December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

IP: Heavy Leonid meteor shower threatens communications
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Heavy Leonid meteor shower threatens communications Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 06:11:35 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: San Francisco Examiner http://www.examiner.com/981004/1004meteor.shtml Heavy Leonid meteor shower threatens communications Annual light show biggest in 32 years By Keay Davidson EXAMINER SCIENCE WRITER A spectacular meteor storm will ignite the heavens in mid-November, possibly "sandblasting" satellites and threatening everyday services from cell phones to TV shows to data communications. The last great meteor barrage came in 1966, when space satellites were far less common - and far less essential to everyday life. Back then, thousands of meteors per minute shot across the North American sky. Today, the skies are jammed with satellites that aid in weather forecasting, relay data communications and TV signals, and enable military surveillance. The world's satellite network is a juicy target for the blistering celestial rain. Although the meteors are smaller than grains of sand, they travel tremendously fast - more than 40 miles per second, equivalent to a 10-second flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. As a result, they could knock out or disrupt some satellites' delicate electronics. "This meteoroid storm will be the largest such threat ever experienced by our critical orbiting satellite constellations," William H. Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Los Angeles County, told the House Science Committee on May 21. The 1966 storm appeared over continental North America, but this year's main aerial assault will be visible from Japan, China, the Philippines and other parts of east Asia, and possibly Hawaii. The meteors are debris from a comet, Tempel-Tuttle. Scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View hope to study the shower from aircraft flying out of Okinawa, says Ames principal investigator Peter Jenniskens. They hope to broadcast live TV images of the shower over the World Wide Web. The "Leonid" meteor shower is so named because the meteors appear to emanate from the direction of the constellation Leo. Actually, the shower is a cloud of rocky particles orbiting the sun. Annual event Earth crosses the cloud's path every Nov. 17 and 18. At that time, amateur astronomers enjoy seeing the "Leonids" zip across the sky, sometimes several per minute. But every 30-plus years, our planet crosses a particularly dense part of the Leonid cloud. So the "shower" becomes a "storm," with up to 40 meteors per second and sometimes 50,000 per hour. Although very tiny, the particles move so fast that the friction with Earth's atmosphere will cause them to burn and glow. Visible from hundreds of miles away, they will make the sky look like fireworks. NASA plans to turn the Hubble Space Telescope away from the storm so meteors that hit the giant orbital telescope will miss its super-delicate mirror, says NASA spokesman Don Savage. "NASA is taking (the shower) seriously," Savage said. "We have been assessing what we need to do to ensure our satellites in Earth orbit are going to be operated in a safe manner during this meteor shower." Other satellites might be temporarily re-oriented so that they present the narrowest "cross section" - the smallest target. "We are concerned, and we have been in meetings and making plans concerning the Leonid shower," said U.S. Army Maj. Mike Birmingham, a spokesman for the U.S. Space Command in Colorado, which monitors American military and spy satellites. In his congressional testimony, Ailor said that "because of the very high speed of the particles - they will be moving at speeds of over... 155,000 mph - the storm poses an even greater and somewhat unknown threat." Most particles tiny "Fortunately, most of the particles... are very small, smaller than the diameter of a human hair, and won't survive passage through the Earth's atmosphere," Ailor said. "Our satellites, however, are (in space and) not protected by the atmosphere, so they will be 'sandblasted' by very small particles traveling more than 100 times faster than a bullet. "At these speeds, even a tiny particle can cause damage or electrical problems," Ailor said. "While major holes and physical damage to solar panels and structures are very unlikely, impacts of small particles will create an electrically charged plasma which can induce electrical shorts and failures in sensitive electronic components." Last month, an immense wave of radiation from a neutron star washed over Earth, causing at least two scientific satellites to shut down to protect their electronics. Astronomers said the star, in a constellation about 20,000 light-years away, had unleashed enough energy to power civilization for a billion-billion years. But by the time the radiation found its way across the cosmos and through the atmosphere, it was no stronger than a typical dental X-ray, scientists said. No conflict with space missions The upcoming meteor shower is not expected to conflict with scheduled space missions. The first components of the international space station - a kind of village in space - aren't planned for launch until late November and December, after the shower, Savage said. U.S. Sen. John Glenn, an Ohio Democrat and former astronaut, is scheduled to rocket into orbit on the space shuttle Oct. 29, returning before the Leonid shower. Armed with sensitive monitors, Jenniskens' colleagues will study the meteors' "spectra" - frequencies of light that reveal the particles' chemical composition - through portholes in the roof of a plane. Scientists will also study the particles' effects on atmospheric chemistry, such as the ozone layer that shields us from cancer-causing solar radiation. The scientists hope to measure the particle stream, which may be as dense as one extremely small particle every 10 square meters. If so, then every satellite in the sky may get hit, Jenniskens say. Jenniskens' project - involving some 30 scientists and two aircraft - is funded by NASA, the U.S. Air Force and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. He hopes to transmit high-resolution TV images of the incoming meteors via TV or the Web across a 30-degree field of sky. More information on the project is available on the Internet at www-space.arc.nasa.gov/~leonid/. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **********************************************

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IP: Spycam City: The surveillance society: part one
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Spycam City: The surveillance society: part one Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 06:18:00 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/40aboal.shtml Spycam City: The surveillance society: part one by Mark Boal Cameras stare as you browse at Barnes and Noble or rent a video at Blockbuster. They record the way you handle the merchandise at Macy's or how you glide to the music at the Union Square Virgin Megastore. Grab a latte at Starbucks, brunch on borscht at Veselka, or savor a martini at the Union Bar: cameras are watching every sip you take. Peering from skyscrapers with lenses that can count the buttons on a blouse three miles away, they watch every move you make. Even Rudy likes to watch.After testing reaction to the monitoring of parks, public pools, and subway platforms, the city is quietly expanding a pilot program on buses. Cameras indistinguishable from lampposts have advanced from the perimeter of Washington Square into the heart of the park. They're already hidden at some bus stops and intersections to snag speeders and parking perps. More are on the way. The Housing Authority is rushing to put bulletproof cameras in corridors throughout city projects. At P.S. 83 in the Bronx, covert cameras cover the schoolyard; six other Bronx schools will soon follow suit. Even university students are under watch, as activists at City College realized last June when they found a camera hidden in the smoke detector outside their meeting room. The administration had put it there. Two local jails--Valhalla and Dutchess County--are adding cameras to their guards' helmets to go along with the ones in the visiting rooms and some cells. With little public awareness and no debate, the scaffolding of mass surveillance is taking shape."it's all about balancing a sense of security against an invasion of privacy," Rudolph Giuliani insists. But the furtive encroachment of surveillance is Norman Siegel's latest lost cause. "I feel like Paul Revere, shouting 'The cameras are coming, the cameras are coming.' " says the New York Civil Liberties Union's executive director. All summer, a crew of NYCLU volunteers scoured Manhattan on a mission to pinpoint every street-level camera. Next month, Siegel will unveil their findings: a map showing that cameras have become as ubiquitous as streetlights. It's impossible to say how many lenses are trained on the streets of New York, but in one eight-block radius, the NYCLU found over 300 in plain sight. And as one volunteer acknowledges, "There are tons of hidden cameras we didn't catch." That's because it's routine in the security trade to buttress visible cameras with hidden ones, "so everything's covered and it doesn't look like a fortress," as one consultant says. These spycams scan unseen in tinted domes, from behind mirrors, or through openings the size of a pinhole. Under the joystick command of a distant operator, they're capable of zooming in or spinning 360 degrees in less than a second. If you listen to the people who install them, cameras are as common and elusive as shadows. But does anybody really care? No New York law regulates surveillance (except to require cameras at ATM machines). Statutes that prohibit taping private conversations have been outpaced by video technology. Your words can't be recorded without your consent, but you can be videotaped in any public place. And you don't own your image (except for commercial purposes). It took the Supreme Court some 90 years to apply the Fourth Amendment's privacy protection to the telephone. Before a landmark 1967 case, it was legal to bug a phone booth. When legislators finally reined in wiretapping in 1968, video was a speck on the horizon, and cameras were excluded from the law. Now Congress is inundated with privacy bills, but few survive the combined resistance of manufacturers, service providers, law enforcement, and the media. In 1991 and 1993, proposals to limit surveillance were killed in committee by a lobby of 12,500 companies. Testifying against rules that would have required companies to notify their workers--and customers--of cameras, Barry Fineran of the National Association of Manufacturers called "random and periodic silent monitoring a very important management tool." This alliance backs its rhetoric with cash. During the 1996 Congressional campaign, finance and insurance companies alone invested $23 million in their antiprivacy agenda. And so the cameras keep rolling. It's clear that surveillance makes many people feel safer. But researchers disagree about its value as a crime deterrent.The consensus is that cameras can curb spontaneous crimes like vandalism, but are less effective in stopping more calculated felonies. Though spycams are in banks and convenience stores, robberies at these places are staples of the police blotter. Hardcore crooks learn to work around surveillance: witness the masked bandit. And many cameras that promise security are only checked occasionally; their real purpose is not to stop a crime in progress, but to catch perps after the fact. Those reassuring cameras on subway platforms are there to make sure the trains run on time. It's telling that the camera quotient is increasing in the midst of a dramatic decline in crime.Clearly the spread of surveillance has less to do with lawlessness than with order. "Just don't do anything wrong," advises the smiling cop monitoring the hidden cameras in Washington Square, "and you have nothing to worry about." But Americans are worried. Last year, 92 percent of respondents told a Harris-Westin poll they were "concerned" about threats to privacy, the highest level since the poll began in the late '70s. Despite this concern, there's been little research into the effects of living in an omnivideo environment. Surveillance scholarship was hip in the '60s and '70s, but academic interest has dropped noticeably in the past 20 years. In the neocon '90s, the nation's preeminent criminologist, James Q. Wilson, says he "never studied the subject [of security cameras] or talked to anyone who has." One reason for this apathy is the academy's dependence on government money. "Federal funding does not encourage this kind of research," says sociologist Gary Marx, one of the few authorities on surveillance. "The Justice Department just wants to know about crime control. It's bucks for cops." In fact, Justice money is lavished, not on research but on surveillance hardware. In this investigative void, a plucky new industry has sprung up. Sales of security cameras alone will total an estimated $5.7 billion by 2002. Cameras are now an integral part of new construction, along with sprinklers and smoke detectors. But the strongest sign that monitoring has gone mainstream is the plan by a security trade association to incorporate surveillance into the MBA curriculum. Budding businessmen are interested in cameras because they are a cheap way to control wandering merchandise and shield against liability. Fast-food chains like McDonald's protect themselves from litigious customers with hidden camerasthat can catch someone planting a rat tail in the McNuggets. Surveillance also helps managers track workers' productivity, not to mention paper-clip larceny and xerox abuse. Though most employers prefer to scan phone calls and count keystrokes, it's legal in New York (and all but three states) for bosses to place hidden cameras in locker rooms and even bathrooms. A 1996 study of workplace monitoring calculates that, by the year 2000, at least 40 million American workers will be subject to reconnaissance; currently, 85 percent of them are women, because they are more likely to work in customer service and data entry, where monitoring is commonplace. But that's changing as white-shoe firms like J.P. Morganput cameras in the corridors. Meanwhile, in the public sector, New York City transit workers can expect scrutiny for "suspected malingering and other misuse of sick leave [by] confidential investigators using video surveillance," according to a confidential MTA memo. Though the police would need a warrant to gather such information, employers don't."When most Americans go to work in the morning," says Lewis Maltby of the ACLU, "they might as well be going to a foreign country, because they are equally beyond the reach of the Constitution." New York is hardly the only spy city. More than 60 American urban centers use closed-circuit television in public places. In Baltimore, police cameras guard downtown intersections. In San Francisco, tiny cameras have been purchased for every car of the subway system. In Los Angeles, the camera capital of America, some shopping malls have central surveillance towers, and to the north in Redwood City, the streets are lined with parabolic microphones. Even in rustic Waynesville, Ohio, the village manager is proud of the cameras that monitor the annual Sauerkraut Festival. America is fast becoming what Gary Marx calls "a surveillance society," where the boundary between the private and the public dissolves in adigital haze. "The new surveillance goes beyond merely invading privacy . . . to making irrelevant many of the constraints that protected privacy," Marx writes in Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. For example, mass monitoring allows police to eliminate cumbersome court hearings and warrants. Immediately after a crime, cops check cameras in the vicinity that may have captured the perp on tape. So, as surveillance expands, it has the effect of enlarging the reach of the police. Once it becomes possible to bank all these images, and to call them up by physical typology, it will be feasible to set up an electronic sentry system giving police access to every citizen's comings and goings. This apparatus isn't limited to cameras. Recent mass-transit innovations, such as the MetroCard, are also potential surveillance devices. A MetroCard's magnetic strip stores the location of the turnstile where it was last swiped. In the future, Norman Siegel predicts, it will be possible for police to round up suspects using this data. E-Z Passes already monitor speeding, since they register the time when drivers enter tollbooths.Once transportation credits and bank accounts are linked in "smart cards" (as is now the case in Washington, D.C.), new surveillance vistas will open to marketers and G-men alike. Already the FBI clamors for the means to monitor any cell-phone call. Meanwhile other government agencies are developing schemes of their own. The Department of Transportation has proposed a rule that would encode state drivers' licenses, allowing them to double as national identity cards. Europeans know all about internal passports, but not even the East German Stazi could observe the entire population at a keystroke. "What the secret police could only dream of," says privacy expert David Banisar, "is rapidly becoming a reality in the free world." What's more, spy cams are getting smaller and cheaper all the time. "A lens that used to be 14 inches long can now literally be the size of my fingernail," says Gregg Graison of the spy shop Qüark. Such devices are designed to be hidden in everything from smoke detectors to neckties. Qüark specializes in souping up stuffed animals for use in monitoring nannies. A favorite hiding place is Barney's foot. These devices reflect the growing presence of military hardware in civilian life. The Defense Department's gifts to retail include night-vision lenses developed during the Vietnam War and now being used to track pedestrians on 14th Street. A hundred bucks at a computer store already buys face-recognition software that was classified six years ago, which means that stored images can be called up according to biometric fingerprints. "It's all about archiving," says John Jay College criminologist Robert McCrie. And in the digital age, the zip drive is the limit. The template for storing and retrieving images is Citibank's futuristic monitoring center in Midtown (this reporter was asked not to reveal the location), where 84 PCs flash images in near-real time from every branch in the city and beyond. Every day over a quarter of a million metro New Yorkers pass under these lenses. When the bank upgrades to digital in the next year or so, each image will be recorded and archived for 45 days. What alarms civil libertarians is that "no one knows what happens to the tapes once they are recorded, or what people are doing with them," as Norman Siegel says. In fact, mass surveillance has created a new kind of abuse. Last summer, a police sergeant in Brooklyn blew the whistle on her fellow officers for improper use of their cameras. "They were taking pictures of civilian women in the area," says the policewoman's attorney, Jeffrey Goldberg, "from breast shots to the backside." But you don't need a badge to spy, as plaintiffs around the country are discovering: At a Neiman-Marcus store in California, a female worker discovered a hidden camera in the ceiling of her changing room that was being monitored by male colleagues. At the Sheraton Boston Hotel, a union president invited a comrade to view a videotape of himself in his underwear. The hotel was monitoring its workers' changing rooms. In Maryland, a 17-year-old lifeguard was videotaped changing into her bathing suit by her supervisor at the county swimming pool. Elsewhere in that state, a couple discovered that a neighbor had installed two cameras behind bathroom heating ducts and had monitored them for six months. On Long Island, a couple discovered a pinhole camera watching the bedroom of their rented apartment. It had been planted by the owner. In Manhattan, a landlord taped a tenant having sex with his girlfriend in the hallway, and presented it along with a suggestion that the tenant vacate the premises. He did. In this laissez-faire environment, whoever possesses your image is free to distribute it. And just as images of Bill Clinton leading a young woman into his private alcove ended up on Fox News, so can your most private moments if they are deemed newsworthy--as one Santa Monica woman learned to her horror when footage of her lying pinned inside a crashed car, begging to know if her children had died, ended up as infotainment. The paramedic, as it turns out, was wired. The harvest from hidden cameras can also end up on the Internet, via the many Web sites that offer pics of women caught unaware. There are hidden toilet cams, gynocams, and even the intrepid dildocam. Though some of these images are clearly staged, others are real.Their popularity suggests that whatever the rationale, surveillance cameras resonate with our desire to gaze and be gazed upon. As J.G. Ballard, author of the sci-fi classic Crash, putsit, these candid-camera moments "plug into us like piglets into a sow's teat, raising the significance of the commonplace to almost planetary dimensions. In their gaze, we expose everything and reveal nothing." But exposure can be a means to an end. "Once the new surveillance systems become institutionalized and taken for granted in a democratic society," warns Gary Marx, they can be "used against those with the 'wrong' political beliefs; against racial, ethnic, or religious minorities; and against those with lifestyles that offend the majority." Earlier this month, New York police taped large portions of the Million Youth March in Harlem.In the ensuing furor over whether the tapes accurately portrayed the police response to a rowdy activist, a more basic issue went unaddressed. Social psychologists say that taping political events can affect a participant's self-image, since being surveilled is unconsciously associated with criminality. Ordinary citizens shy away from politics when they see activists subjected to scrutiny. As this footage is splayed across the nightly news, everyone gets the meta-message: hang with dissenters and you'll end up in a police video. But even ordinary life is altered by surveillance creep. Once cameras reach a critical mass, they create what the sociologist Erving Goffman called, "a total institution," instilling barely perceptible feelings of self-consciousness. This process operates below the surface of everyday awareness, gradually eroding the anonymity people expect in cities. Deprived of public privacy, most people behave in ways that make them indistinguishable: you're less likely to kiss on a park bench if you know it will be on film. Over the long run, mass monitoring works like peer pressure, breeding conformity without seeming to. Communications professor Carl Botan documented these effects in a 1996 study of workplace surveillance. Employees who knew they were being surveilled reported higher levels of uncertainty than their co-workers: they were more distrustful of bosses, their self-esteem suffered, and they became less likely to communicate. The result was "a distressed work force." The anxiety of being watched by an unseen eye is so acute that the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham made it the basis of his plan for a humane prison, in which inmates were to be controlled by the knowledge that they might be under observation. Bentham called this instrument of ambiguity the Panopticon. Ever since then, the power of the watcher over the watched has been a focal point of thinking about social control. The philosopher Michel Foucault regarded the panoptic force as an organizing feature of complex societies. Surveillance, Foucault concluded, is the modern way of achieving social coherence--but at a heavy cost to individuality. Spycams are the latest incarnation of this impulse. Welcome to the New Improved Panopticon.Twenty-five years ago, Mayor John V. Lindsay installed cameras in Times Square. But he took them down after 18 months because they only led to 10 arrests--causing The New York Times to call this experiment "the longest-running flop on the Great White Way." No such ridicule has greeted Giuliani's far more ambitious surveillance plans and his cheeky assertion that "you don't have an expectation of privacy in public spaces." It's a brave new world, but very different from the ones imagined by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty Four taught us to be alert to the black-booted tyrant. The Truman Show updates this Orwellian model as the saga of an ordinary man whose life is controlled by an omniscient "creator," a TV producer who orders the 5000 cameras surrounding his star to zoom in or pull back for the perfect shot. As inheritors of Orwell's vision, we are unable to grasp the soft tyranny of today's surveillance society, where authority is so diffuse it's discreet.There is no Big Brother in Spycam City. Only thousands of watchers--a ragtag army as likely to include your neighbor as your boss or the police. In 1998, anybody could be watching you. This is the first of a three-part series. Part Two: Behold Jennifer, the Surveillance Celebrity Additional reporting: Emily Wax. Research: Michael Kolber ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **********************************************

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IP: Fwd: [Spooks] CIA needs spies. Care to join?
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Bridget973(a)aol.com Subject: IP: Fwd: [Spooks] CIA needs spies. Care to join? Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 19:10:31 EDT To: ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com Subject: [Spooks] CIA needs spies. Care to join? Date: Mon, 05 Oct 1998 22:48:59 -0500 From: Bob Margolis <rttyman(a)wwa.com> To: Spooks <spooks(a)qth.net> >From the Christian Science Monitor--OCT 5 Cheers, Bob Margolis =========== Help Wanted The blonde - a cross between TV's ``La Femme Nikita'' and a Washington lawyer - grins knowingly out of the glossy pages of an international news magazine. ``Do you have what it takes?'' asks the bold advertising line just over her shoulder, paid for by the Directorate of Operations (DO), the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency. ``Did you see that one?'' CIA Director George Tenet asks enthusiastically of the ad. ``We worked on another one that says, 'If you ever liked taking apart your radio and putting it back together, we might have a job for you.''' Blame the tight labor market, budget cuts, or low morale fueled by post-cold-war mission confusion, but the ad in London's The Economist illustrates an acute problem the CIA no longer wants to keep secret: It's fast running out of spies. To counter the flight of experienced operatives trained in skullduggery, the agency has embarked on the most aggressive recruiting drive in its five-decade history. If it can't bolster the number of case officers, experts say, the CIA runs the risk of being caught flat-footed, as with India's nuclear tests this spring, which caught the agency - and thus the United States - unawares. ``We anticipate the current program will rebuild the operations-officer cadre by more than 30 percent over the next seven years,'' says CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher. Augmenting a national media campaign is the college-campus recruitment program that has been under way for years. But while the agency used to actively recruit at 120 colleges, it is now concentrating its efforts at half that number, pinpointing universities with strong computer and technical programs and those with large numbers of minorities. In addition to the fresh crop of college graduates, the worldly wise are also encouraged to apply. ``We are also looking for people with international experience, languages, business experience. You are not necessarily going to get someone like that right out of college,'' says Ms. Guilsher. Congress is pumping a classified amount of money into the recruitment effort. The DO began experiencing sharp losses in personnel nearly seven years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union. By last year, the number of people leaving the agency exceeded fresh recruits by 3 or 4 to 1. Insiders cite a number of reasons for the departures, including overall mission drift and the way the CIA has handled spy scandals, including mole Aldrich Ames, who funneled secrets to Moscow from 1985 until his arrest in 1994. Such demoralizing headlines underscore the agency's need for fresh recruits as Tenet seeks to reform the CIA. The current hiring drive was already in the planning stages when the CIA's failure to detect India's nuclear tests last spring solidified recruiting resolve from Capitol Hill to the CIA's suburban headquarters in McLean, Va. ``If you had the right number of people in the field doing the right thing, the failure wouldn't have occurred,'' says a congressional source familiar with agency operations. Intelligence observers estimate total agency employees at just over 16,000. One estimate places the total number of case workers in the field at less than 1,000. ``My guess is most Americans would overguess by 10- to 20-fold the numbers out there spying [for the CIA],'' the source says. It'S not just the manner in which the recruitment calls are sounded that is changing. The agency is also overhauling the way it handles would-be spies. In the past, applicants could expect to wait more than a year and a half as their application crawled through the hiring bureaucracy. In today's tight labor market, many applicants were simply walking away, signing on to higher-paying jobs in the private sector. Today, a CIA contact is assigned to answer applicants' questions, and the agency claims the hiring period has been compressed to six to eight months. ``We're overhauling our entire recruitment system,'' says Tenet. Still, the agency is constricted by government pay scales - starting pay for a professional trainee is $30,000, about $5,000 less than what the average college graduate received this year. What a CIA job can provide is the cachet of being a CIA agent - the lure of being in the know on world affairs. The agency also recruits using a rarely discussed theme these days: patriotism. ``Patriotism is not a word used much anymore ... but there are still people who learn about the CIA's mission and understand that it really does have an important purpose and function and want to work in the agency,'' says Ronald Kessler, author of ``Inside the CIA.'' Once in, today's trainees receive a more intensive, highly technical education than in the past. ``You can't collect [intelligence] in rocket science if you don't know about rocket science,'' says a congressional source. Today, a case officer in the field receives an average of one to three years of training. Part of the need for greater numbers is sparked by the reopening of an undisclosed number of stations in former East Bloc countries, which were closed in the early 1990s. The CIA says the reopenings are not necessarily to spy on former cold-war adversaries, but rather to monitor a region now transformed into a crossroads for weapons for hire. --- Submissions should be sent to spooks(a)qth.net To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe spooks" to majordomo(a)qth.net -- bridget973(a)aol.com Black Helicopters on the Horizon: http://members.xoom.com/bridget973 ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **********************************************

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IP: Cyberwar: Proper Vigilance Or Paranoia?
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Cyberwar: Proper Vigilance Or Paranoia? Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 06:16:19 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: ZDNet http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/printhigh/100598/cover/chapter1.html Cyberwar: Proper Vigilance Or Paranoia? By Will Rodger The last war was on land, air and sea. The next one may be on your computer. Armed with reams of data showing dramatic increases in computer crime since 1995, a wide-ranging but little-noticed federal working group is moving swiftly to try to knit together a private and public partnership against armies of hackers, government spies and terrorist agents that could make cyberspace unsafe for democracy. The fear: that no part of the industrialized world is safe from digital disaster. Successful attacks on power grids, hospitals, banks, farms, factories and railroad switches could plunge a target nation into chaos and dysfunction. Administration officials say this is no joke, ticking off threats already encountered: A 19-year-old Israeli hacker, known as the Analyzer, and two California teenagers successfully penetrate U.S. Department of Defense computers in February, setting off fears that their intrusions are related to U.S. troop buildups against Iraq. Russian hacker Vladimir Levin breaks into Citibank systems and steals $12 million in 1994. He escapes arrest for one year, only to be brought to justice as he gets off a flight to London and walks into the arms of Interpol. A study by network security specialist Dan Farmer that shows more than 60 percent of 1,700 high-profile Web sites - many run by banks - can be broken into or destroyed using a program he designed to probe for weaknesses no system administrator should allow in the first place. At the center of the U.S.' attempts to create a cyberdefense structure is the Critical Infrastructure Coordination Group, an assembly of cabinet undersecretaries and other senior officials sworn to work with the FBI and American business to protect a society that now depends on a safe, free flow of bits and bytes. But even as the defense structure emerges, civil libertarians, industry executives and even administration insiders worry about how well the Clinton administration or its successors can steer between protecting against all forms of disruption on one hand and creating a police state on the other. Fears that police agencies will use the threat to gain unprecedented power "reflect a misunderstanding of what we're all about and what the administration is all about," said Michael Vatis, director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) at the FBI. "We are structured as a real partnership [between government and free enterprise]. It's our own intention to bring people on board from the private sector. We all say the same thing." But James Adams, former chief executive officer of United Press International and head of the newly formed Infrastructure Defense Inc. consultancy, said government must surrender more power first. "I don't think the government can any longer say we know what's good for you and we're going to take care of it. The government is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I'm not arguing that's a good thing or a bad thing - it's simply a fact." Either way, bitter, seemingly endless disputes between the administration and the people whose cooperation it needs already have tainted the process of developing a national approach to protecting critical information assets, both sides said. A five-year battle over use and export of data-scrambling technologies crucial to data security, for instance, has alienated much of the computer industry. FBI demands that telephone companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make wiretaps easier to perform, meanwhile, have led to charges of betrayal by phone companies that claim they were promised more compensation than they're getting, and civil libertarians who say the new proposals invite abuse by rogue police. As a result, what should be a cooperative effort to secure the nation from outside attacks threatens to bog down in a morass of mistrust and stony silence. "Our members are scared to death of this whole program," a Washington association executive said, insisting on anonymity. "You've got the FBI and the National Security Agency pushing this thing. These guys are spies. Then there are these 'private sector' groups springing up to coordinate 'information sharing' about how different companies have these huge holes in their networks. Some of them are headed by ex-Defense Department people. The whole thing makes us paranoid." Worse, still, the lobbyist said: The nation's chief computer security organization - the secretive, estimated 50,000-employee National Security Agency (NSA) - is the same one responsible for wiretapping and signal interception everywhere outside the U.S. As long as the world's biggest Big Brother has a major role to play, business may be gun-shy of the program. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **********************************************

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advances in imaging sensors
by David Honig 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was an article in a recent EETimes about a new type of very fast imaging sensor, whose circuitry provides for very short exposures, which may find uses in consumer items. I was thinking that very fast image grabbers could be used to identify moving people, e.g., in their cars at an airport, or even on the street. The performance limit will be the sensitivity of the pixels and available light. But motion blur goes away. (In my part of Calif, there are video cameras mounted on signalling poles or streetlights in wealthy suburbs, for 'traffic monitoring' reasons. Images from them (as released to the public) are wide-angle, and people can't be ID'd. But things change.)

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Web TV with 128b exported
by David Honig 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/981005/ca_microso_1.html MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) WebTV Networks today announced it is the first U.S. company to obtain government approval to export nonkey recovery-based 128-bit-strength encryption for general commercial use. WebTV Networks pioneered low-cost access to the Internet, e-mail, financial services and electronic shopping through a television set and a standard phone line. The WebTV(TM) Network service, combined with the WebTV-based Internet terminals and receivers, is the first communications system permitted by the U.S. government to provide strong encryption for general use by non-U.S. citizens in Japan and the United Kingdom. Such strong encryption allows Japanese and United Kingdom subscribers of WebTV to communicate through the WebTV Network (both within national borders and internationally) without fear of interception by unauthorized parties. etc...

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Re: Another potential flaw in current economic theory... (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 20:35:53 +0100 > From: Steve Mynott <stevem(a)tightrope.demon.co.uk> > Subject: Re: Another potential flaw in current economic theory... (fwd) > how can you "own" something yet not control it? fascism is a form of > socialism I 'own' my freedom but I *never* control it. Its expression is a direct result of *others* respecting that ownership. Another example is a very old Chinese proverb from The Masao: You are What you do When it counts The point being, you *never* have anything to say about when it counts. Not to mention the obvious retort, what do you mean by 'control'... > any true cypherpunk must be a libertarian.. In your opinion. ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Interesting document by an anonymous 'guy' (Echelon)
by Max Inux 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey, at http://www.bsnet.co.uk/chris/nsa.txt there is an interesting paper on how the NSA has been spying etcetera to do with echelon, i would post some, but it is all good, and is 518K a quick bit from the top.... "I haven't posted or updated it in a while, but here is the gathered documentation on our governments' massive spying on us, including domestic phone calls.", then later..... "This is about much more than just cryptography. It is also about everyone in the U.S.A. being fingerprinted for a defacto national ID card, about massive illegal domestic spying by the NSA, about the Military being in control of key politicians, about always being in a state of war, and about cybernetic control of society" With the recent talk about Echelon I thought I would bring it up..... Max -- Max Inux <maxinux(a)openpgp.net> Hey Christy!!! KeyID 0x8907E9E5 Kinky Sex makes the world go round O R Strong crypto makes the world safe If crypto is outlawed only outlaws will have crypto Fingerprint(Photo Also): 259D 59F7 D98C CD73 1ACD 54Ea 6C43 4877 8907 E9E5

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Sad news ... (... or not ;-)) (http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/current/msg
by Enzo Michelangeli 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> At 6:57 PM -0400 on 10/6/98, Petro wrote:> > > Who owns the patents, Digicash, or Chaum?> > DigiCash, Inc., of the US of A, not DigiCash BV, of the Netherlands.> > Cheers,> Bob Hettinga Uhm, strange: I thought that the main attraction of a Dutch company was the lack of withholding tax on royalty payments made to non-residents, that, combined with the tax treaties between The Netherlands and most countries (which allow tax-free payment from those countries to the Dutch company), makes it an ideal vehicle to receive royalties on a (almost) tax-free basis. But if the patents were held by Digicash Inc., what was the point of having Digicash BV? Enzo

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Baywatch and Visto?
by Visto Corporation 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So, you think the people on Baywatch look that way naturally? Check out our ENHANCEMENTS. . . Announcing VISTO BRIEFCASE RELEASE 4.0. Login to your account at http://www.briefcase.com to see some great new features: -- The new SHARED BRIEFCASE lets you share your calendar and files with anyone you choose. Organize work groups and share project files securely, without any special software. Post wedding or vacation photos on your shared site, for family and friends across the world to see. Check out a sample shared briefcase at http://www.briefcase.com/guest/extremeclub -- then try your own. -- The INSTANT IMPORT feature uploads contact and calendar appointments quickly for all Outlook users with an Internet Explorer browser. -- We've given you greater email functionality. Now you can add a personalized SIGNATURE to all outgoing email messages. And you can forward mail from your EXTERNAL POP3 accounts right into your Visto Briefcase. -- And for our premium service subscribers, the faster, more efficient BRIEFCASE ASSISTANT now has EMAIL FILTERING and support for LOTUS NOTES email. Your Visto Briefcase -- your email, calendar, files, addresses and more in your own private place on the Web. Now even more features, no additional cost. Login now at http://www.briefcase.com to get the skinny. TO REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE, SELECT THE "REPLY TO" FUNCTION FROM YOUR EMAIL MENU. 10/07/98 02:01:13 [Briefcase Login] 67993

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