Paul Graham explains that this hatred stems from
bruised egos.  In the hopes of mobilizing hackers to combat spam,
Graham issued "A Plan for Spam," an outline for a spam filter ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item15

"Presence Technology"
Instant messaging (IM) is a form of presence technology that
offers a better alternative for communicating with colleagues and
customers than email because it lets users know if the other
party is available first.  With IM technology, users have a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item16

"2003 and Beyond"
Technological developments that should emerge in the next several
years and become widespread by 2010 include smaller PCs,
pervasive Internet, intuitive handhelds, consumer devices capable
of automatic wireless communication, and improved processing and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item17

"Can Sensemaking Keep Us Safe?"
The Sept. 11 attacks created a demand to leverage the United
States' strength in analytical technology and networking to build
what the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in
the Information Age calls a virtual analytic community threaded ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0317m.html#item18


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