January 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

Keeping Your Job Hunt Secret Is Harder Now -- But Here's How to Do It
by R.A. Hettinga 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110661488326134778,00.html> The Wall Street Journal January 25, 2005 MANAGING YOUR CAREER Keeping Your Job Hunt Secret Is Harder Now -- But Here's How to Do It By ERIN WHITE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL January 25, 2005 Miserable at work? Ready to jump ship? Thanks to the improving job market, the likelihood that you will find something has increased. But you may encounter an unanticipated problem: It's harder than ever to conceal a job hunt from colleagues and supervisors. Casual dress codes make your nice interview suit more conspicuous. Many employers are using monitoring software to track their employees' Web surfing, e-mails and instant messages. In addition, open-plan office layouts can complicate your efforts to conduct job-search phone calls discreetly. Don't worry. There are still plenty of ways to keep your hunt off your boss's radar screen. And the proliferation of alternate workplace arrangements -- including companies' more relaxed attitudes toward telecommuting -- can actually help your covert job search. Even if you work from home only part-time, you can take advantage of the extra privacy. Kamela Pancroft, a 40-year-old human-resources executive in Castle Rock, Colo., tried to schedule job interviews during the two days a week that she worked from home last year. After several months of searching, she got a new job in October as an HR vice president for a mortgage banker. Her old boss didn't have a clue that she had been looking. Avoiding a common pitfall, Ms. Pancroft used her home computer and private America Online e-mail account to send risumis and conduct other aspects of her search. You should never depend on your company's equipment or e-mail account when you're aiming to job hop, career counselors warn. Relatively inexpensive computer-monitoring software lets businesses track and review your office computer use. Your boss doesn't have to catch you job hunting. He can just ask the information-technology department to retrieve a record of your computer activities. Company officials probably don't review your communication constantly, but it's likely they'll do so if they think you're doing something wrong, says Donald Harris, president of HR Privacy Solutions, an employee-privacy consulting firm in New York. "What people are allowed to do [at work] in the U.S. is pretty much set by the employer," Mr. Harris cautions. By contrast, workers in Europe have stronger privacy rights on the job. When posting your risumi in a Web-site jobs database, keep your identity as secret as possible. Monster.com, for instance, allows you to hide your name and contact information. The popular Web site sends you an e-mail when someone shows interest in your risumi. Describe your employer generically rather than divulging its actual name, advises Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a San Diego-based group that studies workplace privacy issues. If you work for Procter & Gamble, for example, you could refer to it as a "large consumer-products company" in your risumi. Advance planning will solve the casual-dress dilemma. In pursuit of a horticulture research-associate position at a local university this past fall, Jonathan Ervin didn't want to don the work boots and khaki pants that he usually wore to work as a manager at a wholesale nursery. So the 31-year-old Stokesdale, N.C., resident left a suit in his car the morning of the university-job interview. At midday, he drove to a local farmers' market and hid behind a dumpster to change. He used his car's rear passenger door to "screen any areas that were not blocked" by the dumpster, he recalls. (He subsequently quit his job to conduct his search full time.) Another approach is to alter your daily routine so that your job search attracts less attention. A 30-year-old book editor in New York grew anxious several weeks ago when a nosey secretary glanced at her unusually fancy outfit -- a nice suit for a job interview that day -- and chided, "People notice things." The editor says she now wears a suit once or twice a week, hoping that when she does have an interview, the suit won't stand out as much. Despite the secretary's warning, she doesn't think her boss suspects that she's looking for a new job. You can also lower your risk of exposure by using a cellphone to make job-search contacts from an isolated part of your workplace. Mr. Ervin, for instance, placed calls from a secluded area of the nursery. When co-workers walked past him, he shooed them away. They assumed that he was conducting an important business call and shouldn't be interrupted. For the ultimate in privacy during a job search, splurge and book a hotel room near your office for the day. The unconventional arrangement makes sense if you can't work from home, dislike using a cellphone to call potential employers, and lack a private office at work. Lunchtime absences are less noticeable. "You definitely want to err on the side of discretion," says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a Chicago career-counseling company. -- ----------------- 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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Walter Wriston
by R.A. Hettinga 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110651946402433460,00.html> The Wall Street Journal January 24, 2005 REVIEW & OUTLOOK Walter Wriston January 24, 2005; Page A18 One great underlying strength of the modern American economy is its innovative and competitive financial system, and one of its architects was Walter Wriston, who died last week at age 85. As an executive with First National City Bank, and later chairman of Citicorp, he helped to create products and services that millions of Americans now take for granted, such as the certificate of deposit and the automated teller machine. Under his leadership, Citicorp became the largest American bank and one of the most profitable in the world, with a global customer base that continues to grow today. We always thought it a shame he was never Treasury Secretary, though his intellectual influence was greater than that of most who did serve in that post. After his retirement from Citicorp in 1984, he wrote widely and presciently about the way technology was transforming our age. His 1992 book, "The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution is Transforming Our World," was ahead of its time. He was a major supporter of the Manhattan Institute and other think-tanks that promoted free market ideas. Raised in modest Midwest circumstances, Mr. Wriston was the kind of creative and public-spirited capitalist that America is so fortunate to produce and remains one of the secrets of our prosperity. -- ----------------- 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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Vive le rubber 'ose: 'The Interrogators' and 'Torture': Hard Questions
by R.A. Hettinga 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

<http://nytimes.com/2005/01/23/books/review/23KAPLAN.html?pagewanted=print&p…> The New York Times January 23, 2005 'The Interrogators' and 'Torture': Hard Questions By ROBERT D. KAPLAN THE INTERROGATORS Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda. By Chris Mackey and Greg Miller. Illustrated. 484 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $25.95. TORTURE A Collection. Edited by Sanford Levinson. 319 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95. T a time when neither a large national economy nor a modern military is required to produce and deploy a weapon that can destroy a medium-size American city, a good interrogator constitutes a better defense against catastrophe than soldiers or marines. No group of people in the defense establishment get to know the enemy better on a personal level than interrogators do. As the Abu Ghraib scandal reveals, some guards and interrogators can be sadistic ghouls; but many other interrogators could qualify as the most liberal people in the armed services since, for one thing, they have spent years studying the language and the history of their captives. As one Special Forces officer told me in Afghanistan, ''In order to defeat the enemy you first have to love him, and his culture.'' Competent interrogation is less about breaking a prisoner down to learn a single fact than about engaging him in hours upon hours of conversation, and comparing his responses on seemingly irrelevant details with those of others revealed under questioning. It is about looking for one plot and finding another; or rather not finding a plot at all, but happening upon -- for example -- the travel patterns and safe houses of a group of Muslim terrorists of one nationality and deducing how that group differs from another. Real interrogation is about finding shards of evidence in a desert, in which a vital fragment will come not from a high-level Qaeda operative, but from a midlevel functionary who spends weeks in captivity before anyone realizes his importance. In ''The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda,'' Chris Mackey (the pseudonym of an Army interrogator) and Greg Miller, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, write that as a prisoner in Afghanistan reached for his glasses (by now long lost) when he went to examine a photograph, that ''absent-minded move'' alerted interrogators to the fact that he was ''accustomed to poring over documents.'' Interrogators can use many tools that do not involve actual physical abuse. They spread rumors among detainees, wear them down through repetitive questioning and threaten to turn them over to other intelligence services known to employ torture -- all of which cause interrogators constantly to ask themselves where, exactly, does the slippery slope toward real abuse begin? Sadly, it is no use saying torture never works, because as the French authorities learned in Algeria, as the Filipinos learned with their own Muslim insurgents and as the Dubai authorities learned with a Qaeda terrorist, it periodically does work, and in some instances can possibly avert a major attack. While it is true that the threat of torture, as Mackey and Miller report, induces more anxiety among detainees than torture itself, that threat over time will carry little weight if it becomes widely known that the jailers have no record of following through. ''Fear is often an interrogator's best ally,'' the authors note, ''but it doesn't have a long shelf life.'' A captured Qaeda manual even advises Muslim prisoners that people in the West don't ''have the stomach'' for torture, ''because they are not warriors.'' Machiavelli famously said that good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad. And because we all share a social world, he goes on, the virtue of a policy maker resides not in his moral perfection but in the communal result of his act. If one is not already ill at ease with such maxims, consider this: In the ultimate hypothetical case, if a terrorist with hard intelligence about an impending large-scale terrorist strike could be broken by torture, shouldn't it be used? That nauseating question forms the theme of ''Torture: A Collection,'' edited by Sanford Levinson, a professor of government at the University of Texas. What's most striking about these essays is that despite their abstract and theoretical content, they generally do not contradict the depiction of actual interrogators described by Mackey and Miller. The wall between the liberal campus and a conservative, utilitarian-minded military breaks down because the questions are so serious that few of this book's contributors want to engage in polemics, and few -- to their credit -- ever seem completely comfortable with their own conclusions. To follow Machiavelli further: it is not simply and crudely that the ends justify the means. It is that evil, if it is to be employed, should be used only to the minimum extent necessary, and then only to accomplish a demonstrably greater amount of good. As the Princeton professor Michael Walzer writes, ''It is important to stress Machiavelli's own commitment to the existence of moral standards.'' But knowing what that minimum extent is, and knowing with reasonable certainty that a greater amount of good will result, thwarts scholars and interrogators alike. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argues for legally sanctioning torture in ''ticking bomb'' cases. ''At bottom, my argument is not in favor of torture of any sort,'' he says. ''It is against all forms of torture without accountability.'' His rationale is that in ticking bomb cases the idea that torture in some form will not be used is illusory, and the government should not be able to walk away from responsibility for it. That, in effect, would leave the interrogators with all of the legal and moral blame. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, counters that torture is so extreme that it should remain ''tabooed and forbidden,'' and that any attempt to legitimize torture even in the rarest of cases risks the slippery slope toward normalizing it. Seeking a middle ground, Miriam Gur-Arye, a criminal law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues that in the absence of a concrete terrorist threat, only a specific self-defense argument can justify force in an interrogation: it cannot be justified by the more general and utilitarian -- that is, Machiavellian -- argument of necessity. Interrogators themselves are not above such hairsplitting. After an intense discussion about how humane it would be to deprive prisoners of sleep, and just how much sleep deprivation constituted cruelty, Mackey came to the conclusion that ''if the interrogator followed the exact same regime -- slept, ate . . . and took breaks on the same schedule as the prisoner -- there was no way to argue'' that such treatment was cruel. There is even a name for an interrogator staying with a prisoner until one or the other of them breaks: it's called ''monstering.'' Double-teaming a prisoner, in which different interrogators take turns sleeping, was considered immoral, Mackey says. Because monstering was so hard for an interrogator to endure, it was used only when something important was at stake and the prisoner seemed close to breaking. One interrogator kept a prisoner in a booth for 29 straight hours. It was worth it, Mackey reports: the prisoner had been a translator for Osama bin Laden and disclosed a Qaeda plot to use the chemical agent ricin. But what if the prisoner hadn't confessed? Should he have been double-teamed for 48 hours and beaten? Such questions demand answers, and yet are unanswerable. My own experience covering the military suggests a different approach to the issue. As Mackey and Miller themselves note, the effectiveness of interrogators is regularly undermined by a host of problems that have nothing to do with torture. Rarely do military interrogators get all the language training they need. Their offices are understaffed. When they walk into an interrogation room they often lack vital information about the detainee that another agency in the United States government already possesses, and won't share. Embedded with Army Special Forces in Afghanistan a year ago, I was shocked by how a creaky bureaucracy was stalling the hunt for terrorists on the Pakistani frontier. An administration that dynamically addresses such problems will provide the public with a wider cushion of protection than one that stretches the boundaries of what constitutes physical abuse. No matter how wise those drawing up the guidelines are, however, the art of interrogation does not lend itself to micromanagement from above. Interrogators will forever be forced to make split-second decisions with grave life-and-death consequences. The way toward public safety and out of the moral abyss will come less from philosophy than from sturdy bureaucratic reform: correcting, for example, the broken reserve system that contributed directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. An interrogator armed with fluent Arabic and every scrap of intelligence the system can muster, who has mastered the emerging science of eye movements and body signals, who can act threatening as well as empathetic toward a prisoner, should not require the ultimate tool. Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of many books, including the forthcoming ''Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.'' -- ----------------- 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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Securing Wireless Apps Webinar from Unstrung
by Tyler Durden 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

Should be of interest to someone on this list. -TD >Dear Colleague, > >As an industry professional, you may be interested to know about an >upcoming online event being presented by Unstrung (www.unstrung.com) the >worldwide source for analysis of the wireless economy. This free Web >seminar - " Securing Wireless Apps in Financial, Government & Military >Markets" - will evaluate recent progress in a critical market. > >Keeping information out of the hands of interlopers is an important task >for any net manager - but it's critical for those with the responsibility >for keeping financial, governmental, and military applications secure. >Security issues continue to be the main concern holding back widespread >wireless adoption in these environments. > >During this presentation we'll focus on: > >- The critical role of security in these vertical markets - why does it >matter? >- Potential effects of wireless network attacks in each market >- The diverse security demands of these three markets >- Case studies of deployments in each market and lessons learned > >Join us on Thursday, January 27, at 2:00 p.m. New York / 7:00 p.m. London >time, for this live Webinar sponsored by Bluesocket, Fortress Technologies, >and Proxim. > >Everyone who attends the Webinar will receive a free Unstrung T-shirt. >Click here for a look: > >http://img.lightreading.com/unstrung/unstrung_shirt.gif > >You can sign up for this event via this link: > >http://metacast.agora.com/link.asp?m=23288&s=4936527&l=0 > >We hope to see you there!

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[ISN] Call for Papers - PHRACK #63
by InfoSec News 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

Forwarded from: dontreply(a)phrack.org [-]=====================================================================[-] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =: P H R A C K - F I N A L := +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ...a glorious era comes to an end. #63 will be our last PHRACK RELEASE -- EVER... FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS * FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS * FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS ----------------------------------- Deadline: 10 July 2005 at 11:59pm http://www.phrack.org/cfp_final.txt ----------------------------------- Phrackstaff is pleased to bring you our LAST EVER CALL FOR PAPERS for the FINAL RELEASE of PHRACK. We are preparing for a hardcover and ezine release at a major hacker convention near you! We ask everyone to submit a paper. Great care will be taken to ensure that only the best articles make it into PHRACK FINAL. As usual, papers can be on any topic related to the following: - hacking - phreaking - spying - carding - cybernetics - radio - electronics - forensics - reverse engineering - cryptography - anarchy - conspiracy - world news Since 1985, PHRACK MAGAZINE has been providing the hacker community with information on operating systems, network technologies and telephony, as well as relaying features of interest for the international computer underground. PHRACK MAGAZINE is made available to the public, as often as possible, free of charge. PHRACK STAFF <--- preparing for hex2005 phrackstaff(a)phrack.org Post Scriptum: - Phrackstaff will keep the website running for at least 2 years after PHRACK FINAL. - The last T-Shirts are sold for just $14.95 now. Enjoy it! - More about our decision in the release. Thanks and Goodbye. [-]=====================================================================[-] _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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] Call for Papers - PHRACK #63
by InfoSec News 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

Forwarded from: dontreply(a)phrack.org [-]=====================================================================[-] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ =: P H R A C K - F I N A L := +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ...a glorious era comes to an end. #63 will be our last PHRACK RELEASE -- EVER... FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS * FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS * FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS ----------------------------------- Deadline: 10 July 2005 at 11:59pm http://www.phrack.org/cfp_final.txt ----------------------------------- Phrackstaff is pleased to bring you our LAST EVER CALL FOR PAPERS for the FINAL RELEASE of PHRACK. We are preparing for a hardcover and ezine release at a major hacker convention near you! We ask everyone to submit a paper. Great care will be taken to ensure that only the best articles make it into PHRACK FINAL. As usual, papers can be on any topic related to the following: - hacking - phreaking - spying - carding - cybernetics - radio - electronics - forensics - reverse engineering - cryptography - anarchy - conspiracy - world news Since 1985, PHRACK MAGAZINE has been providing the hacker community with information on operating systems, network technologies and telephony, as well as relaying features of interest for the international computer underground. PHRACK MAGAZINE is made available to the public, as often as possible, free of charge. PHRACK STAFF <--- preparing for hex2005 phrackstaff(a)phrack.org Post Scriptum: - Phrackstaff will keep the website running for at least 2 years after PHRACK FINAL. - The last T-Shirts are sold for just $14.95 now. Enjoy it! - More about our decision in the release. Thanks and Goodbye. [-]=====================================================================[-] _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[silk] A new Social Communication Network: Bellster (fwd from udhay@pobox.com)
by Eugen Leitl 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

----- Forwarded message from Udhay Shankar N <udhay(a)pobox.com> -----

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Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil
by R.A. Hettinga 23 Jan '05

23 Jan '05

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/national/nationalspecial3/23code.html?ei=…> The New York Times January 23, 2005 Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency, a task that has never been fully revealed before. As part of the extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents marshaled to secure the inauguration, these elite forces were poised to act under a 1997 program that was updated and enhanced after the Sept. 11 attacks, but nonetheless departs from how the military has historically been used on American soil. These commandos, operating under a secret counterterrorism program code-named Power Geyser, were mentioned publicly for the first time this week on a Web site for a new book, "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operation in the 9/11 World," (Steerforth Press). The book was written by William M. Arkin, a former intelligence analyst for the Army. The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force. In the past, the command has also provided support to domestic law enforcement agencies during high-risk events like the Olympics and political party conventions, according to the Web site of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Alexandria, Va. The role of the armed forces in the United States has been a contentious issue for more than a century. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts military forces from performing domestic law enforcement duties, like policing, was enacted after the Civil War in response to the perceived misuse of federal troops who were policing in the South. Over the years, the law has been amended to allow the military to lend equipment to federal, state and local authorities; assist federal agencies in drug interdiction; protect national parks; and execute quarantine and certain health laws. About 5,000 federal troops supported civilian agencies at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City three years ago. Since Sept. 11, however, military and law enforcement agencies have worked much more closely not only to help detect and defeat any possible attack, including from unconventional weapons, but also to assure the continuity of the federal government in case of cataclysmic disaster. The commandos here this week were the same type of Special Operations forces who are hunting top insurgents in Iraq and Osama bin Laden in the mountainous wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But under the top-secret military plan, they are also conducting counterterrorism missions in support of civilian agencies in the United States. "They bring unique military and technical capabilities that often are centered around potential W.M.D. events," said a senior military official who has been briefed on the units' operations. A civil liberties advocate who was told about the program by a reporter said that he had no objections to the program as described to him because its scope appeared to be limited to supporting the counterterrorism efforts of civilian authorities. Mr. Arkin, in the online supplement to his book (codenames.org/documents.html) says the contingency plan, called JCS Conplan 0300-97, calls for "special-mission units in extra-legal missions to combat terrorism in the United States" based on top-secret orders that are managed by the military's Joint Staff and coordinated with the military's Special Operations Command and Northern Command, which is the lead military headquarters for domestic defense. Mr. Arkin provided The New York Times with briefing slides prepared by the Northern Command, detailing the plan and outlining the military's preparations for the inauguration. Three senior Defense Department and Bush administration officials confirmed the existence of the plan and mission, but disputed Mr. Arkin's characterization of the mission as "extra-legal." One of the officials said the units operated in the United States under "special authority" from either the president or the secretary of defense. Civilian and uniformed military lawyers said provisions in several federal statutes, including the Fiscal Year 2000 Defense Department Authorization Act, Public Law 106-65, permits the secretary of defense to authorize military forces to support civilian agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the event of a national emergency, especially any involving nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. In 1998, the Pentagon's top policy official, Walter B. Slocombe, acknowledged that the military had covert-action teams. "We have designated special-mission units that are specifically manned, equipped and trained to deal with a wide variety of transnational threats," Mr. Slocombe told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "These units, assigned to or under the operational control of the U.S. Special Operations Command, are focused primarily on those special operations and supporting functions that combat terrorism and actively counter terrorist use of W.M.D. These units are on alert every day of the year and have worked extensively with their interagency counterparts." Spokesmen for the Northern Command in Colorado Springs and the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., the parent organization of the Joint Special Operations Command, declined to comment on the plan, the units involved and the mission. "At any given time, there are a number of classified programs across the government that, for national security reasons, it would be inappropriate to discuss," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "It would be irresponsible for me to comment on any classified program that may or may not exist." But the Northern Command document that mentions Power Geyser is marked "unclassified." The document states that the purpose of the Department of Defense's contingency planning for the inauguration is to provide "unity of D.O.D. effort to contribute to a safe and secure environment for the 2005 inauguration." The Northern Command missions include deterring an attack or mitigating its consequences, and coordinating with the Special Operations Command. In a telephone interview from his home in Vermont, Mr. Arkin said the military's reaction to the disclosure of the counterterrorism plan and its operating units reflected "the silliness of calling something that's obvious, classified." "I'm not revealing what they're doing or the methods of their contingency planning," he said. "I don't compromise any sensitive intelligence operations by revealing sources and methods. I don't reveal ongoing operations in specific locales." Mr. Arkin's book is a glossary of more than 3,000 code names of past and present operations, programs and weapons systems, with brief descriptions of each. Most involved secret activities, and details of many of the programs could not be immediately confirmed. The book also describes American military operations and assistance programs in scores of countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The murky world of "special access programs" and other secret military and intelligence activities is covered in the book, too. Some code names describe highly classified research programs, like Thirsty Saber, a program that in the 1990's tried to develop a sensor to replace human reasoning. Others describe military installations in foreign countries, like Poker Bluff I, an electronic-eavesdropping collection station in Honduras in the 1980's. Many involve activities related to the survival of the president and constitutional government. The book, for instance, describes Site R, one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney since the Sept. 11 attacks. Site R is a granite mountain shelter just north of Sabillasville, Md., near the Pennsylvania border. It was built in the early 1950's to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. The book also describes a program called Treetop, the presidential emergency successor support plan, which provides survivors of a nuclear strike or other attack with war plans, regulations and procedures to establish teams of military and civilian advisers to presidential successors. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the continuity of government activities cited in the book. People who advocate that the government declassify more of the nation's official documents said the book would fuel the debate over the balance between the public's right to know and the need to keep more military and intelligence matters secret in the campaign against terror. "This is part of an ongoing tug of war to define the boundaries of public information," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "There has been a steady withdrawal of information from the public domain in the present administration, and a reluctance to disclose even the most mundane of facts." -- ----------------- 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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Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil as Antiterror Efforts Expand
by R.A. Hettinga 23 Jan '05

23 Jan '05

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/national/nationalspecial3/23code.html?th=…> The New York Times January 23, 2005 Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil as Antiterror Efforts Expand By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency, a task that has never been fully revealed before. As part of the extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents marshaled to secure the inauguration, these elite forces were poised to act under a 1997 program that was updated and enhanced after the Sept. 11 attacks, but nonetheless departs from how the military has historically been used on American soil. These commandos, operating under a secret counterterrorism program code-named Power Geyser, were mentioned publicly for the first time this week on a Web site for a new book, "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operation in the 9/11 World," (Steerforth Press). The book was written by William M. Arkin, a former intelligence analyst for the Army. The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force. In the past, the command has also provided support to domestic law enforcement agencies during high-risk events like the Olympics and political party conventions, according to the Web site of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Alexandria, Va. The role of the armed forces in the United States has been a contentious issue for more than a century. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts military forces from performing domestic law enforcement duties, like policing, was enacted after the Civil War in response to the perceived misuse of federal troops who were policing in the South. Over the years, the law has been amended to allow the military to lend equipment to federal, state and local authorities; assist federal agencies in drug interdiction; protect national parks; and execute quarantine and certain health laws. About 5,000 federal troops supported civilian agencies at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City three years ago. Since Sept. 11, however, military and law enforcement agencies have worked much more closely not only to help detect and defeat any possible attack, including from unconventional weapons, but also to assure the continuity of the federal government in case of cataclysmic disaster. The commandos here this week were the same type of Special Operations forces who are hunting top insurgents in Iraq and Osama bin Laden in the mountainous wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But under the top-secret military plan, they are also conducting counterterrorism missions in support of civilian agencies in the United States. "They bring unique military and technical capabilities that often are centered around potential W.M.D. events," said a senior military official who has been briefed on the units' operations. A civil liberties advocate who was told about the program by a reporter said that he had no objections to the program as described to him because its scope appeared to be limited to supporting the counterterrorism efforts of civilian authorities. Mr. Arkin, in the online supplement to his book (codenames.org/documents.html) says the contingency plan, called JCS Conplan 0300-97, calls for "special-mission units in extra-legal missions to combat terrorism in the United States" based on top-secret orders that are managed by the military's Joint Staff and coordinated with the military's Special Operations Command and Northern Command, which is the lead military headquarters for domestic defense. Mr. Arkin provided The New York Times with briefing slides prepared by the Northern Command, detailing the plan and outlining the military's preparations for the inauguration. Three senior Defense Department and Bush administration officials confirmed the existence of the plan and mission, but disputed Mr. Arkin's characterization of the mission as "extra-legal." One of the officials said the units operated in the United States under "special authority" from either the president or the secretary of defense. Civilian and uniformed military lawyers said provisions in several federal statutes, including the Fiscal Year 2000 Defense Department Authorization Act, Public Law 106-65, permits the secretary of defense to authorize military forces to support civilian agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the event of a national emergency, especially any involving nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. In 1998, the Pentagon's top policy official, Walter B. Slocombe, acknowledged that the military had covert-action teams. "We have designated special-mission units that are specifically manned, equipped and trained to deal with a wide variety of transnational threats," Mr. Slocombe told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "These units, assigned to or under the operational control of the U.S. Special Operations Command, are focused primarily on those special operations and supporting functions that combat terrorism and actively counter terrorist use of W.M.D. These units are on alert every day of the year and have worked extensively with their interagency counterparts." Spokesmen for the Northern Command in Colorado Springs and the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., the parent organization of the Joint Special Operations Command, declined to comment on the plan, the units involved and the mission. "At any given time, there are a number of classified programs across the government that, for national security reasons, it would be inappropriate to discuss," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "It would be irresponsible for me to comment on any classified program that may or may not exist." But the Northern Command document that mentions Power Geyser is marked "unclassified." The document states that the purpose of the Department of Defense's contingency planning for the inauguration is to provide "unity of D.O.D. effort to contribute to a safe and secure environment for the 2005 inauguration." The Northern Command missions include deterring an attack or mitigating its consequences, and coordinating with the Special Operations Command. In a telephone interview from his home in Vermont, Mr. Arkin said the military's reaction to the disclosure of the counterterrorism plan and its operating units reflected "the silliness of calling something that's obvious, classified." "I'm not revealing what they're doing or the methods of their contingency planning," he said. "I don't compromise any sensitive intelligence operations by revealing sources and methods. I don't reveal ongoing operations in specific locales." Mr. Arkin's book is a glossary of more than 3,000 code names of past and present operations, programs and weapons systems, with brief descriptions of each. Most involved secret activities, and details of many of the programs could not be immediately confirmed. The book also describes American military operations and assistance programs in scores of countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The murky world of "special access programs" and other secret military and intelligence activities is covered in the book, too. Some code names describe highly classified research programs, like Thirsty Saber, a program that in the 1990's tried to develop a sensor to replace human reasoning. Others describe military installations in foreign countries, like Poker Bluff I, an electronic-eavesdropping collection station in Honduras in the 1980's. Many involve activities related to the survival of the president and constitutional government. The book, for instance, describes Site R, one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney since the Sept. 11 attacks. Site R is a granite mountain shelter just north of Sabillasville, Md., near the Pennsylvania border. It was built in the early 1950's to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. The book also describes a program called Treetop, the presidential emergency successor support plan, which provides survivors of a nuclear strike or other attack with war plans, regulations and procedures to establish teams of military and civilian advisers to presidential successors. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the continuity of government activities cited in the book. People who advocate that the government declassify more of the nation's official documents said the book would fuel the debate over the balance between the public's right to know and the need to keep more military and intelligence matters secret in the campaign against terror. "This is part of an ongoing tug of war to define the boundaries of public information," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "There has been a steady withdrawal of information from the public domain in the present administration, and a reluctance to disclose even the most mundane of facts." -- ----------------- 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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Walter B. Wriston: A Remembrance
by R.A. Hettinga 23 Jan '05

23 Jan '05

Wriston was in cryptography in WWII, and was also on of the Neal Stephenson's "informants" on finance when he was researching Cryptonomicon. If you ever read his stuff during the dot-com years, he sounded pure financial cypherpunk. Cheers, RAH -------- <http://forbes.com/2005/01/21/cz_sf_0121wriston_print.html> Forbes Obituary Walter B. Wriston: A Remembrance Steve Forbes, 01.21.05, 6:59 PM ET Walter Wriston Add To Tracker Walt Wriston, former Chairman and CEO of Citicorp/Citibank, was also a founding director of Forbes.com and served until last year. Our revenues would never have equaled what Citicorp took in every few minutes, but to Walt, that did not matter at all. He was, at heart, an innovator, an entrepreneur, an original thinker and a man who delighted in getting things done. He quickly grasped the promise of the Internet and never lost faith in its possibilities in the aftermath of the high-tech bubble. The fact that there would be setbacks and excesses in the field were to him part of the normal course of events in a free market. They never made him lose sight of how powerful an instrument the Internet is. He understood, as few others did, how fundamentally vital is the spread of information. The willingness to pioneer by pursuing and investing in new technologies and going into areas where others wouldn't tread -- or had tread and faltered -- was how this man truly revolutionized American and global banking. The word "revolution" has been grossly over-used, but what Wriston did for finance was just that -- a revolution. Until the 1960s, banking was a backwater. A handful of hours each day was more than sufficient to handle one's responsibilities. Commercial bankers were risk-averse. They were stodgy. They didn't want to be bothered with consumers -- that was for savings banks, not commercial banks. The government told banks what interest rates they were allowed to pay on deposits. Before Walt was through, he almost single-handedly turned banking from the equivalent of a small, sleepy town into a hyper-energetic, New York-like metropolis. Under his leadership, Citibank pioneered automatic-teller machines. It pursued the credit card business in a way that no other bank was doing at the time. He constantly battered government regulations. He expanded internationally at a dizzying pace. Old constraints on banks were consigned to the dustbin of history. Walt made what is now called Citigroup the world's leading financial institution. Because he was not risk-averse, he made his share of mistakes. But these were minute compared to his monumental achievements. Walt was a delight to be around. He believed passionately in free markets. His insights were almost always original and profound. Our board meetings were always productive and stimulating. Walt was both an intellectual and a restless doer. My only regret is that he was never given the reins to run our Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve. Now that would have been a sight to behold! In the end, however, Walt Wriston achieved far, far more than have those who have held these kinds of public sector posts. We have lost a truly remarkable man. -- ----------------- 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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