October 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Fwd: Libertarian and Green Party Presidential Candidates Arrested!
by Bill Stewart 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

>Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 18:08:55 -0700 (PDT) >Subject: Libertarian and Green Party Presidential Candidates Arrested! >From: (another list) >While trying to enter the Bi-Partisan Press Conference tonight to serve >legal papers to the CPD: > >http://badnarik.org/supporters/blog/2004/10/08/michael-badnarik-arrested/ > >8:38PM CT > >The first report from St. Louis is in - and presidential candidates >Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green Party) were just >arrested. Badnarik was carrying an Order to Show Cause, which he intended >to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Earlier today, >Libertarians attempted to serve these same papers at the Washington, D.C. >headquarters of the CPD - but were stopped from approaching the CPD office >by security guards. > >Fred Collins reported to me from the ground that Badnarik and Cobb are in >great physical condition and great spirit. > >As soon as more details are available, they will be posted here immediately. > >8:51PM CT > >I just spoke with Jon Airheart on his cellular telephone. He reports that >while he could see no handcuffs, both Badnarik and Cobb had their hands >behind their backs, as if they were handcuffed. Airheart also confirms >that Badnarik did have the papers to serve the CPD in his jacket pocket. > >9:09PM CT > >The first AP report just hit Google News: > > Just as the debate began, two third-party presidential candidates >purposely crossed a police barricade and were arrested. Green Party >presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate >Michael Badnarik were protesting their exclusion from the debate > >And a whole lot more on the blog page... > >Mark ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart(a)pobox.com

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Faulty 'No-Fly' System Detailed
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18735-2004Oct8?language=printer> The Washington Post washingtonpost.com Faulty 'No-Fly' System Detailed By Sara Kehaulani Goo Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, October 9, 2004; Page A01 The federal government's "no-fly" list had 16 names on it on Sept. 11, 2001. Today, it has more than 20,000. The list, which identifies suspected terrorists seeking to board commercial airplanes, expanded rapidly even though the government knew that travelers were being mistakenly flagged, according to federal records. The records detail how government officials expressed little interest in tracking or resolving cases in which passenger names were confused with the growing number of names on the list. More than 2,000 people have complained to the Transportation Security Administration. Airlines, at one point, were calling the agency at least 30 times a day to say that they had stopped a passenger whose name was similar to one on the list but after further investigation was determined not to be a terror suspect, according to a TSA memo. More than 300 pages of documents related to the no-fly and related lists were released late Thursday night by the TSA and the FBI in response to a federal court order. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit on behalf of Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, two peace activists who wanted to know why their names had turned up on a no-fly list. The documents reveal early symptoms of what are now known to be flaws with the watch lists. Travelers who were flagged by the lists said they now foil the system by altering how their names are spelled on their tickets -- adding their middle initials, full middle names or titles, for example. Government officials do not announce when they stop passengers actually on the lists. The only publicly known case involved Yusuf Islam, once known as the pop singer Cat Stevens, who was prevented last month from entering the country. The information revealed by the documents is "not very comforting," said Thomas R. Burke, a San Francisco attorney representing the peace activists and the ACLU. The TSA acknowledges that the system for checking passenger names for suspected terrorists needs fixing, and it plans to overhaul it in a new program called Secure Flight. The Justice Department declined to comment. The false matches "underscore the need we have to get more information on passengers to adjudicate those that are not a risk," said Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse. Every time a passenger books a ticket, the airline checks the traveler's name against two enormous government databases, or watch lists, of people the government believes pose a threat. The FAA created two lists in 2001: a no-fly list and a so-called selectee list, both of which airlines compare against reservation records. When the TSA was formed in 2002, it took over maintenance of the lists from the FAA. The no-fly list grew from 16 names supplied by the FBI in 2001 to 1,000 names by the end of 2002, according to the newly released TSA documents. There are now more than 20,000 names on the no-fly list, some which are aliases, according to a homeland security source who is not allowed to release such numbers. There are several thousand names on the selectee list, according to the source. Internal TSA memos direct airlines to refuse boarding to a passenger on the no-fly list and to alert the local FBI. Travelers on the selectee list are to be directed to a law enforcement officer and put through additional security procedures in order to board the plane, the documents said. Airlines declined to say exactly what kind of technology they use to match names. But the documents make clear that in the months after Sept. 11, carriers were having difficulty with the task. The Air Transport Association, the airline trade group, met with the TSA's top policy director in December 2002 to address the "false positives problem," according to a TSA memo. "This has been such a headache for me," wrote one Alaska Airlines executive, whose name was redacted, in an e-mail to the TSA a week before the meeting. "Any solutions . . . would be greatly appreciated." TSA officials wrote letters and e-mails of apology to passengers who complained of being mistakenly flagged by the lists. But in an internal memo, officials said there was little the agency could do. "While a few carriers keep track of 'false positives' the majority do not," wrote Chad Wolf, now TSA's number-two policy official, in a December 2002 e-mail to agency legislative affairs official Cori Sieger. "Consequently, TSA does not have the ability to record this data nor is there a pressing need to do so." Passengers are falsely flagged by the lists in such large numbers because of the kind of technology airlines use to compare the reservation lists to the watch lists, according to experts in name-matching technology. Each airline conducts the matches differently. Many major carriers use a system that strips the vowels from each passenger's name and assigns it a code based on the name's phonetic sound, according to the Air Transport Association. The name-matching technology is "too simplistic for a very complex problem," said Jack Hermansen, co-founder of Language Analysis Systems Inc. in Herndon, a company that has a competing name-matching technology that factors in a name's cultural origin. "It's these accidental matches that cause the big problem." The phonetic-code concept is traced back to a program called Soundex patented in 1918, which was used by Census Bureau officials to help sort out names that sounded similar but might be spelled differently. The name "Kennedy," for example, would be assigned the Soundex code K530, which is the same code assigned to Kemmet, Kenndey, Kent, Kimmet, Kimmett, Kindt and Knott, according to genealogy Web sites that use the technology. Today's systems are more sophisticated than Soundex, but they grew from the same origins, experts said. "The reason this technology is used is you're really trying to protect against typing errors," said Steven Pollock, executive vice president at TuVox Inc., a company that sells speech-recognition software. "When someone types in a name, the problem and the challenge is people will spell names incorrectly. . . . Names are definitely the toughest things to get [right], no doubt about it." But the phonetic coding systems tend to ensnare people who have similar-sounding names, even though a human being could tell the difference. Earlier this month, for example, Rep. Donald E. Young (R-Alaska), said he was flagged on the "watch list" when the airline computer system mistook him for a man on the list named Donald Lee Young. ) 2004 The Washington -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Technology | Top 20 computer threats unveiled
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/3727692.stm> The BBC Saturday, 9 October, 2004, 11:41 GMT 12:41 UK Top 20 computer threats unveiled The yearly hit parade of hackers' favourite security vulnerabilities has been published. Issued by the respected Sans Institute, the Top 20 list helps organisations find out if they are closing the most commonly exploited loopholes. With more than 2,500 software vulnerabilities found every year many organisations need help to know which ones to tackle first. The list includes loopholes found in both Windows and Unix/Linux software. Big hitter "It's a first things first list," said Alan Paller, head of the Sans Institute, a non-profit group which trains and certifies computer security professionals. "It can be very helpful for people that are trying to fix their vulnerabilities." He told BBC News Online that it was the list of the vulnerabilities hackers were attacking now. TOP 10 WINDOWS 1. Web servers & services 2. Workstation service 3. Windows remote access services 4. Microsoft SQL server 5. Windows authentication 6. Web browsers 7. File-sharing applications 8. LSAS 9. E-mail programs 10. Instant messaging Each entry in the Top 20 mentions a category of software and the accompanying report fleshes out individual vulnerabilities and what organisations can do to close these holes. Almost 60% of the loopholes listed this year were in the 2003 Top 20 list. Mr Paller said this was because only half of all organisations bother to patch their systems. "These vulnerabilities are like little diseases that you cannot wipe out if 50% of people do not have the vaccine," he said. Mr Paller said we will only see significant changes in the Top 20 when organisations get to the point of finding and fixing vulnerabilities automatically. Shrinking holes Gerhard Eschelbeck who studies vulnerabilities for online security firm Qualys said: "It gives people a benchmark to measure themselves against." TOP 10 UNIX/LINUX 1. Bind domain name system 2. Web server 3. Authentication 4. Version control systems 5. Mail transport services 6. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) 7. Open secure sockets layer (SSL) 8. Misconfiguration of enterprise services 9. Databases 10. Kernel He said that better information about vulnerabilities popular with the virus writing and hacking communities can help organisations protect themselves. "The underground knows this data very well," he said. "We want to level the playing field here between the guys that have the data and the bad intentions and the people that need to know about this so they can do their job effectively." Mr Eschelbeck's work on vulnerabilities shows that every 21 days, on average, the number of web-facing systems vulnerable to a particular loophole shrinks by 50% as people patch machines. For internal machines, such as the PCs on workers' desktops, the number shrinks 50% every 62 days. This difference, said Mr Eschelbeck, comes about because of the sheer number of PCs have on desktops and the time it takes to scan them and see which vulnerabilities they are hosting. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Papers Show Confusion as Government Watch List Grew Quickly
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/09nofly.html?oref=login&pagewant…> The New York Times October 9, 2004 Papers Show Confusion as Government Watch List Grew Quickly By ERIC LICHTBLAU ASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The government's list of banned airline passengers has grown from just 16 names on Sept. 11, 2001, to thousands of people today amid signs of internal confusion and dissension over how the list is implemented, newly disclosed government documents and interviews showed Friday. A transportation security official acknowledged in one internal memorandum that the standards used to ban passengers because of terrorism concerns were "necessarily subjective," with "no hard and fast rules." More than 300 pages of internal documents, turned over by the Justice Department on Friday as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, provide a rare glimpse inside the workings of the government's so-called no-fly list. Federal officials have maintained tight secrecy over the list, saying little publicly about how it is developed, how many people are on it or how it is put into practice, even as prominent people like Senator Edward M. Kennedy have been mistakenly blocked from boarding planes. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal government last year under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of two San Francisco women who said they suspected their vocal antiwar protests led to their being banned from flying. The Justice Department fought the release of information on the no-fly list on national security grounds, leading a federal judge in San Francisco to admonish government lawyers for making "frivolous claims" to justify the unusual secrecy. He ordered the government to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, prompting the Justice Department to turn over the internal documents to the A.C.L.U. on Friday. Federal officials said they could not discuss the documents Friday because of the pending lawsuit. In general, said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, "we have taken numerous steps to refine the no-fly system, including better definition of the criteria for the watch list and putting in place an effective redress system that allows passengers who are mistakenly put on the list to be removed." But Thomas R. Burke, a lawyer representing the A.C.L.U., said the documents raised "some very serious concerns about the criteria the government is using in developing the no-fly list and the internal miscommunication in implementing it." In an internal e-mail message in May 2002, for instance, an F.B.I. supervisor, whose name was deleted, complained that the Transportation Security Administration had made the F.B.I. responsible for pursuing possible matches from the list but had failed to inform the bureau about changes in no-fly security directives. "Despite my best efforts, the T.S.A. just motors along, and I and the agents are being whipped around the flagpole trying to do the right thing," the official wrote. In another internal message in October 2002, an F.B.I. official in St. Louis cited difficulties in getting suspects put on the no-fly list and in coordinating different watch lists. The various watch lists "are not comprehensive and not centralized," said the official, whose name was also deleted. Some people "appear on one list but not the others. Some of the lists are old and not current. We are really confused." Federal officials have been developing a master terrorist watch list to consolidate the no-fly list and nine others kept by different agencies. But a report last week by Clark K. Ervin, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, found serious coordination problems in that effort. The documents released Friday show that the government's no-fly list as of Sept. 11, 2001, had only 16 names on it - fewer than the number of terrorists who hijacked the four airliners that day. Several investigations have criticized the government's failure to put two of the hijackers on watch lists even after their terrorist ties became known. The no-fly list grew drastically after the attacks, and one document in Friday's material said the number of banned passengers ballooned to nearly 600 within about two months. Another 365 names were put on a secondary list that allows them to board a plane after getting closer scrutiny. The two lists had grown to about 1,000 names by December 2002, one document showed. The documents do not give a current total, but a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday the names on the no-fly and secondary flight lists total about 10,000, with the no-fly list accounting for "a few thousand." Another government official corroborated that account. Copyrigh -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: RFID Driver's licenses for VA
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

At 10:57 PM 10/8/04 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >>At 04:35 PM 10/7/2004, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >>A defense is a metal board in a wallet, close to the RFID chip's antenna. >>It is readable when the licence is taken out of the wallet. When inside, >>the antenna is quite effectively shielded. > >Tinfoil Wallets, anybody? :-) When you get your driver's license, you should run a magnet over it to keep iron oxides from staining your wallet. And apparently you should now microwave it to clean those DMV-employee pathogens from it. Then it will be safe to carry, and you can see for yourself what it tells everyone else ---part of the definition of safety.

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RFID Driver's licenses for VA
by Sunder 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

So the cops and RFID h4x0rZ can know your true name from a distance. and since RFID tags, are what, $0.05 each, the terrorists and ID counterfitters will be able to make fake ones too... Whee! http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,65243,00.html RFID Driver's Licenses Debated By Mark Baard Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65243,00.html 09:50 AM Oct. 06, 2004 PT Some federal and state government officials want to make state driver's licenses harder to counterfeit or steal, by adding computer chips that emit a radio signal bearing a license holder's unique, personal information. In Virginia, where several of the 9/11 hijackers obtained driver's licenses, state legislators Wednesday will hear testimony about how radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags may prevent identity fraud and help thwart terrorists using falsified documents to move about the country. Privacy advocates will argue that the radio tags will also make it easy for the government to spy on its citizens and exacerbate identity theft, one of the problems the technology is meant to relieve. <SNIP> Because information on RFID tags can be picked up from many feet away, <SNIP> ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ <--*-->:and our people, and neither do we." -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + : War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Once Again, America First
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/books/review/10FOERL.html?8bu=&pagewanted…> The New York Times October 10, 2004 ESSAY Once Again, America First By FRANKLIN FOER N May 4, American conservatism took an unexpected turn. That morning, George Will -- the movement's most influential columnist, one of its icons -- slapped George W. Bush with a tart reprimand. For a year, Will had obliquely hinted of his grave misgivings about the Iraq war and the push to democratize the Middle East. But with the insurgency escalating, he now felt obliged to state his frustration bluntly. ''This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts,'' he wrote. From the war's start, a few stray conservatives have criticized it. The columnist Patrick J. Buchanan vociferously opposed Bush's campaign against Saddam Hussein, just as he had opposed the one waged by Bush's father. Other opponents resided in heterodox corners of the movement like the libertarian Cato Institute and the traditionalist Chronicles magazine. But Will's migration toward the antiwar camp represented a significant shift: full-fledged members of the conservative establishment were now expressing doubts about the prospects for American success in Iraq. Indeed, Will has been joined by a small legion, from the powerful Representative Henry Hyde to the influential lobbyist Stephen Moore. ''I supported the war and now I feel foolish,'' the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson confessed to The New York Times. While this backlash against the war may seem unexpected -- the Bush presidency has inspired fierce loyalty from conservatives -- it is hardly surprising if one looks at the movement's past. The right's skepticism of the state has long reverberated within its foreign policy. Conservatives have raised questions about the ability of the American government to spread democracy abroad, just as they have doubted its ability to deliver social welfare at home. They have long feared that wartime is like a strong fertilizer heaped on government, causing it to sprout new departments and programs that never manage to disappear once peace resumes. For most of the cold war, conservatism sublimated these doubts to pursue its overriding objective of eliminating global Communism. But with the Iraq war hitting a rough patch, this anti-interventionist tradition is suddenly poised for revival. The conservative movement has its own creation myth, told in books like William A. Rusher's ''Rise of the Right.'' Before the early 1950's, these histories usually begin, there was no such thing as a conservative. Sure, you could find scattered libertarians and traditionalists camped in obscure little magazines. But they hardly constituted a movement, and they certainly didn't have a coherent ideology. In the early 50's, however, the tide began to turn. Whittaker Chambers unleashed his masterwork, ''Witness,'' in 1952, and Russell Kirk published ''The Conservative Mind'' a year later. Two years after that, National Review was founded to bottle this new energy and serve as a vanguard for a coalescing movement. This version of events almost makes it seem as if the right mystically appeared from nowhere. It's easy to understand why conservatives would want their movement's biography to exclude its earlier history. Before World War II, isolationism had been a major tendency, perhaps the major tendency, on the right. And by the 50's, isolationism had been badly (often unfairly) stigmatized. One of conservatism's early and now largely forgotten folk heroes was Albert Jay Nock, the flamboyant author of ''Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,'' who wore a cape and celebrated Belgium as his ideal society. In 1933, Nock wrote about ''the Remnant,'' borrowing the term from Matthew Arnold and the Book of Isaiah. By the Remnant he meant an enlightened elite that rejected the phoniness of mass society. A few historians have used Remnant as a synonym for the pre-National Review right -- a group that included the economic journalists Garet Garrett and Frank Chodorov, Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter) and, to an extent, H. L. Mencken. Nock's allusion to Isaiah works nicely for these polemicists, who issued thunderous, Old Testament-like warnings about American decline. Finding themselves at the forefront of opposition to World War II, they turned to the America First movement. Their hatred for war followed from their radical individualism. As the essayist Randolph Bourne (not a conservative) famously put it about World War I, ''War is the health of the state.'' Since these writers disliked the state, they came to dislike war, too. While the greatest generation has become deeply etched into the national mythology, only a smattering of scholarly monographs, like Wayne S. Cole's ''Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945,'' have dwelt on the opposition to World War II. But the America First Committee achieved a significant following in the late 30's. At its pre-Pearl Harbor peak, it claimed approximately 800,000 members -- and not just angry farmers and protofascists. Its Yale Law School chapter included Gerald Ford and Potter Stewart, the future Supreme Court justice; John F. Kennedy sent the organization a $100 check. Even though the antiwar movement drew support from across the political spectrum, it included many of the intellectuals and activists who would help revitalize the conservative movement in the 50's. Russell Kirk supported the Socialist Norman Thomas because of his antiwar stand. Henry Regnery, the seminal conservative publisher (whose house, now run by his son, Alfred, has had a recent success with ''Unfit for Command''), broke into the business with pro-German tracts critical of the Nuremberg trials. Willmoore Kendall, William F. Buckley's intellectual mentor at Yale and the inspiration for Saul Bellow's short story ''Mosby's Memoirs,'' began on the far left. But when his comrades renounced their neutrality to side with the Allies, a disillusioned Kendall took a major leap in his journey rightward. As a precocious child, Buckley followed his father's anti-interventionist politics and named his first sailboat Sweet Isolation. At times, these conservatives foreshadowed the arguments made by 60's radicals opposing American intervention in Vietnam. In a wartime speech, the Ohio senator Robert A. Taft intoned, ''Political power over other nations, however benevolent its purposes, leads inevitably to imperialism.'' So how did these isolationists turn into the cold war's most fervent hawks? The most persuasive explanation is also the most obvious: Communism. National Review -- filled with Catholics and former leftists -- viewed the Soviet Union as such an overwhelming threat that it willingly set aside its fear that the cold war would create a Leviathan federal government. In fact, anti-Communism's primary importance to the movement came to be enshrined in a doctrine called fusionism, formulated by the National Review writer Frank Meyer, an ex-Communist. The doctrine, which Meyer hashed out in his 1962 book, ''In Defense of Freedom,'' held that conservatism's competing wings, traditionalist and libertarian, should make ideological peace. Above all, they faced a common Red enemy. Even if they hadn't been so eager to combat Communism, conservatives would have had good political reasons to distance themselves from their earlier isolationism. After Pearl Harbor, public opinion swung heavily in support of the war. In the process, isolationism emerged as a synonym for disloyalty and anti-Semitism. At the height of the so-called Brown Scare, Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio and pronounced them ''Americans we can do without.'' Given the abuse suffered by isolationists during World War II, it may seem surprising that they often became the most fervent boosters of the fierce cold warrior Joseph McCarthy. But in fact, McCarthy helped ease the isolationists into their new hawkish identity. In his history of the postwar era, ''Troubled Journey,'' Fred Siegel argues that McCarthy served as the isolationists' ''tribune of revenge.'' He enabled them to retaliate against the internationalist liberals who had sent our boys to war, and to strike back at the very men who had tarred them as traitors during the struggle against fascism. As George H. Nash put it in his classic book, ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,'' Joseph McCarthy's crusade had drawn many of the embattled conservatives together in ''a bruising common struggle.'' But it hadn't drawn all of them together. Conservatism emerged out of the McCarthyite moment with a new enemy: that small band of conservatives who continued clinging to isolationism. National Review, for one, didn't have any place for them in its pages. According to Buckley's biographer John B. Judis, with the founding of the magazine, and its masthead brimming with stalwart interventionists like James Burnham, Buckley ''was turning his back on much of the isolationist and anti-Semitic Old Right that had applauded his earlier books and that his father had been politically close to.'' And he did more than turn his back. He waged war against them. After the John Birch Society announced its opposition to the Vietnam War in 1965, National Review spent 14 pages denouncing the group and its conspiracy theories. (The Birchers considered Communist infiltration of the American government the threat that required attention.) Upon the death of the libertarian isolationist Murray Rothbard in 1995, Buckley quipped, ''We extend condolences to his family, but not to the movement he inspired.'' The historian Jonathan M. Schoenwald has documented many of these struggles between National Review and its fellow conservatives in his book, ''A Time for Choosing.'' Without a home in the conservative movement, the isolationists had no choice but to search for allies in unlikely quarters. During the late 60's, they often teamed up with the New Left, becoming stalwarts of the antiwar movement. Karl Hess, a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign and the author of the memoir-cum-political tract ''Dear America,'' argued, ''Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.'' In 1969, Hess joined with a libertarian antiwar faction that quit the Young Americans for Freedom (Y.A.F.), the campus conservative group. And a few on the New Left returned the favor, heartily embracing the apostates. In 1975, the historian Ronald Radosh (then a man of the left) published ''Prophets on the Right,'' a book championing the prescience of Robert A. Taft and other ''conservative critics of American globalism.'' This long history of residing on the fringe ended suddenly with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 1992, Buchanan ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the Republican presidential primaries on an explicitly ''anti-imperialist'' platform -- a platform that he further developed in his revisionist history, ''A Republic, Not an Empire.'' ''When we hear phrases like 'New World Order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers,'' he wrote in one of his newspaper columns. Even if his party ultimately rejected him, it co-opted much of his program, and in 1995, a year after Republicans ascended to the majority in the House of Representatives, 190 of them voted to deny funds for American troops stationed in Bosnia. By the end of the decade, condemnations of ''foreign policy as social work'' and ''nation building'' had become standard in conservative boilerplate. Buchananite foreign policy has an intellectual wing, paleoconservatism. Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them. Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals -- or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism. Clustered around journals like Chronicles and Southern Partisan, the paleocon ranks included the syndicated columnist Sam Francis and the political theorist Paul Gottfried. Their writings have been anthologized in ''The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right,'' edited by Joseph Scotchie. The paleocons explicitly hark back to Garrett, Nock and the Remnant, what they lovingly call the ''Old Right.'' Like their mentor, Russell Kirk, the paleocons venerate traditional society, celebrating hierarchy, patriarchy and even the virtues of the antebellum South. They bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism. A foreign policy naturally follows from these domestic views. The dismal state of American civilization so depresses them that they see no point in exporting its values abroad. Kirk announced in a 1990 lecture to the Heritage Foundation that America's contribution to the world will be ''cheapness -- the cheapest music, the cheapest comic books and the cheapest morality that can be provided.'' Counterattacking, the neocons often accused the paleocons of anti-Semitism. David Frum, for instance, built this case in his 1994 book, ''Dead Right.'' Indeed, this is a charge that has dogged isolationists -- from Nock to Charles Lindbergh (who is elected president in Philip Roth's new counterfactual novel, ''The Plot Against America'') to Buchanan. With their pleas for ''America first'' and their rejection of cosmopolitan foreign policy, they have occasionally vilified the oldest symbol of cosmopolitanism -- the Jew. During the gulf war debate, Buchanan spoke of the Israel defense ministry's ''American amen corner.'' Even the best thinkers in this tradition haven't been immune from repeating canards about Jewish dual loyalties. In 1988, Kirk accused the neocons of mistaking ''Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.'' George W. Bush entered office implicitly promising agnosticism in the long-running debate between neocons and paleocons. On the 2000 campaign trail, he promised a ''distinctly American internationalism'' that would provide ''idealism, without illusions; confidence, without conceit; realism, in the service of American ideals.'' Of course, after 9/11, Bush dispensed with this doctrinal neutrality. And in adopting a neocon foreign policy, he rallied most conservatives behind his ambitious agenda, a dramatic turnabout in opinion from the 90's. Will this consensus hold? Already, many conservative writers seem primed to abandon it. Even when they haven't gone as far as Will or Carlson in their criticisms of the war, they have flashed their discomfort with Bush's goal of planting democracy in Iraq. National Review has called this policy ''largely, if not entirely, a Wilsonian mistake.'' With these signs of restlessness, it's easy to imagine that a Bush loss in November, coupled with further failures in Iraq, could trigger a large-scale revolt against neoconservative foreign policy within the Republican Party. A Bush victory, on the other hand, will be interpreted by many Republicans as a vindication of the current course, and that could spur a revolt too. If the party tilts farther toward an activist foreign policy, antiwar conservatives might begin searching for a new political home. In the meantime, the publishing industry may be providing a test of the Bush consensus: Pat Buchanan's new book, ''Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency,'' has already climbed onto the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps the movement's current state of mind is best reflected in its godfather, William F. Buckley. In June, he relinquished control of National Review. When asked about Iraq by The New York Times, he confessed: ''With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extraterritorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.'' It is noteworthy that Buckley's departure from the right's flagship journal should be accompanied by such ambivalence and profound questions about the movement's first principles. Conservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley's steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts. Franklin Foer, a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor for New York magazine, is the author of ''How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.'' -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Implant replaces ID cards for access to restricted areas.
by Nomen Nescio 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

Mexican Attorney General, Staff Get Chip Implants Implant replaces ID cards for access to restricted areas. The Attorney General of Mexico, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, recently announced at the opening of Mexico's National Information Center that he and some of his staff had been implanted with VeriChips to replace their ID tags for access to restricted areas, and to access the country's crime database. http://www.govtech.net/magazine/channel_story.php?channel=24&id=90885

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Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money)
by R. A. Hettinga 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

Okay. So I'm coming to the conclusion that book-entry settlement, with its absolute requirement for both "identity" and float between transactions, is becoming more and more *un*-safe to use as internet ubiquity increases. Anyone want to pick up the other side of this and tell me why not? No bugbears or horsemen need apply... Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6175738/print/1/displaymode/1098/> MSNBC.com Fake companies, real money Elaborate con wrings cash out of stolen credit cards By Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent MSNBC Updated: 7:15 p.m. ET Oct. 7, 2004 T-Data, a small New-York based software company, doesn't take credit cards -- never has in its 20-year history. But a few weeks ago, owner Jeff Duhl found himself looking over $15,000 worth of credit card charges seemingly accepted by his store. A quick investigation revealed most of the charges had been made using stolen credit cards. Slowly, he caught on: Someone had stolen a batch of credit card accounts, then stolen his company's name, set up an imposter version of T-Data, and rung up thousands of dollars worth of fake purchases. The "profits" were then desposited into checking accounts controlled by the imposters. "It is ingenious," said Dan Clements, who operates merchant advocacy site CardCops.com. Duhl wasn't the only victim of this new brand of corporate identity theft: At least 50 other firms apparently also had their identities stolen in the scheme. For credit card thieves doing their best to wring money out of a stash of stolen accounts, it seems like the perfect scam. How to profit from stolen credit cards While millions of credit card account numbers are stolen every year -- 60 million last year, and perhaps 120 million this year, according to one estimate -- turning them into cash can be tricky. Merchandise ordered with the card must be delivered somewhere, which is risky. Massive cash withdrawals are quickly spotted by credit card associations. The scheme Duhl's firm was caught up in is a heady, complex alternative: First, credit card thieves find a legitimate company unlikely to already be accepting credit card transactions. They then impersonate that company and set up accounts with merchant processing providers, whose role it is to transfer funds between credit card companies and merchants. Using stolen credit cards, the thieves then start sending small payments, usually $498 or $598 at a time, to the fraudulent merchant accounts. The credit card companies send funds to the processors and they in turn send the funds off to bank accounts controlled by the criminals. "They are flying under the radar on each transaction unless someone does a whole lot of work," Duhl said. A key part of the scheme: The thieves went to the trouble of registering the domain www.T-datasoftware.com, then set up a fake Web site. The site looked like a believable business to the merchant processing providers, who gave the thieves their accounts. Duhl's imposters were able to set up accounts at seven different payment processing firms. When Duhl investigated, he discovered some 50 other Web sites -- most mere imitations of one another -- all sitting on the same computer server. "They got away with $15,000 (in charges) at my company," Duhl said. "Multiply that by the number of sites, the number of companies, these folks could be getting away with millions of dollars," he said. It's not clear how much money the criminals really did get away with in the end. Many of the processing firms interviewed for this article claimed they caught on to the fraud after the transactions had cleared, but before the suspects had withdrawn the money from various checking accounts around the country. One did concede, however, that the scheme has real potential. 'Hundreds of thousands' over a weekend "If you don't catch it you could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars over a weekend," said David Steinberg, chief credit officer at Merchant E Solutions, one of the processing firms used by the thieves. Steinberg said his company had never suffered such a loss, but that the industry is bustling with fraud attempts. Some 5 to 10 percent of all applications his firm receives are turned away as potentially fraudulent, he said. Phyllis McNeill, a spokeswoman for Global Payments, another processing firm hit in the scam, confirmed a fake account had been set up in T-Data's name with her company. She said the account was actually set up through a reseller, and was shut down after eight transactions had been performed. Randy Lobban, director of risk management at North American Bancard, said the con artists were able to open up an account at his firm and pass eight charges through the system, but the funds were never released. "They never got any money," Lobban said. He alerted the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to the incident. Representatives at First Data and Wells Fargo also confirmed that fake accounts had been opened at their firms. An official at Beacon Bank in Minnesota, where one of the checking accounts used to receive the stolen funds had been set up, confirmed that he had discussed the situation with Duhl, but would not provide further comment. Corporate ID theft Whoever impersonated T-Data were clever enough to throw a few monkey wrenches in the path of anyone trying to detect them. When applying for the compulsory credit check needed to obtain the fake merchant account, for example, the thieves didn't use T-Data's tax ID number. Instead, they used the name and credit profile of a man unconnected with the company. Steven Wiencek, who lives on Long Island near the company, didn't even know his credit had been checked until contacted by MSNBC.com for this story. But the application, which listed Wiencek as company president, gives his Social Security number and driver's license number, suggesting the people behind this scheme have access to a wide swath of stolen credit cards and stolen identities. Another attempt at misdirection was foiled by an alert mail carrier. The application for the merchant account used a slight variation of Duhl's address -- apparently an attempt to ensure that mail to Duhl would be lost. But a knowledgeable local postal worker recognized the company name anyway, leading Duhl to discover the dupe. "Without that, I may not have found out about this for a long time," he said. The thieves were also persistent. Using one stolen credit card, they attempted to steal $2,500 through five separate faked merchant accounts, according to an affidavit of credit card fraud supplied by Duhl. Another corporate ID victim, John Bartholomew of Abcom Services, said he was lucky, because Duhl contacted him just as the scam began. "We are a management company in long-term health care. We would have no reason to use credit cards," he said. The firm had been in business for 21 years, and never accepted a single charge -- until the criminals stole his company's name, Bartholomew said. True to form, the criminals hijacked his brand name and set up merchants accounts using his company's name and a similar -- but slightly altered -- street address. The good news is, Bartholomew was able to warn the merchant account providers soon enough that only about $4,000 in charges were run through his company's name. The bad news is, some of the providers are still trying to make him pay the bill for the charges. He figures he's spent about $5,000 in legal fees trying to clean up the mess. Who are they working with? Rob Douglas, a consultant who operates PrivacyToday.com, blames the merchant account providers for never checking to see if the name on the account application actually represented a real person who worked at the firm. "You have to ask what the companies that set up the merchant accounts are doing?" he said. "Who has the responsibility to do due diligence that they are in fact working with who they think they are working with when they open an account?" But several of the merchant service providers pointed out the difficulty of stopping all fraudulent applications in a world where identities are so easily stolen. "For all of us, it's a tough business," Steinberg, of Merchant E Services, said. "It's a large, large problem." Duhl himself blames the banks where the money was to eventually wind up -- wondering how the thieves were able to set up accounts in the post-Patriot Act era. Apparently worried as much about security implications as his personal loss, Duhl contacted the FBI, the Secret Service and the U.S. Postal Inspector's Office. None of the agents he spoke to returned phone calls placed by MSNBC.com. He says he is frustrated that none of the agencies seem to have taken any interest in the incident -- particularly because at least one phone call was placed to Pakistan using the cell phone purchased in his company's name, and one of the bank accounts used to funnel money was established by suspects who presented Russian passports as identification, he says his own research revealed. "No one in the government seems like they are going to get interested in establishing a case," Duhl said. Douglas, who consults with firms trying to deal with the new trend of corporate identity theft, says there's little small companies like Duhl's can do to prevent this kind of incident. But one piece of practical advice he offers larger firms: search the Web once a week for evidence of impersonation. "As strange as it sounds, companies need to have one or more people assigned to surf the Web and see if there are mirror sites out there, just like we tell parents to surf for their child's name," he said. Bob Sullivan is the author of Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Bush "wins"
by Sunder 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

http://www.boingboing.net/images/wbay.jpg http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/07/tv_station_reports_t.html Thursday, October 7, 2004 TV station reports that Bush has been elected President WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin is running an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. (Click image for enlargement." wbayAt this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting.... <SNIP> ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ <--*-->:and our people, and neither do we." -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + : War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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