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I.R.S. Accuses Man of Hiding $450 Million
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Mar '05

01 Mar '05

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/business/01tax.html?th=&pagewanted=print&…> The New York Times March 1, 2005 I.R.S. Accuses Man of Hiding $450 Million By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON ASHINGTON, Feb. 28 - A prominent telecommunications entrepreneur who once tried to mount a rescue of a Russian space station has been arrested and charged with evading taxes by hiding at least $450 million of income through offshore corporations. According to a 12-count indictment released on Monday that federal prosecutors called the largest criminal case of individual tax evasion, the entrepreneur, Walter Anderson, 51, did not pay over $210 million in federal and local income taxes he owed for the years 1995 through 1999 alone. "Mr. Anderson ran the table when it came to violating the tax laws," Mark W. Everson, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, told a news conference Monday. "Because of his dishonest dealings, Mr. Anderson's lavish lifestyle was subsidized by honest, hard-working Americans." In 1998 Mr. Anderson, who lives in Washington, reported a total income of $67,939 and paid a tax of just $494. Mr. Everson said Mr. Anderson actually made at least $126 million that year that he never reported. From 1987 through 1993, officials said, Mr. Anderson failed to file a tax return. Mr. Anderson is the chief executive of Orbital Recovery, a company trying to extend the life of telecommunications satellites. He was arrested Saturday at Dulles Airport outside Washington as he stepped off a plane from London, according to Kenneth L. Wainstein, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. In court on Monday, Mr. Anderson pleaded not guilty to the charges. His lawyer, John Moustakas, told Magistrate Judge Alan Kay that the government's case was based on "innuendo and rumor." If convicted, Mr. Anderson faces as much as 24 years in prison. Judge Kay ordered Mr. Anderson held without bail until a bond hearing on Thursday. Susan Menzer, a prosecutor in the case, called Mr. Anderson "a flight risk" who "can't be trusted." "He hasn't been listening to judges for years," she added. Since a search warrant was executed in 2002, Mr. Anderson has moved artwork and cash to Switzerland to defeat both tax collectors and creditors who have civil court orders, the Justice Department said in court papers. Mr. Moustakas did not return a phone call seeking comment. Mr. Anderson has long attracted a certain level of public attention, especially when he tried to arrange a rescue of the Mir space station five years ago. He frequently flew in a private jet and made deals involving millions of dollars. At conferences on space travel he often spoke of his hatred of government. But he came under scrutiny, law enforcement officials suggested, only because of a tip from a disgruntled business associate. Mr. Anderson, according to the indictment, formed an offshore corporation, Gold and Appeal Transfer, in the British Virgin Islands in 1992 to hide his profits from deals involving a telecommunications company he started in the 1980's. Over the next three years, the indictment charged, Mr. Anderson set up a network of offshore corporations, including one in Panama under the alias Mark Roth, that were used to hide his ownership of three telecommunications companies and allow him to earn hundreds of millions of dollars without paying taxes. While Mr. Anderson at times insisted publicly that he was worth no more than $4 million, he serves as a senior business adviser to Constellation Services International, a fledgling satellite rescue company that disclosed his ownership of several companies, including Gold and Appeal. Its Web site said Gold and Appeal was worth at least $100 million and described Mr. Anderson as selling the Esprit Telecom Group in 1998 for $900 million. In extensive filings with the I.R.S. and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the indictment charged, Mr. Anderson claimed that he was merely an employee of Gold and Appeal, the offshore bank that the indictment says was central to his tax-evasion effort. "The I.R.S. holds all Americans, even the very wealthy, to the same standard," Mr. Everson said. "This indictment sends a strong signal that we will not tolerate abuse of the tax laws." But later, questioned by reporters, Mr. Everson noted that the I.R.S. law enforcement staff has been cut by at least a quarter in recent years. Mr. Wainstein, the United States attorney, said one of his prosecutors had spent a year developing the case. Prosecutors noted that it was difficult to catch determined tax cheats but said that some countries known as tax havens had been cooperating with American investigators more often since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The government has stepped up investigations but managed to recommend only 1,400 tax prosecutions out of the 130 million tax returns filed annually. For budgetary reasons, the I.R.S. relies almost entirely on data reported to it on computer files, not on traditional detective work, to help identify tax evaders. Gary Hudson of Redwood City, Calif., said that Mr. Anderson invested $30 million in his Rotary Rocket, the primary backing for a private rocket launching and recovery firm that ultimately failed. "One condition of his investment was that we could not take any government money," Mr. Hudson said in a telephone interview on Monday. Besides avoiding federal taxes, the indictment charges, Mr. Anderson also evaded at least $40 million in income taxes owed the District of Columbia and $254,000 in local sales taxes he should have paid on jewelry, wine and art, including a painting by Salvador Dalm and several by Reni Magritte. Copyright 2 -- ----------------- 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' -- ----------------- 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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[i2p] weekly status notes [mar 1] (fwd from jrandom@i2p.net)
by Eugen Leitl 01 Mar '05

01 Mar '05

----- Forwarded message from jrandom <jrandom(a)i2p.net> -----

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Invisibility Shields Planned by Engineers
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Mar '05

01 Mar '05

<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0228_050228_invisibility.ht…> Invisibility Shields Planned by Engineers James Owen in London for National Geographic News February 28, 2005 In popular science fiction, the power of invisibility is readily apparent. Star Trek fans, for example, know that the devious Romulans could make their spaceships suddenly disappear. But is the idea really so implausible? Not according to new findings by scientists who say they have come up with a way to create cloaking device. Electronic engineers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia are researching a device they say could make objects "nearly invisible to an observer." The contrivance works by preventing light from bouncing off the surface of an object, causing the object to appear so small it all but disappears. The concept was reported today by the science news Web site news(a)nature.com. It says the proposed cloaking device would not require any peripheral attachments (such as antennas or computer networks) and would reduce visibility no matter what angle an object is viewed at. Sir John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College, London, said the concept potentially holds several important applications "in stealth technology and camouflage." While types of invisibility shielding have been developed before, the phenomenon described by Andrea Alz and Nader Engheta sounds like something that might have been witnessed from the bridge of science fiction's starship Enterprise. The concept is based on a "plasmonic cover," which is a means to prevent light from scattering. (It is light bouncing off an object that makes it visible to an observer). The cover would stop light from scattering by resonating at the same frequency as the light striking it. If such a device could cope with different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation (including visible light), in theory, the object would vanish into thin air. Plasmonic Covers Alz and Engheta investigated experimental plasmonic covers that incorporated metals, such as gold and silver, to hide visible light. When light strikes a metallic material, waves of electrons, called plasmons, are generated. The engineers found that when the frequency of the light striking the material matched the frequency of the plasmons, the two frequencies act to cancel each other out. Under such conditions, the metallic object scattered only negligible amounts of light. The researchers' studies show that spherical and cylindrical objects coated with plasmonic shielding material produce very little light scattering. These objects, when hit by the right wavelength of light, were seen to become so small that they were almost invisible. The study is supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which researches and develops cutting edge military technology. Some experts note, however, that cloaking devices that could enable military vehicles and aircraft, let alone spaceships, to become completely invisible to the enemy are likely to remain elusive for the foreseeable future. John Pendry, the Imperial College physicist, said that light-shielding covers would have to be customized to match the properties of each and every object they hide. It would be still more difficult to devise shields that could cope with all wavelengths of the visible spectrum-from red to violet light-and not just a single color. Types of invisibility shielding previously proposed by scientists depend on advanced camouflage systems, rather than objects being made to look undetectably tiny. Such systems involve light sensors that create a mirror image of the background scene on the concealed object. -- ----------------- 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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Federal Judge Orders 'Enemy Combatant' Jose Padilla Charged Or Released
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Mar '05

01 Mar '05

<http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=401&u=/wews/20050228/lo_wyff/2605…> Yahoo! Federal Judge Orders 'Enemy Combatant' Jose Padilla Charged Or Released Mon Feb 28, 6:08 PM ET A federal judge in Spartanburg has ordered that an American citizen held as an enemy combatant in a Navy brig in Charleston should be released. U.S. District Judge Henry F. Floyd ruled Monday that the president of the United States does not have the authority to order Jose Padilla to be held. "If the law in its current state is found by the president to be insufficient to protect this country from terrorist plots, such as the one alleged here, then the president should prevail upon Congress to remedy the problem," he wrote. In the ruling, Floyd said that three court cases that the government used to make its claim did not sufficiently apply to Padilla's case. Floyd wrote that, in essence, "the detention of a United States citizen by the military is disallowed without explicit Congressional authorization." Floyd wrote that because the government had not provided any proof that the president has the power to hold Padilla, he must reject the government's claim of authority. "To do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this countrys constitutional tradition, but it would also be a betrayal of this nations commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties," he wrote. "For the court to find for [the U.S. government] would also be to engage in judicial activism. This court sits to interpret the law as it is and not as the court might wish it to be. Pursuant to its interpretation, the court finds that the President has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold [Padilla] as an enemy combatant," Floyd wrote. As a result, Floyd ordered that Padilla be charged with a crime or released within 45 days. The government is expected to appeal the decision. -- ----------------- 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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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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