December 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Straighten Up and Fly Right
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110194850394688792,00.html> The Wall Street Journal December 2, 2004 COMMENTARY Straighten Up and Fly Right By HEATHER MAC DONALD December 2, 2004; Page A12 One of the highest priorities for whoever succeeds Tom Ridge at Homeland Security should be to take political correctness and a fear of litigation out of national security decisions. From immigration enforcement to intelligence gathering, government officials continue to compromise safety in order to avoid accusations of "racial profiling" -- and in order to avoid publicly acknowledging what the 9/11 Commission finally said: that the enemy is "Islamist terrorism." This blind antidiscrimination reflex is all the more worrying since radical Islam continues to seek adherents and plan attacks in the U.S. The government antidiscrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Since the charges against the airlines were specious but successful, every pilot must worry that his good-faith effort to protect his passengers will trigger federal retaliation. Transportation's action against American Airlines was typical. In the last four months of 2001, American carried 23 million passengers and asked 10 of them not to board because they raised security concerns that could not be resolved in time for departure. For those 10 interventions (and an 11th in 2002), DOT declared American Airlines a civil-rights pariah, whose discriminatory conduct would "result in irreparable harm to the public" if not stopped. On its face, the government's charge that American engaged in discriminatory conduct was absurd, given how few passenger removals occurred. But the racism allegation looks all the more unreasonable when put in the context of the government's own actions. Three times between 9/11 and the end of 2001, public officials warned of an imminent terror attack. Transportation officials urged the airlines to be especially vigilant. In such an environment, pilots would have been derelict not to resolve security questions in favor of caution. Somehow, DOT lawyers failed to include in their complaint one further passenger whom American asked not to board in 2001. On Dec. 22, airline personnel in Paris kept Richard Reid off a flight to Miami. The next day, French authorities insisted that he be cleared to board. During the flight, Reid tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, but a stewardess and passengers foiled him. Had he been kept from flying on both days, he too might have ended up on the government's roster of discrimination victims. Jehad Alshrafi is typical of those who were included in the suit against American. On Nov. 3, 2001, this Jordanian-American was scheduled to fly out of Boston's Logan Airport (from which two of the hijacked planes -- including American Flight 11 -- departed on 9/11). A federal air marshal told the pilot that Alshrafi's name resembled one on a terror-watch list -- and that he had been acting suspiciously, had created a disturbance at the gate, and posed unresolved security issues. The pilot denied him boarding. Alshrafi was later cleared and given first-class passage on another flight. According to DOT, the only reason American initially denied Alshrafi passage was because of his "race, color, national origin, religion, sex or ancestry." Never mind that there were at least five other passengers of Arab descent on his original flight, none of whom had been given additional screening or kept from flying. In fact, on virtually every flight on which the government claims that American acted out of racial animus, other passengers of apparent Middle Eastern ancestry flew undisturbed. If DOT believes that an air marshal's warnings about a passenger's name and suspicious behavior are insufficient grounds for keeping him off a flight, it is hard to imagine circumstances that would justify a security hold in the department's view -- short of someone's declaring his intention to blow up a plane. Given the information presented to the pilot, the only conceivable reason to have allowed Alshrafi to board would have been fear of a lawsuit. And litigation phobia is precisely the mind-set that DOT is hoping to cultivate in flight personnel: 10 days after 9/11, the department started rolling out "guidance" documents on nondiscrimination. While heavy on platitudes about protecting civil rights, they are useless in advising airlines how to avoid the government's wrath. The closest the DOT gets to providing airlines a concrete rule for avoiding litigation is a "but-for" test: "Ask yourself," advise the guidelines, "But for this person's perceived race, ethnic heritage or religious orientation, would I have subjected this individual to additional safety or security scrutiny? If the answer is 'no,' then the action may violate civil rights laws." But security decisions are never that clear. A safety officer will consider many factors in calculating someone's riskiness; any one of them could be pulled out as a "but-for" element. As American's record makes clear, it is almost never the case that someone gets additional screening based on his apparent ethnic heritage or national origin alone; behavior and no-fly-list matching are key in the assessment. (In fact, about half the complainants in the government's action were not even Middle Eastern. DOT simply assumes, without evidence, that American scrutinized the men because of the mistaken belief that they were Arabs.) A pilot trying to apply the "but-for" test to his own security judgment will inevitably reduce the test to an easier calculus: "Deny passage to someone who is or could claim to look Muslim only under the most extreme circumstances." In application, the "but-for" test reduces to a "never-ever" rule: Ethnic heritage, religion, or national origin may play no role in evaluating risk. But when the threat at issue is Islamic terrorism, it is reckless to ask officials to disregard the sole ironclad prerequisite for being an Islamic terrorist: Muslim identity or its proxies -- national origin or ethnic heritage. (Muslim identity should be at most only one factor in assessing someone's security risk.) American contested DOT's action, but fighting the government civil-rights complex is futile. In February 2004, the airline, while denying guilt, settled the action for $1.5 million, to be spent on yet more "sensitivity training." American's pilots were outraged. "Pilots felt: 'How dare they second-guess our decision?'" says Denis Breslin, a pilots' union official. Not satisfied with just one scalp, DOT lawyers brought identical suits against United, Delta and Continental. Those carriers also settled, pledging more millions for "sensitivity training" -- money much better spent on security training than on indoctrinating pilots to distrust their own security judgments. And in the government's wake, the private civil-rights bar, led by the ACLU, has brought its own airline discrimination suits. An action against Northwest is seeking government terror-watch lists, Northwest's boarding procedures, and its cabin-training manual. If these materials got loose, they would be gold to terrorists trying to figure out airline-security procedures The first George W. Bush administration tried mightily not to offend the antidiscrimination lobby. It's time to give up that game. From now on, common sense alone should determine security decisions, the only course which can protect all Americans, Muslims and non-Muslim, alike. Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor at City Journal, from whose latest issue this is adapted. - -- - ----------------- 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' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1336 iQA/AwUBQa82qsPxH8jf3ohaEQIUdACfUpskoYRtBoJFcxRyvGJBc+N/zYsAnRsv 25L4TP8GUTrcsLhaajtyYQmd =vS7t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Whatcha Gonna Do?
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 John Ross' "Unintended Consequences" is a classic of the, um, gun culture, :-) and a great read. I have no idea who Mr. Hendrix is. Cheers, RAH - -------- <http://www.john-ross.net/guest_rant.htm> ROSS IN RANGE Guest rant A Post-Election Rant I Wish I'd Written, or A Ross In Range EXTRA From Michael Hendrix By John Ross (Introduction only) and Michael Hendrix (Body of Column) Copyright 2004 by John Ross and Michel Hendrix. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given. Every once in a while someone writes something that makes me think, "Hey, I was about to do a piece like that, except I was doing something else. And he did it better than I would have, anyway." Given my last column about my cousin Jane Smiley, what follows is especially germane. Mike Hendrix's website is http://coldfury.com. It takes a while to find the page that tells you who's doing the writing, but it's there. Mike, if you ever visit St. Louis, the ammo and the avgas are on me.--JR Whatcha Gonna Do? Okay, is anybody but me sick yet of the Left's floundering and flailing about, trying to find any way they possibly can to blame somebody else for their failure to espouse a message remotely palatable to the majority of eligible American voters? Is anybody but me wishing right about now that somebody would clong them upside the head with a shovel and say, "Look, morons, here's the dealB ."? Well, let's try this, then. Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that everything the Left claims to fear about the Bush admin and mainstream red-state America is true. Yep, that's right, you commie bastiches, we're coming for you. It's only a matter of time now until you hear that late-night knock on the door you've been dreading all along. Our jack-booted gendarmerie is going to be working overtime rounding up every non-white and non-rich subject of our fascist regime, and we're going to be baking every last one of you into pies that we'll then refuse to share with the poor and hungry. We'll be baking those pies in coal-fired ovens, and those ovens will be devoid of any sort of exhaust-scrubber whatever, because we want to release all the toxic gases and chemicals we can into the atmosphere. We'll be spiking the rivers with DDT, alar, thalidomide, and whatever other chemical bugaboos we can think of so as to pollute the drinking water, too. We'll cram the landfills (which will be more numerous than ever) with deadly silicone breast implants, and we're going to wipe our asses with copies of the Kyoto Treaty, after which we'll staple the soiled pages to your foreheads. Halliburton will be sending you the bill for that, too; we'll call it "cosmetic surgery" and charge a rate tied to the market price for the harvested, tanned, and cured pelts of starving homeless Americans, whose numbers will be rocketing even higher than those for the aforementioned landfills, which is where said homeless will be forced to live while we hunt them down for sport. We're going to subjugate the entire world through violence and capitalist exploitation. We'll be sending our duped, mindless killerbot soldiers to the remotest corners of the Earth to deny freedom to every little brown person currently enjoying an idyllic, bucolic existence in harmony with unspoiled nature, every racial, religious, and cultural minority who has thus far lived relatively free of the sting of our rapacious lash. We're all going to get rich from it, and we're going to make the poor noble Bob Cratchets and Tiny Tims of the world pay for our sumptuous lives of piggish, rankly self-indulgent consumerism, and then we're going to kill them when we've bled them completely dry. Yep, it's all true, every bit of it; the New Gulags, which we Nazified Tolkien geeks like to refer to as Barad Ashcroft, or just Shrubthanc, have been under construction since early 2001 and are almost ready to open for business. The ultra-right-wing corporate media establishment has known all along, and have been helping us cover it all up, and now it's too late; there's nothing you can do to stop us. You all are going to be fed into the ovens by the millions, and we're going to destroy the environment and nuke the Third World, and it's all going to be done because Jesus told us to, and that's the only reason we're ever going to need. Because hey, we're stupid. Michael Moore? Dead soon, at our hands, as punishment for daring to dissent. Karen Finley? Ditto. Hillary Clinton? She'll be crawling around our (segregated) private club on all fours in a Playboy Bunny costume, forced to beg for the privilege of bringing us drinks, dropping grapes into our mouths, and mopping the floors with her hair-just to remind any of you other strong, uppity women who might get ideas about overturning the established patriarchal order who's really in charge here. Other younger, more attractive women will be forced into sexual slavery, and abortion will absolutely not be an option for dealing with the inevitable unwanted pregnancies that will result. Rusty coathangers will be available at the door, although using them will be punishable by electrocution-electricity provided by the nuke plants that will be on every corner and completely unregulated and unsafe. But it's just as well that they are our slaves, because there ain't gonna be no welfare to help them out, and they're not going to be allowed to work at anything other than pleasing their oppressors. We'll be burning the UN HQ in New York down, of course, and we'll be locking all the delegates inside the building before we set it alight. Then we'll be invading France, just to teach 'em a lesson about how we Texas cowboys do bidness. The world's oil, of course, is ours, and we'll be boiling tons of it and pouring it over the heads of those who refuse to acknowledge our Xtian God. There'll be no stem cell research, there'll be no health care at all for the poor (whose numbers we will be increasing by every means we can think of), and if you dare to complain about life in the New Conservative Amerikkka, we're going to kill you for it. All of that: so stipulated. Now, the question for you moonbat Lefty baglappers: What the hell are you going to do about it? I mean, seriously; if you truly believe that all this is now in the process of happening right before your very eyes, doesn't it become incumbent upon you, as the most basic imaginable of moral obligations, to do something to prevent it, or overturn it? I mean, obviously, you tried peaceful means of stopping us, but that didn't work-because us right-wingnuts rigged the election and disenfranchised everybody. And you can't go to the courts because they're in the Bushitler's pocket too, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which you've been saying for four years now illegally handed him the White House after the tainted 2000 "election." So your last legal, nonviolent means of resistance has been taken away from you, and you can't even count on the media to publicize the reality of what's going on because of their right-wing slant, their fondness for the status quo, and of course the fact that they're really nothing but money-grubbing corporations themselves whose only concern is the bottom line. So what's left, Lefties? Where do you go from here? What are you gonna do about it? I'll tell you what you're going to do about it: you're not going to do one damned thing but continue with your whining, that's what, and it's not because deep down you're all cowards either. It's because deep down, you know you're full of shit. You don't even believe half the stuff you're currently crying about yourselves. Because if you did, you wouldn't be talking about it. You wouldn't be writing whiny letters to the editor; you wouldn't be fearfully mincing down to the Canadian Consulate to half-seriously inquire about moving; you wouldn't be sitting in coffee houses denouncing the moronic inhabitants of Jesusland with your fellow smug, self-satisfied pseudo-hip doofuses. You'd be gearing up and arming yourselves for the fight of your lives. And much to your surprise, you'd have a lot of us over here on the right offering to help load mags. And that's why you're going to keep right on losing elections. If even one third of what you say was true, you'd have Americans of every political stripe rushing to your side to man the barricades. But it isn't anything like true, and we all know it, and we've all known it ever since you tried to claim that proposed reductions in the annual rate of increase of various federal budget items during the Reagan years were actually heartless "slashing" of the budget by people who wanted poor people to die. We've known it ever since you railed during the Clinton years about how the welfare reform forced on him by the evil Gingrich Repubs amounted to cultural and economic genocide, and then watched as hordes of welfare cheats-who you always claimed didn't exist-were quietly expunged from the rolls and went back to work. In other words, you're all hype and no hump. Your party has become the Chicken Little Party, weeping and wailing about disaster, catastrophe, and The End Of The World As We Know It every time a new idea for running the government gets put forth by someone who isn't a card-carrying liberal. And the proof is in the pudding. Your delirious ideas don't even inspire your like-minded cohorts-those who really do believe the sky is falling-to get out and fight to save their very lives; you certainly aren't going to inspire a majority of Americans to rally to your banner if you can't even get your own true believers off their asses and into the streets. That's the problem with what you people used to like to call "false consciousness," which is exactly what you're now reduced to peddling. Your hysteria is based on plain and simple untruths, and nobody is willing to go out there and risk injury or death for something they know in their hearts is a lie. There ain't gonna be any Revolution, televised or otherwise, because too many of us know that none is really called for, and the more you try to promote an addle-pated apocalyptic vision of a theocratic MegaMurrika the more the rest of us just sit back and wonder what the hell you're talking about, as we watch life gradually improve for more and more of us despite your doomsaying. Afghanis just voted, in the first real free election they've ever had; they didn't vote in any Lefty flamethrower, and they didn't vote in any Islamist terrorist either. And this occurred only a couple of years after we all watched you people wax apoplectic about the coming disastrous "quagmire." Well, if that's a quagmire, most of us figure the world could do with a few more of 'em. It didn't come cheap, and it didn't come easy, but it came anyway, and no thanks to any of you, either. And the same thing is going to happen in Iraq soon; the ordinary people you claim to be concerned about will see how their lives have improved since Saddam's removal, and, despite all your supposed "concern" for their welfare, they're also going to remember who it was who bitched and whined about the only recent President who was willing to lift a finger and take a political risk to help make it so. And you smarmily call yourselves the "reality-based community." What a laugh that is. And that's what it all comes down to, really. Those of us who do have some adult grasp of reality are sitting back and laughing at you and your dipsomaniacal ravings. You don't inspire trust and confidence in your ability to run the world's only remaining superpower, because you can't resist the adolescent urge to hyperbolize every last little thing. Just as a small example, look at your pals in the liberal MSM [mainstream media--JR]. There are no mere "problems"; instead, we're deluged with one "crisis" after another in their newspapers and on TV. You're like little kids whose experience of the world is so limited as to define the boundaries of your intellect far too narrowly to ever be trusted with the responsibility of governing a nation. Grow up, Chicken Little. Lead, follow, or get out of the friggin' way. Or, at the very least, you can stop trying to get the rest of us to guzzle a bunch of Kool-Aid that you can't even swallow yourselves. Michael Hendrix 11/12/04 - -- - ----------------- 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' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1336 iQA/AwUBQa7kF8PxH8jf3ohaEQImLwCeJrfwhwQuJJZSbWNZ3DXv40ezGiAAoKkT WyShuQdyzaZb9f5XBFNqlC6T =cqLW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Itanium inventor bobs to surface as chip's savior?
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/secure64_itanium_arrives/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Enterprise ; Servers ; Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/secure64_itanium_arrives/ Itanium inventor bobs to surface as chip's savior? By Ashlee Vance in Chicago (ashlee.vance at theregister.co.uk) Published Wednesday 1st December 2004 18:22 GMT Exclusive Some start-ups are comprised of wide-eyed wheelers and dealers with little technical expertise. Others have a decent mix of business types and technology talents. Then there are start-ups like Secure64 Software Corp. that have nothing but the richest pedigree of pure, unadulterated genius running through their giddy veins. The discovery of Secure64 happened by chance. The company's CEO Peter Cranstone took exception with one of The Register's Itanium bashing articles and sent an e-mail extolling the possible virtues of the chip. This e-mail led to a brief look at Secure64's management team website at which point jaws dropped and little hamsters started turning in heads. Without slighting other members of the Secure64 team, we have to admit that one name in particular caught our attention - Bill Worley, the startup's CTO. Worley worked on a couple of minor projects during his lengthy tenure at HP. Little things like being the principal architect of the PA-RISC processor and later the principal architect of PA-WideWord - known today as Itanium. Worley, however, didn't just do the initial Itanium designs, he also led the decision, in 1993, to unite HP and Intel behind the project. High-end computing has never been the same since - for better or for worse. And few engineers have a more impressive resume. Along with Worley, Secure64 has Cranstone, who co-developed the mod_gzip data compression technology for the Apache web server. Its Chairman is Denny Georg, former CTO of various parts of HP. Its VP of Product Delivery is Joe Gersch who once managed HP's research and development organization. But, as they say late at night, that's not all. Larry Hambly, one of the first 100 employees at Sun Microsystems, also sits on Secure64's advisory board along with Rajiv Gupta - the former GM of HP's e-Speak web services unit and former head of the joint HP/Intel Itanium development team. Just an inconsequential, revolutionary OS So what unambitious project are all these brains working on? Well, just the creation of an abstracted type of operating system that could create faster, more stable, more secure servers. At present, Secure64 has declined requests for interviews with CEO Cranstone saying the company will have a formal launch early next year. This makes it a bit difficult to know exactly what the company is up to. Thankfully, Worley has applied for a couple of patents that give a decent idea of the direction Secure64 is taking. At the heart of Worley's recent work is the notion that general purpose operating systems such as Unix, Linux and Windows don't make the best use of specific features in processors - namely features in Itanium. The general purpose nature of today's server market means that systems perform well on a wide-variety of applications, but the boxes aren't tuned as well as they could be for specific tasks. In the past, any number of companies have taken a stab at this problem by creating server appliances designed to handle a small subset of applications. Most of these appliances relied on sophisticated software to make them different from the average server. Of late, other companies have been trying to tackle the general purposeness of servers with various add-ons. Products such as TCP/IP and SSL accelerators have arrived to speed up the performance of boxes in specific areas. The appliances and accelerators have largely been aimed at web edge types of workloads - things like serving up web pages, processing web services protocols and encryption. While load balancers and some security appliances have been picked up a decent rate, most of these types of products really haven't enjoyed much interest. The boys at Secure64 appear to think they've figured out a way to make a web edge system more attractive to customers. An extensible application environment for you and me Not surprisingly, the company's approach relies on making the most out of Itanium. When Itanium first hit the market, both Intel and HP spent a lot of time touting some of the features that separated Itanium from other processors. (They mention these features less often these days, focusing their marketing efforts instead on defending the chip's existence.) The four main "features" of Itanium at play here are its large register sets (128 general purpose and 128 floating point registers), the fact that it can crank through 6-8 instructions per cycle, its security compartments technology and its 4 privilege levels - again for added security. Secure64 rightly believes that none of the major OSes out there makes terribly good use of these unique features in Itanium. The chance is there for a company to build software that can scream on Itanium and do so with very high levels of security. The company seems to think that the existence of an OS that can truly make use of all Itanium has to offer will spur adoption of the processor. In its patent applications, Secure64 describes its Itanium-friendly software as a type of "extensible application environment." The good, old EAE. A customer would hypothetically load a CD with the run-time EAE into a low-end Itanium server with the EAE serving as the operating system. The Secure64 EAE would then work its magic, initializing memory and setting up the protection ID keys and compartments available with Itanium. All told, the EAE eats up a minimal set of system resources - say 2 percent - and turns over the rest of the server to the applications. The first use for such a product will likely be something in the web acceleration realm. The server would boot up with a caching engine, real-time compression (gzip64), SSL64, DDoS, routing functions and support for those third-party TCP/IP offload cards discussed above. Secure64's patent materials describe the EAE-powered boxes generally being used as web servers, secure web servers, proxy servers, secure proxy servers and application servers. Secure64 documentation obtained by The Register shows that the company believes systems running its software will show a 20x performance improvement on web workloads, while providing much improved scaling. In addition, Secure64 is looking to provide customers with a 100x reduction in the costs associated with churning through web services transactions. Secure64 is claiming that it will be virtually impossible to write worms or viruses that can attack the EAE, as it makes use of Itanium's rich security features. Third-parties can write applications to the EAE that make similar use of these security functions. The Secure64 patent application also describes the EAE as having a rich set of partitioning functions. The company has focused on making each partition very stable and secure via the means described above and has also paid attention to ways partitions can be tuned for specific applications. "The customized execution environment then has direct access and control over the system resources within its partition," Secure64 writes in one application. "That is, there are no operating system abstractions interposed between the customized execution environment and the system resources allocated to the customized execution environment. Advantageously, with the operating system abstractions out of the way, the customized execution environment may implement a computational and/or I/O structure that is simpler, is tuned for a particular application, and can take advantage of certain processor or other system resource features that are not exploited by the (general purpose OS)." Itanic revival Not knowing exactly what Secure64 will end up unveiling next year makes it tough to guess how well the technology will be accepted or what exactly it will compete against. Other companies - Sun comes most immediately to mind - have talked about attacking web edge types of workloads with a new class of multicore chips. These processors can handle numerous requests at once, and Sun has discussed similar 20x performance improvements with web services transactions. It's more difficult, however, to guess how well products from Sun and others would stack up on the security front against Secure64. In some ways, the Secure64 EAE seems like a very sophisticated version of VMware's ESX Server product aimed specifically at the 64-bit computing market. Like ESX Server, the EAE pushes the OS out of the way and provides a nice set of virtualization tools. Again, companies like Sun and HP have been doing similar things with their versions of Unix. Secure64's biggest plus would be that it has tuned its software for Itanium only and thrown out any general purpose OS nonsense that would hamper web workload performance. That certainly makes it a unique player in the market, which is exactly what you want from a start-up. With its rich ties to HP, it's not hard to imagine Secure64 quickly appearing as an option for HP's Integrity server customers. This is a big "in" since HP accounts for about 85 percent of the Itanium ecosystem. The appliance idea never seems to take off as well as start-ups hope, and we have our doubts Secure64's play. That said, it sure would be something to see the originator of Itanium bring the chip back to life using his intimate knowledge of the chip's architecture as Secure64's biggest weapon. . The present Secure64 (http://www.secure64.com/) Patent I (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2…) Patent II (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2…) The past Worley pushes for Itanium (http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/worley.html) Worley interview (http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2001/apr-jun/2worley.html) Cranstone interview (http://www.webreference.com/interviews/petercranstone.html) Related stories IBM, Moore's Law and the POWER 5 chip (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/ibm_power5_moores_law/) How MS will end the Dell - Intel love-in (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/24/microsoft_dell_amd/) Intel is killing Itanium one comment at a time (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/19/intel_itanium_mainframes/) IBM benchmark leaves server rivals breathless (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ibm_shatterrs_tpcc/) Intel nuances Itanium; Microsoft ignores it (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/intel_ms_itanium_kick/) -- ----------------- 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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Jewish wholy words..
by Nomen Nescio 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

Is it true that the jews have these texts in their scriptures? #1. Sanhedrin 59a: "Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild animal." #2. Aboda Sarah 37a: "A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated." #3. Yebamoth 11b: "Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age." #4. Abodah Zara 26b: "Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed." #5. Yebamoth 98a: "All gentile children are animals." #6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122: "A Jew is forbidden to drink from a glass of wine which a Gentile has touched, because the touch has made the wine unclean." #7. Baba Necia 114, 6: "The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts."

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MapReduce for Decentralized Computation - zLabWiki
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

<http://zlab.commerce.net/wiki/index.php/MapReduce_for_Decentralized_Computa…> MapReduce for Decentralized Computation I was reading Dean and Ghemawat's MapReduce paper this morning. It describes a way to write large-grain parallel programs to be executed on Google's large clusters of computers in a simple functional style, in C++. It occurred to me that the system as described might be well-suited to computational cooperation between mutually untrusting entities, computation in what we at CommerceNet refer to as a "decentralized" system. [edit] Decentralized computational cooperation There are five major problems with regard to computational cooperation, by which I mean outsourcing some amount of your computation to servers run by people you don't trust completely: Cracking The server trusts the client not to break the server. Storage The client trusts the server to store the client's data safely. Correctness The client trusts the server to execute the client's code accurately and produce results quickly. Confidentiality The client trusts the server not to disclose the client's data against the client's wishes. Payment The server usually trusts the client to pay them for the service provided. Cracking can be dealt with by known methods: metered resource usage and well-known isolation techniques. Payment can be dealt with in any number of ways; it should be noted that it is not entirely separable from cracking. Storage can be dealt with by replicating or erasure-coding data across a number of administratively-independent servers. This leaves the problems of correctness and confidentiality; I think the MapReduce approach can help with correctness. [edit] Correctness The "map" function converts a record from an input file into a set of records in an intermediate file; typically, each input record is replicated in several places on the cluster, and the "map" function is deterministic. The "reduce" function converts the set of all intermediate records sharing the same key (gathered from the many map-stage output files) into a set of output records, which are written to an output file; typically the "reduce" function is also deterministic. In the usual case, where these functions are deterministic, they can be executed on two administratively-independent servers, and the results (which, in the Google case, are merely files) can be compared. If they differ, the same results can be recomputed on more administratively-independent servers to see which ones were correct. (It may be worthwhile to compare Merkle tree hashes of the output files, rather than the output files themselves, since moving the output files over the network may entail significant expense.) This prevents any single broken or dishonest machine or administrative entity from affecting the correctness of the overall computation. Higher levels of redundancy can be used to defend against stronger attackers at relatively modest cost. Some threats can be defeated by even weaker means with negligible computational cost. Computing each function for a randomly selected 1% of input or intermediate records, then comparing the results, may provide an acceptable probability of catching faults or compromises if they are expected to affect a significant proportion of the output; and it requires negligible computational cost. In the ten-billion-record performance tests mentioned in the Google paper, a corrupt "map" function would have to affect fewer than 694 of the input records to have less than a 50% chance of detection by the 1% sample (including 100 million randomly selected records). A corrupt "map" function that affected 5000 input records --- only one out of every two million --- would have only an 0.7% chance of not being caught. This probably deals adequately with machine failures and gross attacks, but a careful attack might corrupt the output for only a single input record --- and would have only a 1% chance of being caught. This may still be enough if the problem is a result of a deliberate attack and the attacker is vulnerable to sufficiently severe penalties. [edit] Confidentiality Confidentiality is a more difficult problem; computing with confidential data on hardware that belongs to someone you don't trust requires that you compute with encrypted data. In the general case, this is a very difficult problem. (Perhaps this could be written with a real example.) Article Discussion Edit History Create an account or log in Navigation ? Main Page ? Community portal ? Current events ? Recent changes ? Random page ? Help Search Toolbox ? What links here ? Related changes ? Special pages ? This page was last modified 21:20, 29 Nov 2004. ? This page has been accessed 36 times. ? About zLabWiki ? Disclaimers -- ----------------- 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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Google Labs Publications: MapReduce
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

<http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html> Google Labs Publication MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat Google Inc. Abstract MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper. Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system. Our implementation of MapReduce runs on a large cluster of commodity machines and is highly scalable: a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines. Programmers find the system easy to use: hundreds of MapReduce programs have been implemented and upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day. To appear in: OSDI'04: Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, San Francisco, CA, December, 2004. Download: PDF Version This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All person copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Google Labs home page - All About Google )2004 Google -- ----------------- 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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Lockheed and the Future of Warfare
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/business/yourmoney/28lock.html> November 28, 2004 Lockheed and the Future of Warfare By TIM WEINER LOCKHEED MARTIN doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft. Of course, Lockheed, based in Bethesda, Md., is best known for its weapons, which are the heart of America's arsenal. It builds most of the nation's warplanes. It creates rockets for nuclear missiles, sensors for spy satellites and scores of other military and intelligence systems. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency might have difficulty functioning without the contractor's expertise. But in the post-9/11 world, Lockheed has become more than just the biggest corporate cog in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. It is increasingly putting its stamp on the nation's military policies, too. Lockheed stands at "the intersection of policy and technology," and that "is really a very interesting place to me," said its new chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, a tightly wound former Marine. "We are deployed entirely in developing daunting technology," he said, and that requires "thinking through the policy dimensions of national security as well as technological dimensions." To critics, however, Lockheed's deep ties with the Pentagon raise some questions. "It's impossible to tell where the government ends and Lockheed begins," said Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington that monitors government contracts. "The fox isn't guarding the henhouse. He lives there." No contractor is in a better position than Lockheed to do business in Washington. Nearly 80 percent of its revenue comes from the United States government. Most of the rest comes from foreign military sales, many financed with tax dollars. And former Lockheed executives, lobbyists and lawyers hold crucial posts at the White House and the Pentagon, picking weapons and setting policies. Obviously, war and crisis have been good for business. The Pentagon's budget for buying new weapons rose by about a third over the last three years, to $81 billion in fiscal 2004, up from $60 billion in 2001. Lockheed's sales also rose by about a third, to nearly $32 billion in the 2003 calendar year, from $24 billion in 2001. It was the No. 1 recipient of Pentagon primary contracts, with $21.9 billion in fiscal 2003. Boeing had $17.3 billion, Northrop Grumman had $11.1 billion and General Dynamics had $8.2 billion. LOCKHEED also has many tens of billions of dollars in future orders on its books. The company's stock has tripled in the last four years, to just under $60. "It used to be just an airplane company," said John Pike, a longtime military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Alexandria, Va. "Now it's a warfare company. It's an integrated solution provider. It's a one-stop shop. Anything you need to kill the enemy, they will sell you." As its influence grows, Lockheed is not just seeking to solve the problems of national security. It is framing the questions as well: Are there too few soldiers to secure the farthest reaches of Iraq? Lockheed is creating robot soldiers and neural software - "intelligent agents" - to do their work. "We've now created policy options where you can elect to put a human in or you can elect to put an intelligent agent in place," Mr. Stevens said. Are thousands of C.I.A. and Pentagon analysts drowning under a flood of data, incapable of seeing patterns? Lockheed's "intelligence information factory" will do their thinking for them. Mining and sifting categories of facts - for example, linking an adversary's movements and telephone calls - would "offload the mental work by making connections," said Stanton D. Sloane, executive vice president for integrated systems and solutions at Lockheed. Are American soldiers hard-pressed to tell friend from foe in the crags of Afghanistan? Lockheed is transferring spy satellite technology, created for mapping mountain ridges, to build a mobile lab for reading fingerprints. Lockheed executives say the mobile lab, the size of a laptop, is just the tool for special-operations commandos. It can be loaded with the prints of suspected terrorists, they say, and linked to the F.B.I.'s 470 million print files. They say they think that American police departments will want it, too. Does the Department of Homeland Security have the best tools to protect the nation? Lockheed has a host of military and intelligence technologies to offer. "What they do for the military in downtown Falluja, they can do for the police in downtown Reno," said Jondavid Black of the company's Horizontal Integration Vision division. Lockheed is also building a huge high-altitude airship, 25 times bigger than the Goodyear blimp, intended to help the Pentagon with the unsolved problem of protecting the nation from ballistic missiles. The airship, with two tons of surveillance sensors, could be used by the Department of Homeland Security to stare down at the United States, Lockheed officials said. In a pilot program for the department, Lockheed has set up spy cameras and sensors on the U.S.S. New Jersey, anchored in the Delaware River, providing 24-hour surveillance of the ports of Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. The program grew out of the Aegis weapons and surveillance systems for Navy ships, and it soon may spread throughout the United States. The melding of military and intelligence programs, information-technology and domestic security spending began in earnest after the Sept. 11 attacks. Lockheed was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the shift. When the United States government decided a decade ago to let corporate America handle federal information technology, Lockheed leapt at the opportunity. Its information-technology sales have quadrupled since 1995, and, for all those years, Lockheed has been the No. 1 supplier to the federal government, which now outsources 83 percent of its I.T. work. Lockheed has taken over the job of making data flow throughout the government, from the F.B.I.'s long-dysfunctional computer networks to the Department of Health and Human Services system for tracking child support. The company just won a $525 million contract to fix the Social Security Administration's information systems. It has an $87 million contract to make computers communicate and secrets stream throughout the Department of Homeland Security. On top of all that, the company is helping to rebuild the United States Coast Guard - a $17 billion program - and to supply, under the Patriot Act, biometric identity cards for six million Americans who work in transportation. Lockheed is also the strongest corporate force driving the Pentagon's plans for "net-centric warfare": the big idea of fusing military, intelligence and weapons programs through a new military Internet, called the Global Information Grid, to give American soldiers throughout the world an instant picture of the battlefield around them. "We want to know what's going on anytime, anyplace on the planet," said Lorraine M. Martin, vice president and deputy of the company's Joint Command, Control and Communications Systems division. Lockheed's global reach is also growing. Its "critical mass" of salesmanship lets it "produce global products for a global marketplace," said Robert H. Trice Jr., the senior vice president for corporate business development. With its dominant position in fighter jets, missiles, rockets and other weapons, Lockheed's technology will drive the security spending for many American allies in coming decades. Lockheed now sells aircraft and weapons to more than 40 countries. The American taxpayer is financing many of those sales. For example, Israel spends much of the $1.8 billion in annual military aid from the United States to buy F-16 warplanes from Lockheed. Twenty-four nations are flying the F-16, or will be soon. Lockheed's factory in Fort Worth is building 10 for Chile. Oman will receive a dozen next year. Poland will get 48 in 2006; the United States Treasury will cover the cost through a $3.8 billion loan. In the future, Lockheed hopes to build and sell hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of the next generation of warplanes, the F-35, to the United States Army, Navy and Air Force, and to dozens of United States allies. Three years ago, Lockheed won the competition to be the prime contractor for this aircraft, known as the Joint Strike Fighter. The program was valued at $200 billion, the biggest Pentagon project in history, but it may be worth more. The F-35 is in its first stages of development in Fort Worth; its onboard computers will require 3.5 million lines of code. Each of the American military services wants a different version of the jet. There have been glitches involving the weight of the craft. "We did not get it right the first time," said Tom Burbage, a Lockheed executive vice president working on the program. But a day will come, he said, "when everybody's flying the F-35." Lockheed hopes to sell 4,000 or 5,000 of the planes, with roughly half the sales to foreign nations, including those that bought the F-16. "It's a terrific opportunity for us," said Bob Elrod, a senior Lockheed manager for the F-35 program. "It could be a tremendous success, at the level of the F-16 - 4,000-plus and growing." That would represent "world domination" for Lockheed, he said. In the United States, where national security spending now surpasses $500 billion a year, Lockheed's dominance is growing. Its own executives say the concentration of power among military contractors is more intense than in any other sector of business outside banking. Three or four major companies - Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and arguably Boeing - rule the industry. They often work like general contractors building customized houses, farming out the painting, the floors and the cabinets to smaller subcontractors and taking their own share of the money. AND, after 9/11, cost is hardly the most important variable for Pentagon planners. Lockheed has now won approval to build as many F-22's as possible. The current price, $258 million apiece, easily makes the F-22 the most expensive fighter jet in history. Mr. Stevens, whose compensation last year as Lockheed's chief operating officer was more than $9.5 million, says cost is essentially irrelevant when national security is at stake. "Some folks might think, well, here's a fighter that costs a lot," he said. "This is not a business where in the purest economical sense there's a broad market of supply and demand and price and value can be determined in that exchange. It's more challenging to define its value." Lockheed says it has transformed its corporate culture. In the 1970's, it was discovered that the company had paid millions of dollars to foreign officials around the world in order to sell its planes. In one case, Kakuei Tanaka, who had been the prime minister of Japan, was convicted of accepting bribes. "Without Lockheed, there never would have been a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act," said Jerome Levinson, who was the staff director of the Senate subcommittee that uncovered the bribery. The antibribery provisions of that law, passed in 1977, owed their existence to the Lockheed investigation, he said. The last bribery case involving Lockheed came a decade ago, when a Lockheed executive and the corporation admitted paying $1.2 million in bribes to an Egyptian official to seal the sales of three Lockheed C-130 cargo planes. Mr. Trice, Lockheed's senior vice president for business development, says the company cleaned up its act at home and overseas since the last of the series of major mergers and acquisitions that gave the corporation its present shape in March 1995. "You simply have to look people in the eye and say 'we don't do business that way,' " he said. There really is no need to do business that way any more - not in a world where so much of Lockheed's wealth flows directly from the Treasury, where competition for foreign markets is both controlled and subsidized by the White House and Congress, and where Lockheed's influence runs so deep. Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex and director of the national spy satellite agency. The list also includes Stephen J. Hadley, who has been named the next national security adviser to the president, succeeding Condoleezza Rice. Former Lockheed executives serve on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board and the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which help make military and intelligence policy and pick weapons for future battles. Lockheed's board includes E. C. Aldridge Jr., who, as the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, gave the go-ahead to build the F-22. None of those posts and positions violate the Pentagon's rules about the "revolving door" between industry and government. Lockheed has stayed clear of the kind of conflict-of-interest cases that have afflicted its competitor, Boeing, and the Air Force in recent months. "We need to be politically aware and astute," Mr. Stevens said. "We work with the Congress. We work with the executive branch." In these dialogues, he said, Lockheed's end of the conversation is "saying we think this is feasible, we think this is possible, we think we might have invented a new approach." Lockheed makes about $1 million a year in campaign contributions through political action committees, singling out members of the Congressional committees controlling the Pentagon's budget, and spends many millions more on lobbying. Political stalwarts who have lobbied for Lockheed at one point or another include Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a former Republican national chairman; Otto Reich, who persuaded Congress to sell F-16's to Chile before becoming President Bush's main Latin America policy aide in 2002; and Norman Y. Mineta, the transportation secretary and former member of Congress. Its connections give Lockheed a "tremendous opportunity to influence contracts flowing to the company," said Ms. Brian of the Project on Government Oversight. "More subtly valuable is the ability of the company to benefit from their eyes and ears inside the government, to know what's on the horizon, what are the best bets for the government's future technology needs." SO who serves as the overseer for the biggest military contractors and their costly weapons? Usually, the customer itself: the Pentagon. "These programs are huge," said Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller and chief financial officer for the last three years, who recently joined Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm. "There is a historical tendency to underestimate their test schedules, their technological hurdles, the likely weight of an airplane and, as a result, to underestimate costs. "Because you have so few contractors, you don't get the level of attention that the average citizen would think would be devoted to a program costing billions of dollars," he said. "With this massive agglomeration into a very small number of companies, you get far less visibility as to whether the subcontractors are effectively managed. Problems accumulate." "Twenty years ago, the complaint was, it takes so long to build things," he said. Weapons designed in the depths of the cold war were built long after the Berlin Wall crumbled. That led some people, including George W. Bush while running for president in 1999, to suggest that the Pentagon skip a generation of weapons set to roll off the assembly line in this decade and concentrate instead on lighter, faster, smarter systems for the future. That didn't happen. It still takes two decades to build a major weapons system, and the costs are still staggering. "The complaints haven't changed 20 years later," Mr. Zakheim said. The difference between then and now is the concentration of expertise, experience and power in a few hands, he said, "and I don't think the effect has necessarily been a good one." Mr. Stevens rejected that criticism. "I can't tell you the number of times I've heard 'not progressive, not sophisticated, ponderous, slow' " as terms used to describe Lockheed, he said. "I see none of that." What he sees is a far grander vision. Lockheed, he said, is promising to transform the very nature of war. During the cold war, when Lockheed and its component parts built an empire of nuclear weapons, Mr. Stevens said, the watchword was: "Be more fearful. 'Deterrence,' isn't that Latin? 'Deterrere.' Induce fear. Terrorize." Today, Lockheed is building weapons so smart that they can change the world by virtue of their precision, he said; they aim to wage war without the death of innocents, without weapons misfiring, without fatal miscalculation. "I know the fog of war exists," Mr. Stevens said, adding that it could be lifted. "We envision a world where you don't have any more fratricide," no more friendly fire, he said. "With technology we've been able to make ourselves more secure and more humane. "And we aren't there yet - but we sure have pioneered the kind of work that is taking us well along that trajectory. And there's a lot of evidence that says we're doing well. And we're setting the bar high and we expect to be able to do that. Now that's pretty exciting stuff. "I don't say this lightly," he said. "Our industry has contributed to a change in humankind." -- ----------------- 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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[ISN] Universities struggling with SSL-busting spyware
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

--- begin forwarded text

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Class fingerprint scans to stop truancy
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=IF0PGSNPI5OKTQFIQMGCN…> The Telegraph Class fingerprint scans to stop truancy By David Sapsted (Filed: 01/12/2004) Pupils at a secondary school are being "fingerprinted" before each lesson in a bid to combat truancy. All 1,300 students arriving for classes at Impington Village College, near Cambridge, have to place their fingertips on a scanner, which then registers them as present. The scheme is the first of its kind in the country. If a pupil does not check in, the system sends a text message or e-mail to his or her parents, telling them their child is absent. The school telephones parents who do not have a computer or mobile phone alerts. The system, which uses reference points taken from each child's finger rather than a complete fingerprint, has been supplied free on an experimental basis by a technology company. If the scheme is a success, it is likely to be extended to verify the identity of examination candidates; make head counts on school trips; control the issuing of library books and monitor access to school buildings. A spokesman for Cambridgeshire county council said yesterday: "We are impressed by what we have seen so far. The system has many benefits." The technology will also be used to introduce a cashless catering system, which will avoid the need for pupils to carry money and help to increase security. Jacqueline Kearns, the warden of Impington Village College, said: "We are delighted with the new fingertip recognition technology. "It will revolutionise the way students register and will enable us and their parents to keep track of any who are late or absent. "Staff and students have embraced the new technology and we are looking at ways it can improve efficiency and pupil safety." -- ----------------- 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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Swedish military feared linked to Estonia ferry disaster
by Nomen Nescio 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 For those interested in intelligence, munitions smuggling by authorities and so on - a few words concerning military smuggling of munitions on the Estonia, feared to have played a part in the sinking and killings of 852 people on Sept 28, 1994, when the ferry M/S Estonia sinked during a journey from Estonia to Sweden. It has been rumoured for a long time that there were some kind of smuggling of sensitive material taking place on Estonia and that Russian authorities did not like this, needless to say. The very stressed and hasty investigation performed by the involved nations also raised suspicions amongst a lot of people. On top of all this the Swedish social democratic government did all they could to hinder future investigations of the wreckage by trying to cover it with stones and concrete. First some other related info. The reader should know that the Swedish social democratic party is notorious for acting in undemocratic and deceitful manners against the Swedish people. Two of the most infamous affairs being the "IB affair" and the "Catalina affair". In the IB affair it was shown that the social democratic party had founded a secret and unlawful military intelligence bureau as the party's own private spy organization to spy on other politcal adversaries, a Swedish version of Watergate if you will, but it went far beyond that. Hundreds of thousands of people were targeted during a number of years. Even Olof Palme himself knew about break-ins that the intelligence officers performed in other countries embassies in Stockholm, one of them was Egypt's embassy. One major characteristic is that the Swedish way of doing things means sweeping things under the carpet and not letting the public know the truths, this is shown in every "affair" known in resent years, including the Estonia disaster. In all of these affairs it's the social democrats that has been the most responsible party and the party almost in constant power in Sweden historically speaking. The magazine breaking the news in 1973 today has a web site about the affair, http://www.fib.se/IB/ In the Catalina affair it was very recently shown actually, after the planes was discovered east of the island Gotland in the Baltic Sea, that they were both indeed gunned down, as had been suspected for decades. On June 13 1952 the DC3 plane Hugin disappeared and the only thing found was a trashed rescue raft. Three days later the rescure plane of type "Catalina" was also gunned down and forced to emergency landing. It's today also known however that the Swedish (social democratic) governments have all been maliciously and intentionally lying all along about the Hugin's purpose to both the Swedish people as well as the families. Hugin was in fact gathering intelligence very close (some say on the wrong side even) of the Russian border and was relaying all this signal intelligence directly to the Americans. USA was amongst other things interested in Russias capacity to fight the B-47. This was well known for the Russians and this was the direct cause of the attacks in 1952. It is believed that the Swedish FRA, standing for "Fvrsvarets RadioAnstalt", translating to "The Defence's Radio Institution", which is Swedens NSA, signed secret treaties with the US some three years prior to the assult on these planes. The FRA had 5 employees on the Hugin when it was gunned down. It wasn't until 1991 that the families knew what happened, that was when the Russians admitted a Mig-15 gunned them down. When the recon plane was found in June 2004 it was situated far east of the earlier officially declared crash site which further fules the speculation that Hugin was indeed flying where it shouldn't have been, conducting its sigint operations and that the Swedish governments knew this all along. The Hugin was found June 10, 2003. I'm not sure how much of these affairs is known outside Sweden, but it's interesting read that's for sure and I just may get back to these things and others like them later on. Back to other things now. This was published today in Sweden, along with a tv show of one hour: > INRIKES Publicerad 30 november > > "Krigsmateriel fraktades pe Estonia" > > > Estonia hade veckorna fvre fvrlisning- > en vid tve tillfdllen krigsmateriel > fren Baltikum i lasten. Enligt kvdll- > ens Uppdrag granskning i SVT rvrde > det sig om rysk elektronik som svenska > fvrsvaret tog in fvr att studera. > > Lars Borgnds som gjort programmet > sdger att avslvjandet belyser hur > svenska myndigheter hanterat kata- > strofen. -Man har t.ex. inte undersvkt > bilddck, sdger han till SVT Text. > > Den pensionerade tullintendenten > Lennart Henriksson uppger att han fett > order om att sldppa igenom bilarna pe > begdran av fvrsvarsmakten. > Lds mer pe svt.se/nyheter Which translates into something like this: DOMESTIC Published November 30 "War material was freighted on the Estonia" The weeks before the sinking the Estonia had at least at two different occasions war material in its cargo. According to tonight's Uppdrag Granskning(*) in the Swedish state television the equipment was russian electronics that the Swedish military brought in for studies. Lars Borgnds who did the show says that the revelations shows how the authorities have handled the situation. - One example is the failure to examine the car deck, he says to SVT. The retired former head of customs at the port of Stockholm Lennart Henriksson says he was given direct orders to let the cars through and that the order came from the military. (*) The name of the tv show sent on Nov 30, featuring Wallraff styled recordings of swedish officials verifying the smuggling of war material on the direct order from the swedish military commander in chief Owe Viktorin. It was showed in the show that Owe Viktorin personally asked the chief of the swedish customs to order their workers to let specific cars through customs without questions. And so they did. The "KSI" mentioned below is perhaps the most secret Swedish military intelligence organization (we know of) today. The abbreviation stands for "Kontoret fvr Sdrskild Inhdmtning", which translated into something like "The office for special intelligence gatherings". They are known to conduct regular espionage operations on foreign soil and have been deeply involved in the smuggling of intelligence and the recruiting of spies on the ground from Russia for quite some time. They are more or less "not existing", you cannot phone MUST and ask for KSI or someone you know working at KSI, they will not acknowledge anything or anyone, although KSI is known to exist and is also mentioned (briefly) in some official documents. KSI is part of MUST, which stands for "Militdra Underdttelse och Sdkerhetstjdnsten", translating to "The military intelligence and security service" and is the Swedish version of CIA so essentially KSI is like a bureau within CIA with some black bag types of jobs in their resume as well. MUST, http://www.hkv.mil.se/article.php?id=35 FRA, http://www.fra.se MUST's annual report 2003 http://www.hkv.mil.se/attachments/sak_ar03_sv.pdf MUST's annual report 2002 http://www.hkv.mil.se/attachments/sak_ar02_s5_sv.pdf SVT Program homepage http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=2232 This is an english text present at the svt.se site. http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=13038&a=293822 - --------------------------------------- In english: War materials smuggled on Estonia Ten years after the Estonia ferry disaster, a former head of customs in Stockholm has confirmed what has been the subject of much speculation - the ferry was being used for smuggling across the Baltic Sea. This secret cargo comprised Russian war materials that had been let through customs on orders from the highest instance. The person that has now chosen to tell all is Lennart Henriksson. He was employed by the customs office in Stockholm for 38 years and was customs inspector and head of the sea customs. Ive been walking around thinking about what happened for ten years. Each time Estonias name came up Ive thought the little I know should be brought into the light of day. I want to clear my conscience, he says. His revelation has put a new light on the Estonia disaster and how it has been handled by politicians and authorities. And its something that has been unknown to the Accident Investigation Board that investigated the disaster. The evening before Lennart Henriksson got in touch with Uppdrag Granskning, hed seen our report on what was happening ten years after the Estonia disaster. The report took up the questions surrounding the accident and how the experts in Sweden and abroad wanted to carry out the investigation. Also in the report were the rumours and speculation about the ferry carrying smuggled goods and that it was the object of sabotage or an explosion. We also told of some relatives to the deceased who suspected that the truth behind the accident has not been uncovered. And that the authorities have colluded and lied. For ten years, Lennart Henriksson has borne this knowledge alone, despite being personally acquainted with people who died when Estonia went down on the night between the 27 and 28 September 1994. Not long before the accident, something happened that he had never experienced before during his many years in the customs. Some time in the middle of September, I now know it was around the 12th or 13th, I went to my boss who said we were called to a meeting with the director of customs. We went up there and the director said that a vehicle would be arriving on the Estonia that shouldnt be searched. He also gave me a licence number, Lennart Henriksson told us. He asked directly why it shouldnt be searched. He said it was an order. 'But from where? I wondered. From the highest quarters he answered, says Henriksson. Normally, customs searched all the vehicles from Estonia, as smuggling was rife. Lennart Henriksson had never experienced anything like this before - that a vehicle was being let through without a search. When the ferry finally arrived, he went down to the ferry quay and spoke to the driver, who was registered as Frank Larsson. The vehicle was a Volvo 745 estate car. I said the customs were carrying out inspections and he gave me a look but I said the search would be faked. We opened a few boxes and as far as I could see it was military electronics in them. What did you base that on? Anyone whos done their military service knows what it looks like. But I dont know how old it was or what condition it was in. The person that gave him the order, says Lennart Henriksson, was the head of the Eastern customs region Inge Lindunger. Lennart Henrikssons immediate superior, who was present when Lindunger gave the order and who was also on the quay when the Volvo arrived, was Superintendent Stig Sandelin. Who this was that was bringing what looked like military electronics into the country, Lennart Henriksson didnt know but he was curious and made a note of the car's licence number. Later that day, he found out who the car was registered to. He still has that document. The registered owner was Ericsson Access AB, a company that at this time was part of the Ericsson group of companies. But today, they say they know nothing about the incident. Not long afterwards, it happened again. The ferry was schedule to arrive on 20 September - and again there was a transport that was waved through without inspection. This time it was a van and Lennart Henriksson looked through the boxes again. It was the same stuff in this vehicle as well: military electronics. I looked into a few boxes but not too closely. What were you thinking this second time? I thought it was a strange procedure. But orders are orders and you dont reflect too much on why. But what was it in those vehicles and who was bringing it in? And perhaps the most important question: was there anything like it on board Estonia on the night of the accident? When Uppdrag Granskning spoke with customs superintendent Stig Sandelin, he remains silent and refers to classified information and national security. On the other hand he does confirm the transports took place - and that he saw the materials being shipped to Sweden. But was there a similar cargo on the night of the accident? He says he doesnt know. Ive no idea. I dont know what was on board when she went down, says Sandelin. In a recorded conversation between Lennart Henriksson and Stig Sandelin, he's more open. According to Stig Sandelin, there was an agreement between the Commissioner of the Swedish Customs at the time, Ulf Larsson, and Ove Wictorin, who was then Supreme Commander of the Swedish armed forces, that Sandelin was to handle the customs clearance when the materials arrived. During the conversation, Lennart Henriksson asked if he knew who the materials were for. Yes, its the military. I dont know what they saw in it but then it was exciting for them to get hold of old Russian stuff. Thats history now, says Sandelin. In other words, Lennart Henrikssons belief that it was military material being brought in on the Estonia on 14 and 20 September was correct. Stig Sandelin had confirmed it. It was Russian materials, the Swedish defence was mixed up in it and it all took place in great secrecy - that is still the case today. Uppdrag Granskning has also received confirmation that the boxes Lennart Henriksson looked inside contained military electronics, not weapons or explosives. But we dont know what was in the boxes Henriksson didnt look inside. The international Accident Investigation Board, which had investigated the accident for three years, never knew that the Estonia passenger ferry was used to transport secret war materials shortly before the accident. But why was the Swedish defence smuggling war materials from Estonia? It was 1994 and five years had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the Baltic States free. The Soviet bases were pulled down and all the materials were taken to Russia. Svren Lindman was the Swedish defence attachi in the three Baltic countries at that time. It was his task to observe the military break-up in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on behalf of the Swedish defence. According to Lindman, the Russians had already shipped home the most interesting materials from the Baltic with just a few exceptions. There was not much left. On the other hand, there was a lot of advanced equipment in the nearby Leningrad area inside Russia. Svren Lindman took military materials back with him from the Baltic himself occasionally. With his diplomatic passport he could easily pass through the controls. Alexander Einseln, Estonias first Supreme Commander, confirms the situation: Everything was for sale and anything was available if you could pay for it", he says. Was the situation in Estonia such that it was possible to smuggle equipment on board the ferry? "Yes, without doubt. There were no controls at all", says Einseln. Svren Lindman has no knowledge of the transports that Lennart Henriksson is talking about - on the 14 and 20 September 1994. In his opinion, as he didn't know about them, they might have involved the most secret section of Swedish defence - KSI, the Office of Special Intelligence. In other words the Swedish secret service. It would be a dereliction of duty if KSI hadnt been in the Baltic digging up whatever they could after the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Lindman. We have confirmation from Lennart Henriksson and Stig Sandelin that covert transport of Russian war materials on Estonia took place on 14 and 20 September. But now when we contact people higher up in the customs and military organisations to obtain more information it seems their memories fail them. Uppdrag Granskning asked Lennart Henriksson to phone director of customs Inge Lindunger, who had given him the order to let the first car through. He says he doesnt remember now either. Whatever it was, its a thing of the past now", says Inge Lindunger. The Commissioner of the Swedish Customs at the time Ulf Larsson answers likewise: It doesnt ring any bells", he says. We get the same response from the Supreme Commander of the day Ove Wictorin: it's nothing he remembers. Then can KSI, the secret service organisation, have acted independently without the knowledge of the Supreme Commander? Officially, KSI is part of the military's intelligence and security service MUST but is such a secret organisation that nothing is said about it and very few know how and where it operates or who works there. The head of MUST at this time was Erik Rossander. Of course the intelligence service is interested in the material standard of other powers. Thats one of the assignments. But Im not saying how you get it, states Rossander. Otherwise, he wouldnt comment on the issue. Everything we did is covered by the secrets act and that still applies. The heads of customs had slight recollections or none at all; the Supreme Commander and the head of Ericsson Access said they had no knowledge of the covert transport of war materials on Estonia. And yet we know they took place on the 14 and 20 September. The question is, was there a cargo like it on the car deck when the ferry sank on the 28th? The former Supreme Commander of Estonia, Alexander Einseln, believes that if there was a military cargo on the night of the accident, it could explain, in his view, the extraordinary way in which the Estonia disaster was handled. It's unusually suspicious that a democratic country like Sweden should react so quickly to cover the wreck and keep everyone away. I saw the same behaviour from the Finns and the Estonians and thats what has made me question whether something had to be concealed. Why such a hurry? wonders Einseln. What do you think should be done now? The ship must be lifted and inspected. But I wouldnt let the three countries involved be part of it. Countries without any national interests to protect should be asked to help, he says. REPORTER: Lars Borgnds - --------------------------------------- Links about the Estonia disaster http://www.estoniasamlingen.se/ http://www.seainfo.se http://user.tninet.se/~uht674g http://www.estonia.kajen.com http://w1.316.telia.com/~u31612930 http://www.multi.fi/~stigb/Estonia http://www.titanicnorden.com/skepp/estonia.html http://factgroup.nu http://heiwaco.tripod.com http://axelnelson.com/skepp/Estonia.html http://susning.nu/Estonia http://www.elaestonia.org Yours Berra (Verification may not work due to high bit characters) - -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGP Universal 1.2.2 mQGiBEGtw28RBADoYtPEDQY0ViYkoOXftj/1KNoKugHwp1CMkKArBStmEegcwju/ IqrWLYA63iXG7zFXenNx77c+MEMHVzyx6aioDypa331pBOBwHN7fpqJZLExR/sQG hEPOlPLlr37xSx41PXbtK7kV7t9UjW5i0Rub60haQ/7iWC6tU6MopvHECwCg/yrf 9MNwngloM9IC9ZBhtg2JRrMEAJEin9BlPM9nht6+G2K6ZF7LYeBwEnH0SHTKGhwW FvEo4Ii0MjEPdvGmMqkiqiYDE09Ke3jPWVib7AkWxj7atUB+FhY6gGb6lvSnViWp R8fLgnd+jJh699g/0xJuD0eca15gmGr95TAK3+MSMhw0tuwbjAi7ItVhnHzxJ2HN xYtIA/461lGfJxxlJS4ZMjnlgb5ANq445dcbFoc5Vic21Uugvi+y+5pGrJf5/i1K KDROJ3TvW/xCmvFWNF29qPs7AqEGIN1uC27z1EP592bSggH1IwEkdWyWYihI6T5w xiSZ1AR5d8X9bbYaTjclIzzxD3DbsvbQlXmqIO+Af57PSsz10bQFQmVycmGJAFUE EBECABUFAkGtw28FCQIIwIAFCwkCAwECGQEACgkQ4zSiVHY/CRb1dQCcDj+2d8Hz bQWKc5Ey4Sb7D9gj2g0AoOMLhkwW6k23v7a2BvOZSgNTQO+DuQQNBEGtw3AQEAD5 GKB+WgZhekOQldwFbIeG7GHszUUfDtjgo3nGydx6C6zkP+NGlLYwSlPXfAIWSIC1 FeUpmamfB3TT/+OhxZYgTphluNgN7hBdq7YXHFHYUMoiV0MpvpXoVis4eFwL2/hM TdXjqkbM+84X6CqdFGHjhKlP0YOEqHm274+nQ0YIxswdd1ckOErixPDojhNnl06S E2H22+slDhf99pj3yHx5sHIdOHX79sFzxIMRJitDYMPj6NYK/aEoJguuqa6zZQ+i AFMBoHzWq6MSHvoPKs4fdIRPyvMX86RA6dfSd7ZCLQI2wSbLaF6dfJgJCo1+Le3k XXn11JJPmxiO/CqnS3wy9kJXtwh/CBdyorrWqULzBej5UxE5T7bxbrlLOCDaAadW oxTpj0BV89AHxstDqZSt90xkhkn4DIO9ZekX1KHTUPj1WV/cdlJPPT2N286Z4VeS Wc39uK50T8X8dryDxUcwYc58yWb/Ffm7/ZFexwGq01uejaClcjrUGvC/RgBYK+X0 iP1YTknbzSC0neSRBzZrM2w4DUUdD3yIsxx8Wy2O9vPJI8BD8KVbGI2Ou1WMuF04 0zT9fBdXQ6MdGGzeMyEstSr/POGxKUAYEY18hKcKctaGxAMZyAcpesqVDNmWn6vQ ClCbAkbTCD1mpF1Bn5x8vYlLIhkmuquiXsNV6z3WFwACAhAA18ulprxi8SmHLuEN hc3c5gaGBNYOTxZpc2S5FEnKw7yMLTVs30xOvG0K3QdcZpFY24aMeXDy1Qf6sHy+ ZxQA2axKrQfNmRYCVO2lpcqB8f/onavSy1KpUpWcdbmSAOxank0kak2ZTqFx6WYA MqAwfFeg5id3bdajEVGW4wsmijtecFcHNInJE81sPVm/pUtcDHCCqO2iToNFPL5r kFNxJ6CrRfW2Ba8iKlPqohsEymzheRjt/5OXPpljjJn3xjr2IUT0EBFFebS0RI7N Rya3/yHlyLelQfeZSSBDc1I9p0DaLg/SauWdoP/mOMJ9MEJSnkL3DfNFabHXhz9K Ao2uO9+uXjQFRDB8kE2eRVbHQF9zUZ/Ag++MoR+lCNYkKLRAkuaPnrBnjOJMe/3q Y8Dlsu1pl8a5n0G4p0SnLBZW20QYUbU/xXNwatFwQ0+YgqaLEil0U9BKGEjKYmtk 9FxmL8xZSZ6JQRLJBHz/bP41UxqXmbKlP/XC+b5PgGDRNfIHLpZmS5D+mdeQzOhl 8oMetLocABZyR9LKP9VlWLlBLsH8dVqZGHZSGeQ4tnPdRJTrmkC0QBTrTvuHWz7o rGDp3ccMfBxq73FPXCaSGrR5razGrYXzeAHK7YvQiXWzS40WPwrb0ZgDAgb6wlII TAkj+aK6X92Fitr39NdGHIg/Tp6JAEwEGBECAAwFAkGtw3AFCQIIwIAACgkQ4zSi VHY/CRZwmQCg6KkE2F1ULfpRNThRh93nMOwwoOAAn0G9rZfuJH6Vc3uWCtLjNAmO C6rv =NRCZ - -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Universal 1.2.2 iQA/AwUBQa3Ej+M0olR2PwkWEQK2jwCfVTs4mwxmI5l10xj2u2KyGA0ZGrAAoLEr og8Y//1k/FvLjQTXw3lNvQ4Z =dML3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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