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Re: What color are anthrax spores anyway?
by Declan McCullagh 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 08:46:44PM -1000, Reese wrote: > but it isn't like the other news agencies are pushing and shoving to > report either one. Until they do, I'm just a little skeptical. Not so. Driving back from Arlington a moment ago, I heard it on NPR (or on the NPR affiliate's pickup of the BBC feed, close enough). Also: Second Case of Anthrax in Florida Oct. 8, 2001 10:25 ET abcnews.go.com/sections/living/DailyNews/anthraxcase2011008.html Second anthrax case in Florida Oct. 8, 2001 10:10 ET news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/health/newsid_1586000/1586881.stm Local News - The Cincinnati Enquirer Oct. 8, 2001 05:04 ET enquirer.com/editions/2001/10/08/local.html Second Floridian, Workplace Test Positive for Anthrax (Update8) Oct. 8, 2001 15:05 ET http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Top%20World%20News&s1=blk&tp=ad… Etc. -Declan

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Re: Second man tests positive for anthrax; media building closed
by Nomen Nescio 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

> (A complete speculation, admittedly, is the connection with the first > dead guy's occupation: a photographer for the weekly tabloid "The Sun." > Speculations that he was photographing the WTC pilots and their small > plane for a "scoop" on bioterrorism are unsubstantiated.) Additional information from various reports: the first victim, Stevens, lived about a mile from the airport where the hijackers practiced. The Star office building is a few miles away. Stevens' keyboard at his office was found contaminated with Anthrax. The second victim was not infected internally with Anthrax but spores were found in his nose. One of the purposes of the nose is to filter junk out before it gets to the lungs. If the Anthrax spores are the wrong size they will get trapped like this. Part of the art of preparing Anthrax weapons is getting the particle sizes exactly right. Hypothesis one: the Star reporters were trying to get a "scoop" on bioterrorism. Impossible! How would they know where to find bioterrorists? Did Mohammed Atta and associates go around calling up tabloids and offering them a "scoop"? This is inconsistent with the utter professionalism and secrecy with with the operation was conducted. Hypothesis two: Stevens was infected via aerial spraying at his home and carried the spores into the office. Unlikely but possible. It would be difficult to bring enough spores in just on his clothes and person as to contaminate the office and get spores into the nose of his co-worker. And why were more people near Stevens' home not affected? Possibly the spray was extremely ineffective and only Stevens was unlucky enough to get a fatal dose. Hypothesis three: the Star office building was a test for distribution of Anthrax spores via internal air circulation. Unlikely but possible. One would expect to see more internal contamination in the building than just Stevens' keyboard, and more Star employees affected than two. Again it is possible that the delivery was inefficient. It may be that more contamination was found which has not yet been reported. Hypothesis four: Stevens was infected through natural environmental exposure away from work and brought spores into the office. Highly unlikely, given the rarity of Anthrax exposure and the difficulty of bringing in enough spores to infect someone else. Hypothesis five: Stevens was infected through natural environmental exposure in the office. Extremely unlikely: Anthrax is found on animal products (previous industrial cases have involved exposure to such things as goat hides) and a photography editor would not be handling such materials. The most likely possibilities appear to be numbers two and three, that this was either a test run or a botched attempt at infecting the population. The experts have been claiming for weeks that handling these bioagents isn't as trivial as fearmongers would suggest. It seems probable that such factors are at work here.

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by mona ali 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

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Epson Printers & Logitech Mouses
by juancarlos＠memorykings.net 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

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C'est Need To Know!
by Jim Choate 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

http://www.ntk.net/ -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Limbaugh: 'I'm Going Deaf'
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

Does this mean the goofball is going to get even louder?

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FWD: Nation weighing value of security vs. privacy; An edgy America struggles with technology's role
by auto301094＠hushmail.com 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- More of the same, from businessmen this time, not bureaucrats. A telling pulled quote: "I kind of feel like if the FBI wants to follow me around, God bless them. I've got nothing to hide." Disgraceful. ~F. If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" --Samuel Adams **** The Dallas Morning News Nation weighing value of security vs. privacy; An edgy America struggles with technology's role ALAN GOLDSTEIN and VIKAS BAJAJ BODY: But there will be no high-tech silver bullet this time, according to the panel of business and academic experts that convened Tuesday in a special session to discuss technology's role in the crisis. The panel was asked about proposed measures in which airlines could use electronic wizardry to search aggressively for high-risk passengers, culling through myriad databases from both corporations and law enforcement agencies. Security personnel at airports and other high-profile public places would have access to powerful databases brimming with sensitive personal information. FBI records, individual addresses and travel patterns could all be incorporated into the system to help raise red flags. Credit card records could be a particularly illuminating indicator of suspicious behavior, said Tom Klein, president of Fort Worth-based Sabre Holdings Corp.'s airline reservations and emerging businesses units. "It is much broader than how I booked a flight. There are things that will make lots of people uncomfortable. But there are people who say that's where we need to go." The public may be more willing to give up some measure of privacy in exchange for security, said Matt Yarbrough, a former federal prosecutor. The FBI's Carnivore system for monitoring e-mail traffic over the Internet stirred a huge controversy last year, said Mr. Yarbrough, who heads the cyberlaw group in the Dallas office of Fish & Richardson PC. "For some reason, everyone was upset about Carnivore a few months ago. Today, you could probably get it through in a heartbeat." Personal privacy One member of the board said he was willing to subject himself to such scrutiny if it helped make the country more secure. "I kind of feel like if the FBI wants to follow me around, God bless them. I've got nothing to hide," said Guy Hoffman, a Dallas-based partner at TL Ventures, a venture capital firm. But the majority shot back that such systems, perhaps tied to some form of national identity card, could do more harm than good. "You don't know enough about the FBI," said Anne K. Bingaman, chairwoman and chief executive of Valor Telecommunications LLC in Irving. The agency has had a long history of abusing authority through violations of personal privacy, said Ms. Bingaman, a former antitrust chief with the U.S. Department of Justice. "It's one thing to have a card that says who you are. I don't think people object to that. It's what the driver's license is," she said. "But tying it to a database that has all kinds of information that is ostensibly for terrorism but is accessible to thousands of law enforcement people permanently - we have some pretty good reasons to feel threatened by that." Constitutional issues Americans' guarantees of civil liberties were put in place to protect individuals from an invasive government, said Hasan Pirkul, dean of the management school at the University of Texas at Dallas. "The Constitution has not become obsolete because of a terrorist attack," he said. Another threat to the public comes from unauthorized access to the database. >From mischievous teenagers across the planet to sophisticated organized crime rings, computer hackers have breached systems that had once been considered impregnable. "I don't trust the hackers. Those guys can get into anything. Anything we design, they can break," said Mr. Shank of Ericsson. Board members also worried that flawed data could wreak havoc on people's lives. "Mistakes happen," said Laura Rippy, chief executive of Handango Inc. in Hurst, which sells handheld and wireless equipment. "What if they mistake you for someone and you're sitting in jail for a week?" Physical security procedures may prove a better solution for reducing terrorism than their high-tech counterparts, board members agreed. "I still think - the low-tech thing - lock pilots in the cockpit if we're worried about airplanes being used as bombs again," Ms. Bingaman said. "To me, that's far more fail-safe than any of this identification or screening or the rest of it." Limits High-tech screening wouldn't prevent an attack such as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, board members said, because the tools were rudimentary and authorities weren't seeking the plotters. Technology isn't just defensive, said board member Shiek Shah. Surveillance tools and advanced weaponry can "exterminate the breeding grounds of terrorism," said Mr. Shah, co-chief executive of Akili, a Dallas firm that integrates software and other technology for corporate customers. "I agree, eradicate them, but part of the eradication is to wipe out the breeding grounds in positive ways," said Leon Kappelman, director of the Information Systems Research Center at the University of North Texas in Denton. Evaluating the impact of the attacks on the telecommunications and computing infrastructure of Wall Street, board members concluded that systems held up relatively well. Dr. Kappelman, a leading expert in the Year 2000 computer problem, said the financial services industry's preparations for the millennium bug helped get the markets running again. "A big part of Y2K, especially in those businesses, as dealing with disaster recovery and business continuity," he said. "Having those things in place made it very much possible to deal with this faster." The attacks should encourage businesses and governments to rethink their technological vulnerabilities, said John Breen, vice president of consulting services at SBC DataComm Inc., a division of SBC Communications Inc. of San Antonio. "Assess what you have learned over the last three weeks," Mr. Breen said. "Analyze whether it's for your business or for your personal life, and then act," he said. "As Americans, we act. And we need to act as best we can to try and address these failures." Technology will probably be just a piece of a broader response, board members said. "Maybe we looked at technology as the answer," Mr. Hoffman said. "Today we recognize that technology is only part of the solution." Coming Monday: The tech industry's new challenges. First of two parts. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: Hush 2.0 wl8EARECAB8FAjvB9nIYHGF1dG8zMDEwOTRAaHVzaG1haWwuY29tAAoJEKadvsVlUK4P U8kAoKsejzozyFnhWj0BIlPp28ROcCW2AJ9fIBKNEtmew0pWdYUve5d3NMxx5g== =SY2Y -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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And Now Afghanistan by Murray N. Rothbard Circa 1980
by Matthew Gaylor 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard8.html> And Now Afghanistan by Murray N. Rothbard This article was originally published in the January-February 1980 issue of The Libertarian Forum. These are grim times for those of us who yearn for a peaceful American foreign policy, for a foreign policy emulating the ideals of Thomas Paine, who exhorted America not to interfere with the affairs of other nations, and to serve instead as a beacon-light of liberty by her example. The lessons of the Vietnam intervention have been shuffled off with obscene haste, by masses and by intellectuals alike, by campus kids and by veterans of the antiwar movement of the 1960's. It started with Iran, with bloody calls for war, for punishment, for "nuking 'em till they glow." But just as we have been whipping ourselves up to nuking Muslims and to declaring war against "fanatical" Islam per se, we are ready to turn on a dime and sing the praises of no-longer fanatical Muslims who are willing to fight Russian tanks with their bare hands: the heroic freedom fighters of Afghanistan. All of a sudden President Carter has gone bananas: declaring himself shocked and stunned by the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, mobilizing the United Nations in stunned horror, levying embargoes (my how this peanut salesman loves embargoes!), and threatening the Olympics so dear to sports fans around the globe. It's all very scary. There is the phony proclamation of personal betrayal Brezhnev not coming clean on the Hot Line all too reminiscent of the late unlamented King of Camelot before he almost got us into a nuclear holocaust over Cuba. There is the same macho insistence on regarding every foreign affairs crisis as a duel with six-shooters at high noon, and trying to prove that good ole Uncle Sam still has the fastest draw. To set the record straight from the first: Yes, it is deplorable that Russia saw it fit to move troops into Afghanistan. It will, we can readily predict, be a disaster for the Soviets themselves, for tens of thousands of troops will be tied down, Vietnam-fashion, in a country where they are universally hated and reviled, and where they will be able to command only the cities and the main roads, and those in the daytime. But deplorable as the Soviet action is, it is neither surprising nor shocking: it is in line with Soviet, indeed with all Russian actions since the late 19th century an insistence on dominating countries on its borders. While unfortunate, this follows the line of Czarist imperialism: it is old-fashioned Great Power politics, and presages neither the "fall" of Southwest Asia nor an immediate armed strike upon our shores. Indeed, the righteous horror of the U.S. and the U.N. at Soviet actions in Afghanistan takes on an ironic perspective when we consider the massive use of military force wielded not very long age by the United States against Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, the ground for Soviet invasion: the backing of one side in another country's civil war, was precisely the groundwork or the massive and disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. In Vietnam, too, we intervened on the side of unpopular repressive regime in a civil war against a popular revolution: and now the Soviets are doing the exact same thing. So why the selective moral indignation wielded by: Carter, the U.N., the war hawk conservatives, the Social Democrats, the liberals, the media, etc.? Hypocrisy has become rife in America. There are two crucial difference between America's and Russia's "Vietnam" in Afghanistan. One, that Russia will be slaughtering far fewer Afghans than we did Vietnamese. And two, that Afghanistan is, after all, on Russia's borders while we launched our intervention in Vietnam half the globe away from our shores. And Afghanistan, of course is even further away than Vietnam. The whole thing is ludicrous and absurd. Is Afghanistan now supposed to have been part of the "Free World"? Afghanistan has no resources, has no treaties with the U.S., no historic ties, there are none of the flimsy but popular excuses that we have used for over a century to throw our weight around across the earth. But we go, intervening anyway, loudly proclaiming that Russia's actions in Afghanistan are "unacceptable," and for which we are ready to scrap SALT, detente, and the feeble past attempts of the Carter administration to shuck off the Cold War and to establish come sort of modus vivendi with Russia. The conservatives, the Pentagon, the Social Democrats, the neo-conservatives, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority all the worst scoundrels in American life - have been yearning to smash detente, and to accelerate an already swollen arms budget and heat up the Cold War. And now Carter has done it to such an extent that such conservative organs as Human Events are even finding Carter foreign policy to be better in some respects than that of its hero Reagan. The idiocy of the sudden wailing and hand-wringing over Afghanistan may be gauged by the fact that that land-locked and barren land had been a Russian client state since the late nineteenth century, when clashes of British and Russian (Czarist) imperialism came to draw the Afghan-Indian border where it is today. (An unfortunate situation, since northwest and western Pakistan is ethnically Pushtu the majority ethnic Baluchi: the same group that populates southern Afghanistan and southeastern Iran.) Ever since, the King of Afghanistan has always been a Russian tool, first Czarist then Soviet to the tune of no bleats of outrage from the United States. Then, in 1973, the King was overthrown by a coup led by Prince Mohammed Daud. After a few years, Daud began to lead the Afghan government into the Western, pro-U.S. camp. More specifically, he came under the financial spell (i.e. the payroll) of the Shah of Iran, the very man much in the news of late. Feeling that they could not tolerate a pro- U.S. anti-Soviet regime on its borders, the Russians then moved to depose Daud and replace him with the Communist Nur Taraki, in April 1978. Ever since then, Afghanistan has been under the heel on one Communist ruler or another; yet nobody complained, and no American president threatened mayhem. The reason for the latest Soviet invasions is simple but ironic in our world of corn-fed slogans. For the problem with Hafizullah Amin, the prime minister before the Soviet incursion, was that he was too Commie for the Russians. As a fanatical left Communist, Amin carried our a brutal program of nationalizing the peasantry and torturing opponents, a policy of collectivism and repression that fanned the flames of guerrilla war against him. Seeing Afghanistan about to slip under to the West once again, the Soviets felt impelled to go in to depose Amin and replace him with an Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal, who is much more moderate a Communist and therefore a faithful follower of the Soviet line. There are undoubtedly countless conservatives and Social Democrats who still find it impossible to conceive of Soviet tools who are more moderate than other Communists, but it is high time they caught up with several decades of worldwide experience. I deplore the Soviet invasion; I hope for victory of the Afghan masses: and I expect that eventually, as in Vietnam, the oppressed masses will triumph over the Soviet invaders and their puppet regime. The Afghans will win. Buy that is not reason whatever for other nations, including the United States, to leap into the fray. We must not die for Kabul! The crocodile tears shed for the Afghans point up once again the disastrous concept of "collective security" which has provided the basis for the U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson and is the very heart and soul of the United Nations. Collective security means that any border skirmish anywhere, any territorial rectification, any troubles of any pipsqueak country, necessarily provides the sparkplug for a general holocaust, for a world war "against aggression". The world does not have one government, and so international war is not a "police action," despite the successful attempt of the warmonger Harry Truman to place that seemingly innocuous label on his military invasion of Korea. U.S. hysteria over Afghanistan is the bitter fruit of the doctrine of collective security. If we are to avoid nuclear holocaust, if we are to prevent World War III, we must bury the doctrine of collective security once and for all, we must end the idea of the United States as God's appointed champion of justice throughout the world. We must pursue, in the immortal words of classical liberal Sydney Smith quoted in this issue, "apathy, selfishness, common sense, arithmetic." But we can't be apathetic in this pursuit, because time's a wastin.' American officials are ominously spreading the word that the Afghan crisis is the most threatening foreign affairs situation since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, or even since World War II. No doubt: but only because the Carter administration and the war hawks have made it so. Libertarians must mobilize to Stop the War, and to stop it now! We must stop the embargo (Carter's favorite foreign policy tactic), which is both criminal and counterproductive. Criminal because it aggresses against the rights of private property and free exchange. Criminal because it represses trade and thereby injures both the American public and the innocent civilian public of both Iran and Afghanistan. Counterproductive because, while hurting innocent civilians, embargoes do nothing to injure the power elites of either side. Embargoes will only unify the people of Iran and Afghanistan behind their regimes, which they will identify as defending them and their food supply against the aggressor Carter. We must stop the war...and earn the gratitude of all Americans who cherish peace and freedom, and of future generations of Americans who will, one hopes, emerge from the bloody century-long miasma of nationalist chauvinism to see their way clear at long last for the truly American and the genuinely libertarian policy of nonintervention and peace. Copyright © 2001 <http://www.mises.org>Ludwig von Mises Institute <http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard-arch.html>Murray Rothbard Archives ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt(a)coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************

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How Can Water Distribution Systems Be Kept Secure?
by Jim Choate 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

Crypto this... http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1008012.htm -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Mitnick Warns Other 'Scapegoats' ...
by Elyn Wollensky 08 Oct '01

08 Oct '01

Has anyone seen this - elyn http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,47354,00.html Mitnick Warns Other 'Scapegoats' Wired/ 10.8.01 The world's most notorious hacker says the government should focus on securing its computer systems rather than snooping on citizens. Kevin Mitnick, who spent four-and-a-half years behind bars for breaking into the computer systems of telephone companies, stresses that hackers should take extreme care these days given the sensitive political environment and the new laws defining many hacks as acts of terrorism. He also warned that any hacker could win the "scapegoat sweepstakes" at any time, receiving a harsh sentence to serve as an example to other hackers. Mitnick, who has testified before a Senate committee on the dangers of politically motivated hack attacks, thinks cyber terrorism is a credible -- but not particularly critical -- threat that could be headed off by strengthening security at government agencies and private corporations. He firmly believes the newly proposed Patriot Act is just an excuse for law enforcement to further its own agenda. The act, approved on Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee and slated for a full vote this week, gives wide-ranging surveillance powers to the police, including extensive scrutiny of electronic communications. "The Patriot Act is ludicrous," Mitnick said. "Terrorists have proved that they are interested in total genocide, not subtle little hacks of the U.S infrastructure, yet the government wants a blank search warrant to spy and snoop on everyone's communications." If anyone has a right to what some might see as paranoia, Mitnick would be that man. He's been portrayed in newspapers, books and movies as the all-powerful evil programmer, a brilliant hacker able to launch a nuclear war with a mere whistle into a cell phone, able to bring down government computer systems on a whim. For the record, Mitnick denies many of the crimes that have been credited to him and said the government and the mainstream media created the myth of Mitnick for their own profit. "I am not innocent but I certainly didn't do most of what I was accused of," he said. "Basically, I won the scapegoat sweepstakes." Mitnick agreed to be interviewed as part of the publicity for his role in an episode of a new ABC spy drama, Alias, in which Mitnick plays a CIA computer expert. Mitnick's episode, "Doppelganger," is scheduled to air Sunday, Oct. 28. Arrested in February 1995 for hacking into the computer networks of communications providers such as Digital Equipment, Pacific Bell, Bell Atlantic and Internet service provider The Well, Mitnick was held without bail for four and a half years. He served eight months of that time in solitary confinement as authorities apparently feared he could still manage to hack into some device and cause the end of the world. He pleaded guilty to entering computer systems without authorization, served another eight months, and was released in January 2000. Mitnick is banned, until January 2003, from using computers, acting as a technical consultant, or writing about computers without permission from his probation officer. Mitnick recently was given permission to carry a cell phone so that he could be in touch with family during his father's terminal illness. Mitnick was allowed to keep the phone after his father died five months ago but believes it's so authorities can keep track of him. Mitnick testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington on March 2 and outlined a comprehensive plan that would secure computer systems against most hack attacks. He believes that the government should be hardening their systems now, although he's not totally convinced that cyber terrorism is the worst threat. "Yes, a coordinated team of hackers could take down the communications systems, the power system, perhaps the financial markets," he said. "But all of those systems would be back online pretty quickly; you can't really knock them out for an extended period. You could use those outages as a decoy though, to draw attention from what you are really planning." But he believes that increased surveillance powers aren't going to help win the war against terrorism and he thinks the government knows it. "The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a backdoor. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme." Mitnick defines a hacker as someone who has a passion for technology, someone who is possessed by a desire to figure out how things work. Sometimes, he said, that passion may lead a hacker into the shadowy places where the law and hacker ethics conflict. "A hacker doesn't deliberately destroy data or profit from his activities," he said. "I never made any money directly from hacking. I wasn't malicious. A lot of the unethical things I did was to cover my own ass when I was a fugitive." Mitnick does not justify all of his hacks. He admits he broke into computer systems to peek at code that powers cellular phone systems. He didn't destroy data or sell it. But he copied proprietary software. He did have long lists of customer records from major corporations -- including customer credit card numbers -- but said he used the information to "social engineer" his way into systems. Social engineers hack people instead of computers, coercing information out of people by pretending they have a right to that information. Mitnick said he used those corporate billing records to assume customers' identities. "The companies would ask address, credit card information, things like that to confirm that you were who you said you were. That's why I needed the customer databases. Everyone always wondered why I had all those credit cards and never used them or sold the numbers," he said. Mitnick believes Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian software programmer currently awaiting trial in the U.S. on charges he violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, may have also won the so-called sweepstakes. He warns young hackers to pull back and be very careful now. "I hope Dmitry puts up a good fight," Mitnick said. "He's got a great lawyer. I had a public defender. He's innocent, I wasn't. All the right people are supporting him. I pissed a lot of the right people off by hacking into The Well." The Well is an online service that, in its heyday, was the online community of choice for anybody who considered themselves a technophile. Mitnick used The Well's servers as a sort of storage locker for data he'd pilfered from other places, which angered many users who assumed he'd crawled all over the system and violated their privacy. "I was on the run, and didn't have any place to store this data I was collecting. So I hid it all over the Net like it was Easter eggs." Mitnick does admit to reading the e-mail of New York Times reporter John Markoff, who reported on Mitnick for The Times, and then co-authored Tsutomu Shimomura's book, Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw -- By The Man Who Did It. "I read their e-mail because they were discussing how the FBI was going to catch me. I didn't read it all, just searched for a combination of letters that's in my name, and words like "trap," "trace" things like that. Again, this is something I had to do to cover my ass, total self-preservation." Mitnick hosts a radio show, and is currently working on a book on social engineering and how people can protect themselves against it. The book will be published next year. Many in the hacking community believe Mitnick is an outstanding social engineer but just a so-so hacker with limited programming skills. "I'd say I'm equally skilled in both areas," Mitnick said, "but no, my programming skills aren't stellar. Yes, I'd rather hack people's brains than code. If I needed to know about a security exploit, I preferred to get the information by accessing the companies' security teams' files, rather than poring over lines of code to find it on my own. It's just more efficient." Mitnick gave an interesting example of the power of social engineering. Enlisting a co-worker to demonstrate, he proved that it is easy to spoof caller ID information by placing calls to Wired News that appeared to come from other destinations such as the White House. The information that appeared on the incoming caller ID information identified the calls as coming from the spoofed addresses, instead of the phone number that was used to place the call. "Imagine what a malicious hacker could do with this trick, which, by the way, is a perfectly legal feature of the phone system," Mitnick said. "Imagine if your caller ID identified a call as coming from your credit card company, or your bank." Mitnick said the best way to avoid social engineering scams is to trust nothing. And yes, he is bitter over the way his life has been "twisted and torn out from underneath me." But knowing he'll be free to use computers again in 2003 keeps him going. He cautions young hackers not to take any chances now. "Set up a network with your friends and try to hack into it. I know it's not the big challenge you're looking for. You don't get the thrill of entering into forbidden territory, but now is not the time to be hacking. Trust me, you do not want to be the next big winner of the scapegoat sweepstakes."

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