February 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

Lighters to be banned on airline flights
by R.A. Hettinga 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

<http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2270&u=/krwashbureau/20050228/ts_…> Yahoo! Lighters to be banned on airline flights 2 hours, 27 minutes ago By Kimberly Morrison, Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - Airline passengers will have to ditch their lighters or lose them to airport security screeners when a new ban on lighters takes effect in April. * Federated to buy May for billion in stock * Black farmers go to Congress for help * Hussein relative captured in Syria * Park City man held in 17-year killing spree * Egypt moves to hold free elections Echo Company Knight Ridder Special Report (at philly.com) The ban reflects Congress' fear that lighters could be used to ignite bombs on planes or otherwise damage or destroy them. The Transportation Security Administration until now had banned all but butane lighters and said each passenger could carry no more than two. TSA's new ruling extends the ban to all butane lighters, effective April 14. Proponents of the ban, including Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record), D-N.D., cited the case of convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, who tried but failed to light explosives in his shoes with matches. Had Reid been using a lighter, he might have brought down the plane, Dorgan said. Reid was sentenced to life in prison in 2003. The butane lighter ban is expected to streamline security procedures, because in the past screeners had to distinguish between butane lighters and types that were banned. The Department of Transportation bans lighters in checked baggage, so passengers wanting to keep them have few options aside from returning to their cars to stow lighters or handing them off to non-fliers. The U.S. Postal Service considers lighters to be hazardous material and will not mail them. Passengers can continue to carry up to four books of matches, but that, too, is under reconsideration, said TSA spokeswoman Amy Von Walter. -- ----------------- 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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Diana West: Fear and loathing of the gonzo establishment
by R.A. Hettinga 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

<http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/printdw20050228.shtml> Townhall.com Fear and loathing of the gonzo establishment Diana West (back to web version) | Send February 28, 2005 If there is one thing that bugs the Left, it's the idea of empire -- and particularly the idea of its own established empire -- the media culture it still dominates by dint of groupthink. That's why when Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide at age 67, the empire of the Left, a.k.a. the mainstream media (MSM), had to pretend that a bona fide "iconoclast" had died, someone at odds with the establishment -- "like Galileo or Martin Luther," as Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, rather colossally saw fit to describe Thompson's clip file for the ages. Far from living life on the fringe -- which is not to say he didn't live a fringey life -- Thompson was enshrined as an icon by the so-called establishment. By "establishment" I mean the prevailing powers that be, the media and cultural powers for whom Thompson was never a threat, but always a promise. He has long been appreciated, if not celebrated, for his open and prodigious drug use. (He was "who Mark Twain might have been if Twain had discovered acid," friend and National Public Radio foreign editor Loren Jenkins told The Washington Times.) And he has been consistently applauded for a concocted reportage that divorced "journalism" from fact. (His work was "true in a way the bean counters would never understand," said a New York Times appreciation not penned by Jayson Blair.) Thompson's "gonzo" career was a template for counter-cultural behaviors and attitudes that had reshaped the American mainstream by the end of the 1960s. Tantrums. Hedonism. Self-absorption. And the "craziness," the Washington Post appreciation toasted, "that comes with sticking the big toe of your brain in the socket of 'high-powered blotter acid,' and 'uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.'" Guess you had to be there. Even if you weren't, even if you tried to read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" and couldn't, the "gonzo" sensibility lives on. Indeed, the gonzo sensibility has infused our culture to the point where it's no longer a relic of the old counter-culture, but is an innate characteristic of the establishment today. Who keeps his head up in the mainstream today who isn't gonzo-"wild" and gonzo-"crazy"? In gonzo we trust. This explains not only the lavishness of praise being heaped upon Thompson, but also the extraordinary lengths to which his appreciators -- and they are legion -- have gone to palliate his lifelong depravities. My favorite: His was a "lifestyle dominated by a long and sophisticated romance with drugs," said the New York Times appreciation, quite picturesquely dispensing with the ravages of chronic drug use. Then there is Thompson's "obscenity-laced prose." Not to worry, said his Times obituary, expletives "broke down walls between reader and writer." As for his "creative blend of fact and fantasy" (wasn't that Dan Rather's problem?), his "rule-breaking style" and "outrageous voice," they "helped refocus the nation's customarily straitlaced political dialogue." How? The obit doesn't say, but maybe his political coverage that "made no secret of his hatred of Nixon" had something to do with it. And thank goodness. What would the republic have done without him? Too bad he couldn't have been around to refocus the Constitutional Convention. Gonzo-style aside, what's left? According to a line in the middle of the Washington Post appreciation, not so much. "In fact, he'd never done very much in his life except write about it, which he did with clarity, hilarity and big-train momentum." Well, to each his own. On the other hand, gonzo-style alone, given that it has become a way of life, may be enough to rate the posthumous star treatment, although a little distance between star and treatment-ers would be appreciated. But there is something else. "For a generation of American students," The New York Times writes, "Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a dangerous, fantastic occupation." This notion is echoed in The Washington Post: "He was a particular hero to journalists, whose terrible secret is that beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor fame, they are merely clerks and voyeurs. Thompson ... had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the very edges of madness and menace." Fear and loathing. Madness and menace. Danger. Fantasy. These are the moods of adolescent rebellion, the stylistic attitudes of an adversary culture that has long dominated the MSM. Which tells me that when all the ink is dry, Thompson's special place both on the Left and in the MSM is as a sort of adversary mascot, a totem of a mythical time when the empire still lay ahead. Too bad the emperor has no clothes. -- ----------------- 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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SpookAir, redux: No Secrets -- Eyes on the CIA
by R.A. Hettinga 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7037720/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/> MSNBC.com No Secrets: Eyes on the CIA Newsweek March 7 issue - Aviation obsessives with cameras and Internet connections have become a threat to cover stories established by the CIA to mask its undercover operations and personnel overseas. U.S. intel sources complain that "plane spotters"-hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet-made it possible for CIA critics recently to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people-including terrorist suspects-around the world. Google searches revealed that plane spotters Web-posted numerous photos of two private aircraft-one a small Gulfstream jet and the other a midsize Boeing 737-registered to obscure companies suspected of CIA connections. Some of the pictures were taken at airports in foreign countries where CIA activities could be controversial. When the 737 last year went through a change of tail number and ownership-a suspicious company in suburban Boston apparently transferred the plane to a similar company in Reno, Nev.-Internet searches of aviation and public-record databases disclosed details of the plane's new owners and registration number. One critical database, accessible via Google, was a central aircraft registry maintained by the government's own Federal Aviation Administration. A U.S. intel source acknowledged that the instant availability of such data and photos on the Internet is not helpful "if your object is clandestinity." (To see how it works, check the Web for info on a business jet carrying the Liechtenstein tail number HB-IES. The search should turn up pictures of that plane at a European airport, as well as public records and news stories describing how the plane, registered to a company called Aviatrans, once belonged to Saddam Hussein.) Intel sources say the CIA's own lawyers years ago decreed that under U.S. law the agency must register its aircraft-including their tail numbers and the front companies that own them-with public authorities like the FAA, even though this could provide clues to clandestine activity. Agency officials and lawyers have discussed the possibility of changing U.S. laws and regulations to make it easier for the agency to hide its activities. That may be difficult, so for now, plane spotters can keep their eyes on the CIA. -- ----------------- 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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Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy
by R.A. Hettinga 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

<http://www.postgazette.com/pg/pp/05058/462446.stm> Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy He's unable to travel because he refuses to present a government-approved ID Sunday, February 27, 2005 By Dennis Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette SAN FRANCISCO -- John Gilmore's splendid isolation began July 4, 2002, when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket. Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette John Gilmore, beside a graffiti-covered wall, has his morning coffee at a shop that's one block from his San Francisco home. The Bradford native doesn't drive and has other travel restrictions, thanks to his challenge of a law that the government won't allow him to see. The gate agent asked for his ID. Gilmore asked her why. It is the law, she said. Gilmore asked to see the law. Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection. What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore's question: Why? In post 9/11 America, asking "Why?" when someone from an airline asks for identification can start some interesting arguments. Gilmore, who learned to argue on the debate team in his hometown of Bradford, McKean County, has started an argument that, should it reach its intended target, the U.S. Supreme Court, would turn the rules of national security on end, reach deep into the tug-of-war between private rights and public safety, and play havoc with the Department of Homeland Security. At the heart of Gilmore's stubbornness is the worry about the thin line between safety and tyranny. "Are they just basically saying we just can't travel without identity papers? If that's true, then I'd rather see us go through a real debate that says we want to introduce required identity papers in our society rather than trying to legislate it through the back door through regulations that say there's not any other way to get around," Gilmore said. "Basically what they want is a show of obedience." Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette There's no place like home for John Gilmore, who can't travel very far from his San Francisco residence. The Bradford native refuses to give his identification for flying. Click photo for larger image. As happens to the disobedient, Gilmore is grounded. He is rich -- he estimates his net worth at $30 million -- and cannot fly inside the United States. Nor can he ride Amtrak, rent a room at most major hotels, or easily clear security in the courthouses where his case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, is to be heard. In a time when more and more people and places demand some form of government-issued identification, John Gilmore offers only his 49-year-old face: a study in stringy hair, high forehead, wire-rimmed glasses, Ho Chi Minh beard and the contrariness for which the dot.com culture is renowned. "I think of myself as being under regional arrest," he said. Even with $30 million in the bank, regional arrest can be hard. He takes the bus to and from events at which he is applauded by less well-heeled computer techies who flew in from around the country after showing a boarding pass and one form of government-issued photo ID and arrived in rental cars that required a valid driver's license and one major credit card. He was employee No. 5 at Sun Microsystems, which made Unix, the free software of the Web, the world standard. He japed the government by cracking its premier security code. He campaigned to keep the software that runs the Internet free of charge. After he left Sun, Gilmore started his own firm, sold it for more money than he seems to have bothered to count and has since devoted his time to giving it away to favored causes: drug law reform, a campaign to standardize computer voting machines and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, something of an ACLU for the Information Age. To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from the black helicopter crowd. "That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read. Gilmore will show ID for an international flight because he doesn't expect to set the rules for other nations. "I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said. "I used to laugh at countries that had internal passports. And it's happened here and people don't even seem to know about it." >From geek to riches The passage of John Gilmore from a bespectacled proto-nerd from Bradford, Pa., to the twice-wealthy privacy-rights pioneer of the dot.com West Coast started in his father's living room, where he first suspected authority is used simply because someone has it. When something was found broken or spilled or some other evidence of a fractured rule surfaced, and the guilty party unknown, the elder Gilmore would summon his four children to the living room. "He'd line us all up in the living room. Until one of us confessed, we wouldn't get to leave. Eventually one of my younger brothers started confessing to things he didn't do just so we could get out of there," Gilmore said. Gilmore's father was a mechanical engineer. John was born in York and the family moved to Bradford, near the state's northern border with New York, when he was small. Today, at his home in Haight-Ashbury, a place he named Toad Hall, after the character from "The Wind in the Willows," Gilmore keeps a small school photo. It shows him with a little-boy crew cut and thick, half-rim eyeglasses, the kind that have been in and out of fashion twice since the photo was taken in the mid-1960s. The young Gilmore was a strong student at the schools in Bradford. He took to math. In high school, he became curious about computers. The 1960s were an era in which computers enjoyed an almost mystical reputation; imputed by popular culture with the power to deduce anything. One year, a team of scientists entered data for the 1927 New York Yankees and the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers to see who would win -- an early "computer match." Babe Ruth was even credited with a home run. It was easy for a bright boy to become curious about how something so all-knowing worked. "When he was 12, for his birthday, he asked for an IBM manual," said his mother, Pat Woodruff, who remarried after she and Gilmore's father divorced 20 years ago and returned to live in Bradford. "His floor used to be littered with papers. I had no idea what he was doing." The University of Pittsburgh opened a branch campus in a building across the street from his high school. In it, they placed a desk-sized IBM 360. Gilmore started wandering over to learn FORTRAN, the punch-card programming language that made the computer do complex mathematical calculations. The Pitt-Bradford library had a few computer books, and one of his high school teachers got John a card. The family was about to move to Alabama when John began writing to the company that printed up a $3 manual for computer use. The firm, Scientific Time Sharing Corp., in Bethesda, Md., rented out computer time to companies such as Arbitron and ABC News, which needed storage for vast databases. After the third or fourth correspondence, they wrote back to ask if he was a customer. Gilmore wrote back that he was a high school student and he was moving to Alabama. After completing high school in Alabama, Gilmore had two summer internships behind him and a full-time job as the youngest geek in Bethesda. He had a few dollars in his pocket and a letter of acceptance from Michigan State University. He used the money. The letter was of little use. Computer science had not yet come into its own as an academic discipline. "Why pay someone to teach me computers when I can get someone to pay me to learn them?" he reasoned. Road trip When techies burn out, they tend not to do strange things. They are, by nature, already a few degrees off plumb. So they revert to the ordinary. Gilmore burned out in the late '70s. He got on a motorcycle and rode west. "He just packed up his stuff and moved off," Pat Woodruff said. "I don't know where he went at this time." He went to New Mexico. Gilmore worked for a while in the lowest of mechanical technologies: a traveling carnival. He ran the Tilt-A-Whirl. "You have to watch the thing closely and know when someone's going to lose it, so you move back," he said. Dodging stomach contents kept him employed for a while. At one point he moved in with New Mexico's most dysfunctional couple. The male in the relationship found out the female was pregnant. An argument broke out. A gun was produced. Gilmore forgot his lesson from the Tilt-A-Whirl. He didn't duck. A bullet caught him in the hand. He finished his New Mexico stay sleeping under a stairwell at the local college. He knocked around the country a bit more. Staying with a relative in Jacksonville, Fla., Gilmore looked for a job at a local bank. "They said they wouldn't hire me as a teller, but they'd be glad to hire me to run their computer," he said. Eventually, Gilmore moved to San Francisco and took up computer consulting. One day, a friend called. He'd gone to work for a startup firm called Microsoft. The company's founder, a Harvard dropout named Bill Gates, was selling Unix, a universal software on which the Internet would be based, and he wanted Gilmore to find a way to make Unix work on the computers of a prospective customer based at Stanford University. After a job interview, Gilmore called the people at Stanford. They were starting a company to be called Sun, short for Stanford University Network, and would Gilmore like to be their first software employee. "I hired on at Sun because the work was interesting," he said. The pay was just short of marginal. Thus did John Gilmore get rich by accident. Because he was on the ground floor, his stock was worth more. Sun went public in 1986 and suddenly John Gilmore was rich. He stayed on at Sun as a consultant until 1989, then started his own company, Cygnus. A few years later, when he sold Cygnus, he was, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, "loaded." That is to say he is not ridiculously rich -- just wealthy enough to make trouble. He did. Gilmore, for instance, is blocked from most e-mail servers because he runs what the industry calls an "open relay" on his computer server, tucked into the basement of his house. People are able to send e-mail through it without identifying themselves, raising the ire of the anti-spam movement. His server sits next to the remnants of what is known in the industry as the "DES Cracker." It is a collection of computer chips, connected by a spider web of circuitry that he built to overpower the most widely used encryption system -- the same one used on ATMs and satellite dishes. "The government was recommending everybody use it. We did that to show it wasn't worth relying on," Gilmore said. His own theory was that a privacy program offered by the government isn't, by nature, likely to remain private. By 1996, Gilmore's dislike of authority was in full bloom. At San Francisco Airport, he refused to produce a driver's license for security police. "The cop said, 'You want me to arrest you?' I said, 'I'd consider it an honor.' " They honored him with an arrest. The district attorney dropped the case. Gilmore has epilepsy, and because of that his driver's license was suspended five years ago. He decided not to reapply because it is now easier, when asked for a photo ID, to be able to say forthrightly that he has none. More than $1 million of his money has gone to house and feed the Electronic Frontier Foundation. On a given day, visitors can find a team of lawyers meeting with young men and women, still pale from too much time indoors, seeking counsel to protect them from the wrath of everyone from the Recording Industry Association of America, which is trying to shut down music file sharers, to federal regulators worried about the latest software for encrypting e-mail communications. "He cares a great deal about privacy," said Lee Tien, a full-time litigator at EEF. Because privacy is one of those things that disappears without always being noticed right away, Tien and other EFF lawyers find themselves fighting regulations nobody gets excited about right away. "Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?' vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said. "If John Gilmore were a country," adds his personal publicist, Bill Scannell, "his motto would be 'Let Me Alone.' " Conscious objection Rosa Parks did not ride that bus in Montgomery by accident. Several strategy meetings preceded the famous ride in which the founding mother of the civil rights movement boarded a bus and declined to sit in the back. Gilmore's famous visit to two airline ticket counters in the Bay Area was charted out. He checked in with his lawyer. He kept notes. He booked a flight from Oakland, with its slightly cheaper fares, to Washington, D.C., where he planned to drop in on the offices of his member of congress, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to convey his growing concern about the amount of data the government is gathering from and about its citizens. His reason for travel, he would later say, was "to petition the government for redress." That added First Amendment issues to a Constitutional exercise that would also turn on the amendments against unreasonable search and seizure and the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Everything went pretty much according to expectations. That is to say, everything went to hell in a hurry. As Gilmore tells it, he arrived at the gate two hours early, a paper ticket purchased through a travel agent in his hand. A Southwest agent asked for his ID. Gilmore, in turn, asked her if the ID requirement was an airline rule or a government rule. She didn't seem to know. Gilmore argued that if nobody could show him the law, he wasn't showing them an ID. They reached a strange agreement for an argument about personal privacy: In lieu of showing ID, Gilmore would consent to an extra-close search, putting up with a pat-down in order to keep his personal identity to himself. He was wanded, patted down and sent along. As Gilmore headed up the boarding ramp a security guard yanked him from line. According to court papers, a security agent named Reggie Wauls informed Gilmore he would not be flying that day. "He said, 'I didn't let you fly because you said you had an ID and wouldn't show it,' " Gilmore said. "I asked, 'Does that mean if I'd left it at home I'd be on the plane?' He said, 'I didn't say that.' " The Gilmore case is, if anything, about things unsaid. Gilmore -- and millions of other people -- are daily instructed to produce some manner of ID: a driver's license, a Social Security number, a phone number, date of birth. When Gilmore asked to see the rules explaining why his photo ID is necessary for airline security, his request was denied. The regulation under which the Transportation Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, instructs the airlines to collect such identification is classified as "Sensitive Security Information." When Congress passes a law, it is as often as not up to some agency to decide what that law means and how to enforce it. Usually, those regulations are available for people to examine, even challenge if they conflict with the Constitution. This wasn't the case when Congress passed the Air Transportation Security Act of 1974. The Department of Transportation was instructed to hold close information that would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" or "reveal trade secrets" or "be detrimental to the safety of persons traveling in air transportation." The Federal Aviation Administration, then a branch of the transportation department, drew up regulations that established the category now known as Sensitive Security Information. When the responsibility for air travel safety was transferred to the newly created Transportation Safety Administration, which was in turn made a branch of the new Department of Homeland Security, the oversight for Sensitive Security Information went with it. The language in the Homeland Security Act was broadened, subtly but unmistakably, where SSI was concerned. It could not be divulged if it would "be detrimental to the security of transportation." "By removing any reference to persons or passengers, Congress has significantly broadened the scope of SSI authority," wrote Todd B. Tatelman, an attorney for the Congressional Research Office. Tatelman was asked by Congress last year to look at the implications of Gilmore's case. Tatelman's report found that the broadened language essentially put a cocoon of secrecy around 16 categories of information, such as security programs, security directives, security measures, security screening information "and a general category consisting of 'other information.' " The government has been so unyielding on disclosure that men with the name David Nelson suddenly found themselves ejected from flights. Somewhere in the system, the name came up on the newly created "No Fly" list. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., found himself in the same dilemma. When baggage screeners were caught pilfering, prosecutions were dropped because a trial would require a discussion of "Sensitive Security Information." When John Gilmore demanded proof that the airport ID rule met Constitutional muster, the government at first declined to acknowledge it even existed. Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for TSA, tacitly acknowledged the strange rabbit hole into which Gilmore has fallen. The Department of Justice, in its first response to Gilmore's suit two years ago, declined to acknowledge whether such an instruction existed. Later, it admitted its existence. Then the government asked a judge to hold a hearing in secret and preclude Gilmore's lawyers from seeing the regulation they sought to challenge, the contents of which seem to be pretty widely known. "It's a rubber stamp. TSA security directives are -- plural -- sensitive security information and not subject to public disclosure," Davis said. How, then, is someone to challenge in court a law he's not allowed to see? "I have no idea," Davis said. "If a passenger doesn't wish to show ID prior to getting a boarding pass, that's something they're going to have to take up with the air carrier. And the air carrier is required to obtain government-issued identification." That, says Gilmore's lawyer, Jim Harrison, is the enigma of the case: "It's about the ability of the citizens of this country to be able to move about the country, to move about freely, without being subject to laws they can't see." The legal cul-de-sac erected around airport security is not limited to Gimore's deliberately chosen fight. In October 2001, at San Francisco Airport, Arshad Chowdhury, born and raised in the United States, was surrounded by security agents and kept off a Northwest Airlines flight. He was trying to get back to Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a graduate student. Chowdhury's last name sounded somewhat like another name on the no-fly list. He could never get an explanation. He filed suit against Northwest, but, to date, his court fight has been with the government, which has pleaded Sensitive Security Information. To sue Northwest for racial profiling, Chowdhury must first sue his own government for the rules Northwest will plead it was enforcing. High-tech togetherness Code Con is one of those technological events so deep that ordinary conversation requires an English-to-English translator. A young woman was onstage explaining a system she had developed to, as it turns out, automate trust in discussion groups by assigning a ranking of credibility to participants based on past messages and reactions. Discussion boards must either be moderated, to keep the wackos from disrupting them, or wide open, in which case postings can take unreasonably long times. As she spoke, half the audience inside a darkened nightclub rented for the event stared into the blue glow of laptop computers. Some were following the PowerPoint presentation on a Web site set up for the affair. Dan Klein, a Pittsburgh computer consultant, was in the back of the room. He has known Gilmore for years, and to know Gilmore is to know the room. Computer programmers, the really good ones, combine an artistic temperament with a conviction that intuitive reasoning can lead to mathematical certainty. "It's elegant thinking," Klein said. "We are most of us white hats, but we think like black hats." The elegance of Gilmore's thinking is that knowing someone's ID does not prevent the person from committing a terrorist act. The 9/11 hijackers had driver's licenses. Knowing someone's identity, as Gilmore argues it, adds less to a security than it takes away from a traveler's protection from authority that might oppress simply because it can. "It's just rebellion against oppression," Klein said. "Part of it is this sense of 'Why do I have to follow all these rules when they don't make any sense?' " The young woman finished her speech, took a few questions and, just as everyone was about to rise for lunch, Scannell, a peripatetic man who orbits around both the techies and the world of PR, was on the stage. He had a special request. He had just become a parent and wanted to put in a wireless baby monitor. Could someone come up with a way to encrypt a baby monitor so outsiders couldn't pick up the signal? By day's end a few people had approached with ideas. It is doubtful anyone would bother to listen in on a baby gurgling, but this was the principle of the thing: meeting the people who know the math to make it work. Soon afterward, 14 Code Con attendees flooded into a nearby Italian restaurant. Gilmore sat at one end of the table, chatted privacy, travel and whether the drug called Ecstasy has a medicinal application. Then, to save time, he picked up everyone's check. In cash. No credit cards. Why leave a paper trail? That night, he caught a ride home with a friend. The night before was more to his liking. On a bus running through San Francisco to Haight-Ashbury, a multimillionaire sat alone in a seat next to a woman who appeared to be homeless. Neither knew who the other one was. All John Gilmore had to show to get on board was a $1.25 fare. That's how he likes it. -- ----------------- 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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Fred Durst Says Sex Video Was Stolen From His Computer
by R.A. Hettinga 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

Like most real hacks and cracks, it was an, um, inside job... Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1497523/20050225/limp_bizkit.jhtml?headlin…> mtv.com - News - Fred Durst Says Sex Video Was Stolen From His Computer 02.25.2005 9:52 PM EST Contrary to rumors, nookie clip was not hacked from a Sidekick. Fred Durst Photo: MTV News SANTA MONICA, California - Just days after Paris Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick was hacked, spreading her topless photographs across the Internet, a sex tape featuring Fred Durst hit the Web along with reports that it was the work of the Fred Durst on how the video was stolen same hacker. Though the explicit clip features the words "T-Mobile Terrorist" on it, the Limp Bizkit singer said the footage was definitely not stolen from his PDA. "If you look on Paris' thing, I don't use T-Mobile," Durst said with a laugh on Friday (February 25), referring to the list of Hilton's phone numbers that also leaked and included his contact information (see "Paris Hilton Apologizes For Crank Calls, Fergie Wants Revenge"). "No, no, [my listing in her Sidekick] is just old, years old. Somebody that was repairing my computer was smart enough to go through anything he could [and found the movie]. What can I say? I'm not proud of it. "Everyone, probably everyone in this building, has done something similar to what I did, and nobody cares about it," he added during a break from recording the next Limp Bizkit album in Interscope Records' studio. "But if you're high-profile, or on someone's radar ... then it matters. What happens to me happens to me, and I have to live with it and go on." Durst said he's been contacted by at least one company seeking his cooperation in selling the video. "When those things happen to people, there are companies that approach you, say, 'Hey, man, you wanna make some money off this? People are gonna see it anyway,' " Durst explained. "I said, 'Absolutely not, I don't wanna make any money of this. This is ridiculous.' So when you see [celebrity sex tapes] out there with big company names on them, you can know people gave them permission to release it." David Hans Schmidt, a Phoenix-based publicist who once represented Tonya Harding and who has represented celebrities in the selling of nude photos in the past, tells a different story. He said the thieves contacted him in September and he's been negotiating with them and Durst's agents ever since. "I was close to turning something illegal into something legal and then these hackers reneged and went out and put the tape on World Wide Web along with my home telephone number," Schmidt said. "Now we're gonna get 'em. Government agencies are meeting with me this weekend." Schmidt refused to elaborate about the deal because he worried it might hinder the investigation. Durst said he hopes people learn a lesson from what happened to him and Paris. "If you wanna know how not secure you are, just take a look around," he said. "Nothing's secure. Nothing's safe. It's just helping us get better, causing awareness for homeland security. ... I don't hate technology, I don't hate hackers, because that's just what comes with it, without those hackers we wouldn't solve the problems we need to solve, especially security." Limp Bizkit are nearly finished with their fifth studio album, which will mark the return of original guitarist Wes Borland (see "Wes Borland Back With Limp Bizkit"). - Corey Moss -- ----------------- 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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Fear and loathing no more: Hunter S. Thompson, 1938-2005
by R.A. Hettinga 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

<http://www.thejakartapost.com/misc/PrinterFriendly.asp> The Jakarta Post February 28, 2005 Fear and loathing no more: Hunter S. Thompson, 1938-2005 Doug Anthony, Contributor, Jakarta It was always hard imagining the gun-toting, drug-addled king of "Gonzo" journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, surrendering to the infirmities of old age. And on Feb. 20, aged 67, just three years from reaching the biblical three score and ten, his final felony -- and caper -- was to violently end it all with one of the shotguns about which he wrote so fondly in his autumnal memoirs. Aside from this self-inflicted death, the tragedy of Thompson's life is that in the 34 years since his Fear and Loathing books of the 1970s, his mythic stature as a counter-culture wild man had overshadowed his contributions as a writer. Thompson went from waging a mescaline-fueled guerrilla war on the establishment to becoming part of it. He became the quintessential voice of America's left-wing rebellion of the 1960s, and through classics such as Hell's Angels (1966) and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1972), Thompson helped to found New Journalism and its close cousin, Gonzo. Thompson and other Gonzo practitioners ripped the narrator from polite anonymity and placed him center stage, often making it feel like a bad LSD trip. Even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), subtitled A Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, he said, was more truthful than most mainstream journalism at the time. In it, he documents a road trip through the Nevada desert and into America's own heart of darkness. Thompson's subjects were tyranny, corruption, power, guns and above all, drugs. On the way to Las Vegas, Raoul Duke (Thompson's alter-ego), and his 300-pound Samoan companion were armed with "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether". He added: There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." Contemplating the meaning of the 1960s and what was to come, Thompson marked 1971 as the turning point for America's hippies and drug-takers, when flower-power idealism turned to cynicism. Later, sometime in the 1970s, perhaps after ascending to the masthead at Rolling Stone magazine, he seemed to realize he'd become a trademark, a patriarch of hipster street-cred. After all, what writer could sustain such a toxic outburst of creativity over such a long period of time. In a letter to a 14-year-old, Thompson wrote of the Hell's Angels that many of the older members were not "smart or funny, or brave, or even original. They just Old Punks, and that's a lot worse than being a Young Punk". In the 1990s, critics increasingly made the same charge of Thompson -- that unlike his contemporary Tom Wolfe, he hadn't moved on. Thompson's wacky stunts, such as igniting dynamite or blowing up Cadillacs on his farm in Woody Creek, Colorado, were no longer seen as cool or funny, just the behavior of a Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Thompson, of course, refused to give up his old hobbies of groping women, drinking and smoking to excess, or to cut free of his obsession with psychotropics. His later books, such as Better Than Sex, the 1994 diatribe about Bill Clinton, and Kingdom of Fear (2004), became increasingly peppered with personal letters, faxes and already-published articles. They creaked under the weight of a tired writer struggling to keep up a franchise. University campuses paid him to speak, however incoherently; editors shelled out top rates for rambling, repetitive columns. Again and again, we heard of his drug adventures, passion for guns and disdain for authority. He often said his beat as a reporter was to chart the decline of the American century. Kingdom of Fear is a case in point, taking as its subject post-9/11 America, advancing in obscene and angry tones those critiques already popularized by Michael Moore. Sadly, Thompson sounds just as he did 30 years ago. Instead of savaging Nixon, he turned to savaging George W. Bush and the Washington neo-conservatives. In the end, we won't know if the pain of a broken leg, a drug-fried brain or even old-fashioned despair spurred Thompson's final act. But as he slips even further into history, it is not the end of his career, but rather the beginning, that we are likely to remember. "This life's not for everyone," Thompson said in a 1998 interview, and last weekend proved it. -- ----------------- 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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Hunter S. Thompson and Mental Health
by R.A. Hettinga 27 Feb '05

27 Feb '05

<http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=13302&mode=print> Chronwatch Hunter S. Thompson and Mental Health Written by George Thomas Clark Sunday, February 27, 2005 Since Hunter Thompson put a gun in his mouth and shot himself last week, I've been digging deep into the Internet and reading lots of articles about him. The first wave of stories commended his hard-punching, eye-gouging, "gonzo" style of insightful political writing in such books as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Kingdom of Fear," and recalled with wonderment and affection his manic consumption of alcohol, LSD, cocaine, and enough other intoxicants to fill the Physician's Desk Reference. A couple of days after the coroner came, many who'd known the man, or witnessed one or more of his countless binges, began to somberly note that he really had drunk, snorted, and dropped too many unforgiving things and such behavior wasn't so amusing and admirable after all. But in none of the articles I've found has anyone said, "Hey, Hunter should have gotten help." That is amazing, and appallingly typical. If a guy gets a toothache he'll dash to the dentist. A fever sends him scampering to the doctor. A rash drives him scratching to the dermatologist. Heart, liver, kidney, and stomach problems are also widely understood to require medical attention. But what about the human brain? It is easily the most astonishing organ in this solar system, yet it's usually considered a body part unworthy of professional treatment. The essential problem is ignorance; most people still view the brain as a primarily psychic phenomenon and assume that common (even rampant) ailments like depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and excessive anger should either be ignored or treated with more alcohol or cigarettes or, most admirably, by gnawing on the stick of righteous stoicism. None of those will work. People whose brains have sentenced them to unrelenting depressive pain, generally because of an intrinsic chemical imbalance, must be treated medically. A guy like Thompson, who drunkenly barrels into public events, snorts coke in a thousand bathrooms, stands barefoot in the snow shooting guns in the middle of the night, hordes explosives, and repeatedly tells his wife that he's considering suicide, is a guy who needs help. Perhaps his wife did suggest he see a psychiatrist. She should have insisted. Instead, the Associated Press quotes her as having threatened to leave him. His final act certainly wasn't her fault. She couldn't have saved him. Only Thompson had a chance to do that. When Thompson broke his leg in Hawaii last year, Sean Penn immediately spent twenty-seven grand to fly him back to the writer's "fortified compound" - the focal point of his isolation and paranoia - in Colorado. That was a compassionate gesture by Penn but would have been far more helpful had the jet been pointed toward a mental health facility. Thompson would have bellowed upon arriving. He probably would have refused treatment, claiming he didn't need it but the rest of the world did. He was, however, decidedly capable of admitting some kinds of pain. He acknowledged his hip hurt bad enough to be replaced, and underwent the operation. So Hunter S. Thompson, a very tough guy, or at least a tough talker, was willing to get the best treatment for his leg and his hip. But like too many others in mental distress, he didn't understand his brain also deserved the finest medical attention. About the Writer: George Thomas Clark is the author of two books, Hitler Here, a biographical novel, and Outliving Flynn, a short story collection. Hitler Here will be published in India this year by Vasan Publications/Mastermind Books and in the Czech Republic by Mlada Fronta. The author's website is http://www.georgethomasclark.com/ . -- ----------------- 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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Hunter S. Thompson: 1937 - 2005
by R.A. Hettinga 27 Feb '05

27 Feb '05

<http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/10983783.htm?templat…> Posted on Sun, Feb. 27, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson: 1937 - 2005 The writing... By JOHN MARK EBERHART The Kansas City Star "Gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson shot himself a week ago today, but he had put a bullet in his writing career years ago. The Denver Post reported last week that Thompson, 67, had been in pain after a broken leg and hip surgery. But Juan Thompson, his son, made it clear we may never know all the details; in a statement to the Aspen Daily News, he said, "Hunter prized his privacy, and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family." That's fine. But Thompson didn't appear to be as private as his son implied. No, Thompson often lived a life that was very public and marked by excess. The writer himself seemed ambivalent. On some occasions he claimed tales of his drug use were exaggerated. On others he bragged that booze, pills, weed, acid and other substances helped make him creative. Early on, maybe they did. There was no denying the cracked brilliance of 1970s works such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which wallowed in the drug culture but told some truths many Americans didn't want to hear, or Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, which dug deep into the dirt of presidential politics. In 1979 Thompson published The Great Shark Hunt, a collection of shorter works, many of which had appeared in Rolling Stone. Like the two Fear and Loathing books, many of these pieces were "gonzo"; that is, the journalist becoming part of the story. Classic example: "Freak Power in the Rockies," which had appeared in Rolling Stone in 1970. It was a piece based on one of Thompson's elaborate jokes on society in this case, running for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo. His platform was absurd: Sod the streets, change the name of Aspen to "Fat City" to keep "land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name" and otherwise harass developers from transforming Aspen into a playground for the rich. But guess what? Thompson was serious about his fears over rampant development and actually did run for sheriff and came close to winning, so close that he served on a sheriff's advisory committee and ultimately wielded influence in Aspen's preservation. By the early 1980s, though, his writing ability had plummeted. The Curse of Lono, a book about marathon runners, was a mess. His fire-and-gasoline prose was gone, replaced by self-parody. No wonder: Thompson was consuming massive amounts of alcohol and cocaine, according to Paul Perry's 1992 biography, Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson. Even hardcore partiers such as the late John Belushi couldn't match him. Perry's book states that Belushi once stayed with Thompson in Colorado a few days; upon departing, the comedian said: "I had to leave. I couldn't keep up with that guy." Neither, really, could Thompson. Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed and Better Than Sex, published from 1988 to 1994, were addled, woefully thin works. Things seemed to improve with 1997's The Proud Highway and 2000's Fear and Loathing in America, the first two volumes of Thompson's letters. Here was the inferno we'd been missing! But the truth was the most recent of these letters had been written in 1976. Remove the time warp, and one was stuck knowing Thompson's great work was behind him. The man was suffering, too. His marriage to Sandra Dawn Thompson was long over; she would later confess she had come to fear him. In 1990 a woman accused him of sexual assault; a subsequent search of Thompson's home led to drug charges as well. Eventually the whole thing was dropped (by that time, Thompson could afford good lawyers). In July 2000 he accidentally shot his assistant, Deborah Fuller, allegedly while chasing a bear off his property. She was not seriously injured. Amazingly, she stayed with him. I interviewed Thompson in December 2000, and to do so I had to deal with Fuller first. Both she and Thompson sounded seriously on edge at the time. When she finally managed to get him to the phone (it took several days), he obviously was into the sauce. For the last four years Thompson mostly had managed to stay out of the news, and had remarried to yet another assistant, Anita, who apparently had better luck with him. Hey, Rube, published last summer, was not vintage Thompson, but the collection wasn't awful, either. Was he reforming? Who knows? Hunter S. Thompson will be remembered as much for his persona as his writing. Look, everyone is young once. Writers tend to be not only young but also a little crazy. If we're lucky, that period of our lives results in a surfeit of energy that makes the pages crackle; over time, we temper. Old and crazy, though, can be ugly. Ernest Hemingway died that way - and from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, just like Thompson. Both of them had written well. Both had lived hard. I'm not saying either of them should have become a vegetarian or a temperance crusader, but a little more self-respect might have gone a long way toward ensuring their later writings didn't suffer so much. So while it may sound heretical to their many fans, I must stand by this conclusion: Both of them could have done it all better. -- ----------------- 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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CodeCon vs. Demo: A Tale of Two Conferences
by R.A. Hettinga 27 Feb '05

27 Feb '05

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110954583959165320,00.html> The Wall Street Journal February 28, 2005 PORTALS By LEE GOMES Tale of 2 Conferences: High-Tech Innovation Comes in Many Guises February 28, 2005 Through an unusual alignment of the planets, two conferences that featured aspiring innovator-entrepreneurs eager to take the world by storm had their start on the same weekend this month. Both gatherings lasted three days; both featured speakers getting up on stage and describing a new product, usually a piece of software. Beyond that, though, the gatherings couldn't have been more different. The first, called CodeCon, drew 100 or so mostly young programmers, many from the open-source software movement, to a dark and cavernous San Francisco dance club, the venue chosen largely because it was cheap. Attendance cost $80, but you got to go to a Friday night reception at a nearby restaurant with burgers, pizza and beer. The second event was Demo, and it took place at a Scottsdale, Ariz., desert resort that was selected for its golf course, plush rooms, gourmet food and free-flowing open bars. The entry price there was $3,000, and more than 600 people showed up, though many were journalists who got in free. While Demo -- and elite industry shows like it -- are sometimes portrayed as carefully juried competitions of the current crop of tech innovation, in fact, the main prerequisite for getting up on stage in Scottsdale was a willingness to write a check for up to $16,000 to Demo's organizers. There were an eye-glazing 75 presentations in all, most lasting six minutes. At CodeCon, by contrast, it didn't cost anything for the 15 featured speakers to present their ideas. They did, however, have to be selected in advance by conference planners Len Sassaman and Bram Cohen. If that last name sounds familiar, it's because Mr. Cohen is the author of BitTorrent, the file-sharing software that is often used to download pirated movies and that, by one estimate, is now responsible for 30% of all Web traffic because those files are so big. BitTorrent, which has legal uses too, was unveiled at the first CodeCon back in 2002, and it remains the show's greatest hit. Most of the folks presenting at Demo were small start-up companies in "heat-seeking" mode, eager to snag a write-up from one of the freeloading reporters or, better yet, an investment from one of the many venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, angel investors and other moneymen working the halls. At CodeCon, presenters tended to be small groups of programmers with far more modest goals. A mention of your project in Slashdot, the blog of record for techies, would be considered a home run. If, as a result of the buzz from your presentation, you got a job interview at Google, that might be a double. The Luddites among you out there will probably be pleased to learn that both gatherings were plagued by technical snafus. At CodeCon, the bulb in the projector that speakers used to show their slides blew out on the first day. One presenter improvised during the blackout by inviting the crowd to gather around his laptop as he put his software through its paces. At Demo, the whole network kept going down, which is no small detail when you are trying to demonstrate something that works over the Internet. A number of presenters thus found themselves living the entrepreneur's fever dream of being on stage in a crowded hotel ballroom in front of a blank screen, saying, in effect, "Trust me, the product really works." A lot of Demo was focused on the computing needs of big companies, while CodeCon was skewed to the sorts of computer-programming projects that would interest computer programmers. But there was some overlap, too. See if you can guess which of these programs was introduced at which conference: A) Gleeper, for discovering new Web sites. B) Browster, for speeding up Web searches. C) IntelleDox, for coordinating changes to word-processing documents. D) ApacheCA, for coordinating changes to a software project. (Answers: CodeCon, Demo, Demo, CodeCon.) If, through some space-time warp, the Demo people had found themselves at CodeCon, they would probably have regarded many of the projects as crude, unfinished or of limited appeal. Conversely, those at CodeCon would likely have sneered that the Demo products were often me-too entrants into already-crowded markets, innovative mainly in their use of the current buzzwords. But it's not as though the two groups are inherently antagonistic to each other. While open-source buffs like those at CodeCon are sometimes described as the Bolsheviks of the tech world, most would only too happily start a company, and many probably will when they get a little older. The Demo people, mostly in their 40s and 50s, haven't become too ossified to remember that earth-shaking innovations in these days of Linux and the Internet can turn up anywhere, even a San Francisco nightclub. Indeed, venture capitalists are starting to pop up at CodeCon, and the aforementioned hamburger reception was sponsored by Google itself. In short, spending a few days at both CodeCon and Demo offered a handy way to visit both the top and the bottom of the technology food chain. I will, though, leave it up to you to decide which conference was which. -- ----------------- 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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Italian GSM provider warns: too many wiretaps
by R.A. Hettinga 27 Feb '05

27 Feb '05

<Mr-Rogers> Now, boys and girls, try not to laugh *too* hard, and be sure you swallow your Wheaties before you read this... </M-R> Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number3.4/wiretap> | EDRI EDRI-gram ; EDRI-gram - Number 3.4, 24 February 2005 Italian GSM provider warns: too many wiretaps 24 February, 2005 ; Privacy | Wiretapping The Italian mobile operator TIM, one of the largest mobile phone companies in Italy has issued a unique warning that the number of wiretaps has reached the limit. In a fax sent to all Italian public prosecutors they say that they have already over-stretched their capacity from 5.000 to 7.000 simultaneously intercepted mobile phones. New requests now have to be processed on a 'first come first serve' basis, they write. Even more unique in the current secretive environment of law enforcement, the Italian Minister of Justice Roberto Castelli (right-wing Lega Nord) has provided the newspaper Repubblica with statistics about the number of wiretaps and costs. The number of wiretaps has doubled every two years, he said, from 32.000 intercepts in 2001, to 45.000 in 2002, to 77.000 in 2003. He estimates the number of wiretaps in 2004 to be 100.000, costing the Justice department aprox 300.00 million euro in cost reimbursements. In 2003 the department of Justice spent 225 million euro on the intercepts, in 2002 230 million and in 2001 165 million. Castelli admitted the number of police intercepts in Italy was very high. Currently Italy has aprox 58 million inhabitants. With 100.000 intercepts in 2004, Italy orders 172 judicial intercepts per 100.000 inhabitants. There is no information about wiretaps ordered by secret services in any country. Castelli referred to the report of the German Max Planck Institute which already concluded Italy was the wiretapping champion of the (western) world with 76 intercepts per 100.000 inhabitants (44.000 wiretaps in 1996). The number two on the European wiretapping list in 1996, the Netherlands, refuses to provide any recent statistics. According to unofficial estimates the Netherlands intercepted 12.000 phones (fixed and mobile) in 2004. If those numbers are correct, the Netherlands have 75 intercepts per 100.000 inhabitants. In the United States, the most recent public statistics date from 2002. They mention 1.273 court ordered intercepts on a population of aprox 293 million, totalling 0,43 intercepts per 100.000 inhabitants. The UK Communication Commissioner mentions a total of 1.983 warrants for intercepts in 2003 on a population of 59,5 million, totalling 3,3 intercepts per 100.000 inhabitants. One possible explanation for the explosion of the number of wiretaps in Italy is their short duration. An order is valid for 15 days and can only be extended with a new motivation from a magistrate. Only for investigations into organised crime an intercept can last 40 days. In many other countries, intercepts have a duration of 1 to 3 months. Vodafone and Wind, two other major mobile phone companies, are also reaching their maximum wiretapping capacity, reports Repubblica. While Castelli used the occasion to warn against overuse of wiretapping in investigations, the Italian magistracy doesn't seem to agree. Edmondo Bruto Liberati, President the National Association of Magistrates (association of both judges and public prosecutors) stressed that wiretapping is much cheaper than individual covert surveillance. He complained about the vast under-financing the judicial apparatus is currently suffering from. This public debate between the Minister and the magistracy points at a more fundamental division in Italian politics. By stressing the immense costs of wiretapping the Minister of Justice adds weight to his attempt to shift the costs to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Generally the Minister pictures an image of a foolish magistracy that abundantly spends public money. This comes as no surprise to many Italians, given the tense relationship between Berlusconi and the magistracy. MP Giovanni Russo Spena (left wing opposition, Rifondazione Comunista) has demanded an explanation from the government about the massive use of wiretapping in investigations and wishes to be informed how citizens are protected against this potential and actual invasion of their privacy rights. -- ----------------- 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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