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Are new passports [an] identity-theft risk?
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

<http://worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41030> WorldNetDaily Thursday, October 21, 2004 YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE Are new passports identity-theft risk? Privacy advocates warn data chips can be 'seen' by anyone with reader Posted: October 21, 2004 5:00 p.m. Eastern While the U.S. State Department prepares to switch over to passports that include embedded data chips, privacy experts worry the new technology will open Americans to identity theft and fraud. New passports will be fitted with chips using RFID, or radio frequency identification, technology. Reader devices at borders and customs checkpoints will be able to read the information stored on the chip, including the person's name, address and digital photo. Kelly Shannon is a spokesperson for the State Department. She told Wired News: "The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure. It's yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally." RFID technology has been used for tracking everything from store inventory to family members visiting an amusement park. It is also used in the Digital Angel human implant that recently was approved by the FDA for storing medical information. Wired reports civil libertarians and some technologists say the passport chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person's biographical information and photo from several feet away. "Even if they wanted to store this info in a chip, why have a chip that can be read remotely?" Barry Steinhardt, who directs the American Civil Liberty Union's Technology and Liberty program, asked Wired. "Why not require the passport be brought in contact with a reader so that the passport holder would know it had been captured? Americans in the know will be wrapping their passports in aluminum foil." Last week, the government contracted with four companies to develop the chips and readers for the program. The report stated diplomats and State Department employees will be issued the new passports as early as January, while others applying for new passports will receive the new version starting in the spring. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien told Wired RFID chips in passports are a "privacy horror" and would be even if the data were encrypted, which it isn't. "If 180 countries have access to the technology for reading this thing, whether or not it is encrypted, from a security standpoint, that is a very leaky system," Tien said. "Strictly from a technology standpoint, any reader system, even with security, that was so widely deployed and accessible to so many people worldwide will be subject to some very interesting compromises." An engineer and RFID expert with Intel claims there is little danger of unauthorized people reading the new passports. Roy Want told the newssite: "It is actually quite hard to read RFID at a distance," saying a person's keys, bag and body interfere with the radio waves. -- ----------------- 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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Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on the Election
by Bill Stewart 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

A lot of columnists are trying to look fair and balanced in their election coverage, expressing their biases opinions while claiming to be reasonable; I'm most recently mad at Safire for this. So it's nice to be able to recommend a column by someone who's making no pretense of balance, the good Doctor himself: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6562575?rnd=1098436549411&h… ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart(a)pobox.com

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echelon hardware
by Eugen Leitl 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2430 15 October 2004 Want to know the hardware behind Echelon? Uncle Sam using Texas' SAM. By Chris Mellor, Techworld You've probably heard about Echelon, the vast listening system run by the US, UK, Canada and Australia that scans the world's voice traffic looking for key words and phrases. Aside from using the system for industrial espionage and bypassing international and national laws to listen in on people, it is also used to listen out for people like Osama bin Laden and assorted terrorists in the hope of preventing attacks. All this is out in the relative open thanks to investigative journalists and a European Commission report into the system, concerned and annoyed that the Brits and Yanks has got there first. It works like this: The calls are recorded by geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations, such as the UK's Menworth Hill, which combine satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in real time. But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work? Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose. TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information. A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed. A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second. Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US goverment with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it. Since then it has expanded into a general listening facility, an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the world's telephone conversations. Information about it's existence has been reluctantly revealed, prompted by scandals such as the recordings of Princess Diana's telephone calls by the NSA. Recorded signals are fed into the TMS SAM systems where the DSPs filter out the noise to produce much clearer signals that software can work on to detect individual voices, perform voice recognition, and listen out for keywords, such as, for example, "Semtex". Decryption of encrypted calls is also a likely activity. Hutsell says the SAM systems, "are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta. It's an intelligence community application involving data from various sources. This is loaded into RAM and then real-time analysis is carried out on it. Step one is to filter out the noise and our DSP chips are used for that. Then they look into patterns using other tools - images or voice. It's very high-speed." TMS has supplied its RAMsan high-speed SSD technology to several US government agencies. Hutsell said, "We have recently sold another terabyte system to a federal agency. It's installed in the DC [District of Columbia] area via our partner Vion. There's another in a government data centre with Oracle indices that needed to be accelerated." TMS has had 40 percent year on year growth for three years. It has no debt and is privately-owned. Hutsell said: "This year is the healthiest year ever." Half the company's revenue comes from the government sector. Fast, very fast, database and recorded signal access is the name of this game. The US government wants to know what you and I are talking about. Spy in the sky satellites listen in to what we say and look at what we do. Then solid state disk keeps the real time analysis of these calls and images operating at full speed. The world's fastest storage system is used in the world's most sophisticated spying operation. Impressive and scary at the same time. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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WiMax Operator's Manual: Building 802.16 Wireless (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
by Eugen Leitl 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

----- Forwarded message from brian-slashdotnews(a)hyperreal.org -----

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Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
by Tyler Durden 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

Uh...wha? I said... > > The US was in Vietnam trying to fight their way up. So it > > would have been pretty evident to anyone watching that the US > > was trying to undermine the PRC. > And you said... >You live in a world of delusion. Your dates are all wrong, >your events are all fiction. So there was no Vietnam war? The US was not involved? It didn't occur in the 60s? Are you saying that the cultural revolution didn't begin in approximately 1966? That the Sino-Soviet split didn't occur in the late 1950s? >The US never followed an aggressive policy towards the PRC. Like I said: Uh...wha? Let's put it this way: Mao and China clearly interpreted US involvement around China (ie, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc...) as having a lot to do with containing the 'communist meanace' and restoring the Chiang regime to power (we had funded Chiang and the incredibly corrupt Soongs with billions of $ during the 30s and 40s). Whether you agree with this actually constituting "aggression" or not is almost irrelevant. Clearly, our involvement in all of those areas (along with the rhetoric along with MacArthur's words which got him fired) could easily be interpreted as such. But let's sidestep this and point out that it's the US that did this then and is doing this in the middle east. Almost no other countires can be said to be involved in a meaningful way. So is it your belief that the US is somehow more moral/courageous/godfearing than all the other countries in the world? Why is it always us (and not other countries) meddling in foreign affairs? Doesn't that strike you as odd? Is it merely a coincidence that we continue to be the focus of lots of international hostility? -TD _________________________________________________________________ Get ready for school! Find articles, homework help and more in the Back to School Guide! http://special.msn.com/network/04backtoschool.armx

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Do you know anyone looking for a Cryptography position?
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

I guess the bubble's over officially, now... :-). Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text

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Re: e-gold
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:17 AM -0400 10/21/04, Somebody wrote: >"R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> writes: >> So, what kind of problems are you having? > >I can't seem to figure out how one deposits or removes gold from >e-gold. They got out of the business of exchanging other forms of money into e-gold a long time ago. Think of them more as an on-line book-entry central securities depository, ala DTC <http://www.dtc.org/dtcpublic/html/>, CREST <http://www.crestco.co.uk> (now apparently part of Euroclear <http://euroclear.com>), etc. The minute they got out of the business and spun their own exchange department off into its own firm, literally tens of companies, if not hundreds since, popped up and started competing. As far as E-Gold was concerned, it was a hell of a lot better than taking in people's Kruggerands etc., and turning it into debits and credits into a database, and the size of their reserves went up accordingly. Imagine being an individual investor in the US, going to DTC and trying to figure out what they do or whether you can do business with them. Same problem with E-Gold, anymore. Actually, CREST *does*, last time I looked at them, have retail accounts, so maybe they're more applicable than the strictly-institutional DTC. The companies that do the in/out exchange (for a fee) are now called "exchange providers". There are lots of them, and they range from professional, like IceGold <http://www.icegold.com>, who I talked about, to, well, anyone who'll take your check in the mail, wait for it to clear, and then click you some gold to your e-gold account. The big ones do more different kinds of money from wires to credit cards etc., but not PayPal, because it's against the PayPal user agreement to buy and sell securities. PayPal freezes exchange provider accounts whenever they show up. In the meantime, expect to wait for the money you send them to completely and irrevocably clear before you see an increase in the account at E-Gold. > They post no information on that at all, and when I've asked >them, they've more or less evaded the question. An operation like >this, if it was on the up and up, would have to be taking bailments >and permitting removals of gold on a frequent basis, but they're >apparently set up to do nothing of the kind. See above. They're taking large wholesale in/out orders only, mostly from the aforementioned exchange providers, who then click you retail amounts of E-Gold for a fee, sometimes less than E-Gold would on a hypothetical retail rate, sometimes less, depending on how they gold's moving that day. >Their online examiner shows exactly the same amount of gold in the >system over a very extended period of time -- call it $25M worth -- >and shows perhaps $1.5M a day in transactions. That transaction >level is surprisingly high given that no gold comes into or out of >the >system at all so far as I can tell. See above. The transaction level is surprisingly high given the transaction costs as well, but remember what I said about storing gold, etc., and, of course, the fact that they're doing book-entry transactions and their attendant, non-repudiation, auditing, etc., costs. >Overall, I'm wondering a lot about whether there is funny business >of some sort going on -- but I can't tell what the nature of the >funny >business might be. I don't think so. If you count up all the fees, they're making enough money on the throughput, storage, in/out exchange fees, and so on. Since they're only handling the depository management function anymore, they don't have nearly as much overhead as you would think. The larger and better firms in this business, like E-Gold and Goldmoney, have sufficiently complicated arrangements with their storage firms, governments where they're domiciled, and so on, that there is probably sufficient oversight for all this. They are doing book-entry trades, remember. They have to call the cops for enforcement themselves if someone rips *them* off somewhere. E-Gold and Goldmoney's officers are US citizens residing and working, for the most part, on US soil. Everyone knows who they are and where they are. We're a long way from TCMay's Cryptopia here, um, Toto. Obviously, caveat emptor, and all that. There's always lots of risk in any kind of financial intermediary business, up to, and including the risk that the entrepreneurs dodging off with the reserve assets, and all you have in terms of risk prediction -- in the absence of financial controls -- is what David Hume called "constant conjunction": they are honest today, were honest yesterday, and every other day so far, so we can, in theory, expect them to be honest tomorrow. As for the lack of growth of the reserve pool, after bursting internet bubbles, terrorism attacks, and wars on same, the bloom is certainly off the rose. We're way past the whizzy, "holy cow, we can do *gold* transactions, on the *internet*, isn't that *kewl*" stage, and the business is now cruising along on the people who actually find it useful, and/or profitable, to do business that way, and less on enthusiasts, privacy, theological, political, financial, or otherwise. Jesus didn't come, or he wasn't pissed, or the date didn't quake, or the state didn't collapse, or whatever. It's just a business now. For a while there were lots of scamsters getting paid in digital gold currencies, exploiting the "gee-whiz" factor for the rubes, but that seems to have died down a bit, between the efforts of various federales, the just-plain mundane ubiquity of the internet increasing the pervasivity of net.clues, and, I expect, the judicious expulsion from the system by an operator or two. Being more financial gold-bugs than um, apocalyptic eschatologists (libertarian, anacharcapitalist, or otherwise -- okay, a gold-bug, by definition, is a *financial* apocalyptic eschatologist, sue me :-)) Goldmoney is particular about the know-your-customer stuff, and about kicking potential scamsters off their system than e-gold is, but e-gold isn't about to lose their shirts by associating themselves with scamsters either, modulo an early investment in them by a cryptofundamentalist disaster-maven who ended up by the feds and/or in their custody, and, IIRC, much of whose investment in E-Gold has since been returned to the people who were originally scammed. Live and learn, and all that. Speaking of that, I think, in e-gold's case, at least, they have been more e-sheep than e-goat, certainly at the hands of various cypherpunks and fellow travellers, who saw them coming, proposed yet-another-crypto-currency, :-), managing to score some seriously nice temporary villa-digs in erst-Crypto-Paradise in the process, resulting in one now famous c-punk bailing out (persona-no-grata in hand on the ferry leaving Blowing Point) in the pure horror at the sheer complexity of the algorithm involved, and the rest literally suing each other off the island and into several other subsequent jurisdictions. Learning occurs, as I said before. So, sure, after more than a decade in business, E-Gold is, and has been, legitimate. Goldmoney's legitimate, too, though a little younger, and for the same reason. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't be careful, and, for the most part, you shouldn't be using *any* internet transaction method, including credit cards over SSL, unless you have an excellent business case for doing so. The cost of anything is the foregone alternative, and all that. Getting paid in E-Gold costs money for the seller and they buyer of the good or service traded for it, especially if your customer converts to E-Gold to pay you, and you immediately convert out of E-Gold to get actual dollars to buy stuff with. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQXgXRcPxH8jf3ohaEQK6hwCfaYTqUCd6E5updBR7XueAcM/RbOIAoJ0d 8jzb8WbGQnc2eKhfIWIn9eWQ =eQAI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- 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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Re: e-gold
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 5:32 PM -0400 10/20/04, Somebody wrote: >How much do you know about the e-gold crew? I've sent them a couple >of queries and I've gotten answers back that haven't been very >pleasing. The short story is that they're a Jesus-is-coming-and-boy-is-he-pissed pre-millennium gold transaction startup, and the millennium came and went sans datequake and/or rapture. Good news is they're good businessmen after all, they're making money, and they've honored their internet transactions for more than a dozen years. They even pre-date the commercial net by a few years. Bad news is when they ever do go sideways one of the partners is a tax-lawyer from, er, heck, (the money partner is an oncologist; they met in a bible-study class... not, um, the end of the world, Rockefeller was a bible-thumping baptist, remember...) and the russian-doll puzzle of domiciles subsidiaries and governance documents goes through about six countries including Nevis, Bermunda, etc., not to mention separate gold depository accounts around the world. The long story is, well, long. I trust 'em to do the gold transactions. It's not cheap, though. It's gold, it needs to be stored, and there are storage charges. You need a currency-exchange provider, to get money into and out of the system. The ones I like most are ice-gold <http://www.icegold.com>, in, of all places, Estonia (Latvia???). Jim Ray <jray(a)free-market.net>, a former cypherpunk, is a good guy, and e-gold's original internet evangelist, and has been with them for about 10 years. Another reputable gold-transaction outfit is Goldmoney <http://www.goldmoney.com>. They're just plain-old-fashioned gold-bugs from the old school. You know, a financial calamity around the corner but it's okay, because we're gonna get rich. :-). Seriously, James Turk, the founder there has been a gold bug since the heyday of the Oil Embargo. He used to work at Citibank in the far east, back in the day. And, instead of down in Florida somewhere as it is for E-Gold, GoldMoney's office is in midtown, even if the gold's at ViaMAT in London and the domicile's the Channel Islands, Jersey, I think. Turk's been in the gold bug business so long that he *patented* the whole idea of electronic gold transactions way back when, submarined it until e-gold was hauling it down, and is now collecting royalties. Of course, you know me. I'm not much into the whole commodities-as-money thing, I'd rather do bearer forms of depository-held collateral, like, say, dollars -- or the S&P. :-). So, what kind of problems are you having? Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQXf+IcPxH8jf3ohaEQLjQgCeKov2foDmbcM85OazHKhLtryDO6oAn38c 5hZceFFv23q5HYFFIOdciEUK =+GW1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- 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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Printers betray document secrets
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/3753886.stm> The BBC | Entertainment | Have Your Say | In Pictures | Week at a Glance Monday, 18 October, 2004, 16:58 GMT 17:58 UK Printers betray document secrets That staple of crime novels - solving a case by identifying the typewriter used to write a ransom note - is being updated for the modern day. US scientists have discovered that every desktop printer has a signature style that it invisibly leaves on all the documents it produces. They have now found a way to use this to identify individual laser printers. The work will help track down printers used to make bogus bank notes, fake passports and other important papers. Spot colour Before now it was thought that the differences between cheap, mass-produced desktop printers were not significant enough to make individual identification possible. But a team from Purdue University in Indiana led by Professor Edward Delp has developed techniques that make it possible to trace which printer was used to produce which document. In 11 out of 12 tests, the team's methods identified which model of desktop laser printer was used to print particular documents. "We also believe that we will be able to identify not only which model of printer was used but specifically which printer was used," Professor Delp said. The image processing software developed by Professor Delp's team looks for the "intrinsic signatures" that each printer produces. Professor Jan Allebach, who helped develop the ID techniques, said the production methods demanded by competition in the desktop printer market meant there was quite a lot of variation in the way different machines printed pages. "For a company to make printers all behave exactly the same way would require tightening the manufacturing tolerances to the point where each printer would be too expensive for consumers," he said. The differences emerge in the way that a laser printer lays down ink on the paper and which can be spotted with the Purdue system. Inkjet is next Typically, different printers lay down ink in distinct bands that can be spotted by image processing software. "We extract mathematical features, or measurements, from printed letters, then we use image analysis and pattern-recognition techniques to identify the printer," said Professor Delp. Desktop printers coupled with scanners have become favourites with forgers as they produce high-quality copies of banknotes and personal documents that can fool a casual glance. The team is now working to extend its techiques to cover inkjet printers. The team is also working on ways to manipulate printers so they lay down ink with more easily identifiable signatures. The researchers will present their detailed findings at the International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies in early November. -- ----------------- 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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Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
by Tyler Durden 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

>As I said, an Islamic regime is objectionable if it tolerates >terror against non islamic minorities, thus creating, perhaps >unintentionally, an environment that facilitates terror against >external infidels - that is to say, terror against me and >people like me. You say a lot of wacky stuff, so it suprises me that I find this pragraph to actually make some sense. > > In this context a very strong case can be made that the US > > caused the Khmer Rouge to come to power, precisely by > > performing in a way similar to what you espouse. > >That "case" is a nutty rationalization put forward by the >former fans of the Khmer Rouge to rationalize their bad >conduct. No. You've got to do more reading. Sihoanouk was in power and loosely held a coalition together. In part because he believed it and in part because it was necessary to hold this coalition together, Sihoanouk did not spout particularly pro-American rhetoric. As a result, the US/CIA backed Lon Nol to overthrow Sihoanouk. Lon Nol could by no means hold things together , so in swept the Khmer Rouge, backed by Mao and the Chicoms. Let's remember some facts here: The US backed the ferociously corrupt Chiang regime, even helping them sack China's treasuries. The US fought China in Korea and was now occupying it. MacArthur threatened to make China a nuclear "Parking Lot". The US was in Vietnam trying to fight their way up. So it would have been pretty evident to anyone watching that the US was trying to undermine the PRC. In fact, this was also a main motivation for the Cultural Revolution: Mao wanted to move heavy industry out into the countryside, away from easy bomb-ability by the Americans. (Of course, that idea was actually used by Mao for consolidating his politcal power which was always with the peasants, but that's besides the point). Mao did the reasonable thing and fought us (and won) in all 3 theaters. I'll agree with you pretty quickly if you say Mao was a fairly Stalinist butcher, but in any event he made use of the Khmer Rouge to push a US-backed puppet out of the peninsula. Note that only after Mao kicked our asses repeatedly did Nixon and Kissinger decide to make friends with Mao and the PRC (which was the smart thing to do all along after the Sino-Soviet split). What if the US had not followed such an aggressive policy towards the PRC? Chinese history gives us a clear indication: They would never have backed the Khmer Rouge. (Sihoanouk regularly traveled to China before and after that time, BTW, and was moderately friendly with Jong Nan Hai.) In addition, the notion of having to hide Chinese industry from the Americans could never have been used as a credible reason for lauching the Cultural Revolution. In the end, our policies in SE Asia likely caused millions to be killed, and in the end were self-defeating. A complete fiasco. And the same thing is happening in the Middle East. So even if one agrees that your goals are 'admirable' (and I question that), your methods would also be a complete, unmitigated disaster. -TD _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

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