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Papers Show Confusion as Government Watch List Grew Quickly
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/09nofly.html?oref=login&pagewant…> The New York Times October 9, 2004 Papers Show Confusion as Government Watch List Grew Quickly By ERIC LICHTBLAU ASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The government's list of banned airline passengers has grown from just 16 names on Sept. 11, 2001, to thousands of people today amid signs of internal confusion and dissension over how the list is implemented, newly disclosed government documents and interviews showed Friday. A transportation security official acknowledged in one internal memorandum that the standards used to ban passengers because of terrorism concerns were "necessarily subjective," with "no hard and fast rules." More than 300 pages of internal documents, turned over by the Justice Department on Friday as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, provide a rare glimpse inside the workings of the government's so-called no-fly list. Federal officials have maintained tight secrecy over the list, saying little publicly about how it is developed, how many people are on it or how it is put into practice, even as prominent people like Senator Edward M. Kennedy have been mistakenly blocked from boarding planes. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal government last year under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of two San Francisco women who said they suspected their vocal antiwar protests led to their being banned from flying. The Justice Department fought the release of information on the no-fly list on national security grounds, leading a federal judge in San Francisco to admonish government lawyers for making "frivolous claims" to justify the unusual secrecy. He ordered the government to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, prompting the Justice Department to turn over the internal documents to the A.C.L.U. on Friday. Federal officials said they could not discuss the documents Friday because of the pending lawsuit. In general, said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, "we have taken numerous steps to refine the no-fly system, including better definition of the criteria for the watch list and putting in place an effective redress system that allows passengers who are mistakenly put on the list to be removed." But Thomas R. Burke, a lawyer representing the A.C.L.U., said the documents raised "some very serious concerns about the criteria the government is using in developing the no-fly list and the internal miscommunication in implementing it." In an internal e-mail message in May 2002, for instance, an F.B.I. supervisor, whose name was deleted, complained that the Transportation Security Administration had made the F.B.I. responsible for pursuing possible matches from the list but had failed to inform the bureau about changes in no-fly security directives. "Despite my best efforts, the T.S.A. just motors along, and I and the agents are being whipped around the flagpole trying to do the right thing," the official wrote. In another internal message in October 2002, an F.B.I. official in St. Louis cited difficulties in getting suspects put on the no-fly list and in coordinating different watch lists. The various watch lists "are not comprehensive and not centralized," said the official, whose name was also deleted. Some people "appear on one list but not the others. Some of the lists are old and not current. We are really confused." Federal officials have been developing a master terrorist watch list to consolidate the no-fly list and nine others kept by different agencies. But a report last week by Clark K. Ervin, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, found serious coordination problems in that effort. The documents released Friday show that the government's no-fly list as of Sept. 11, 2001, had only 16 names on it - fewer than the number of terrorists who hijacked the four airliners that day. Several investigations have criticized the government's failure to put two of the hijackers on watch lists even after their terrorist ties became known. The no-fly list grew drastically after the attacks, and one document in Friday's material said the number of banned passengers ballooned to nearly 600 within about two months. Another 365 names were put on a secondary list that allows them to board a plane after getting closer scrutiny. The two lists had grown to about 1,000 names by December 2002, one document showed. The documents do not give a current total, but a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday the names on the no-fly and secondary flight lists total about 10,000, with the no-fly list accounting for "a few thousand." Another government official corroborated that account. Copyrigh -- ----------------- 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: RFID Driver's licenses for VA
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

At 10:57 PM 10/8/04 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >>At 04:35 PM 10/7/2004, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >>A defense is a metal board in a wallet, close to the RFID chip's antenna. >>It is readable when the licence is taken out of the wallet. When inside, >>the antenna is quite effectively shielded. > >Tinfoil Wallets, anybody? :-) When you get your driver's license, you should run a magnet over it to keep iron oxides from staining your wallet. And apparently you should now microwave it to clean those DMV-employee pathogens from it. Then it will be safe to carry, and you can see for yourself what it tells everyone else ---part of the definition of safety.

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RFID Driver's licenses for VA
by Sunder 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

So the cops and RFID h4x0rZ can know your true name from a distance. and since RFID tags, are what, $0.05 each, the terrorists and ID counterfitters will be able to make fake ones too... Whee! http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,65243,00.html RFID Driver's Licenses Debated By Mark Baard Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65243,00.html 09:50 AM Oct. 06, 2004 PT Some federal and state government officials want to make state driver's licenses harder to counterfeit or steal, by adding computer chips that emit a radio signal bearing a license holder's unique, personal information. In Virginia, where several of the 9/11 hijackers obtained driver's licenses, state legislators Wednesday will hear testimony about how radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags may prevent identity fraud and help thwart terrorists using falsified documents to move about the country. Privacy advocates will argue that the radio tags will also make it easy for the government to spy on its citizens and exacerbate identity theft, one of the problems the technology is meant to relieve. <SNIP> Because information on RFID tags can be picked up from many feet away, <SNIP> ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ <--*-->:and our people, and neither do we." -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + : War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Once Again, America First
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/books/review/10FOERL.html?8bu=&pagewanted…> The New York Times October 10, 2004 ESSAY Once Again, America First By FRANKLIN FOER N May 4, American conservatism took an unexpected turn. That morning, George Will -- the movement's most influential columnist, one of its icons -- slapped George W. Bush with a tart reprimand. For a year, Will had obliquely hinted of his grave misgivings about the Iraq war and the push to democratize the Middle East. But with the insurgency escalating, he now felt obliged to state his frustration bluntly. ''This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts,'' he wrote. From the war's start, a few stray conservatives have criticized it. The columnist Patrick J. Buchanan vociferously opposed Bush's campaign against Saddam Hussein, just as he had opposed the one waged by Bush's father. Other opponents resided in heterodox corners of the movement like the libertarian Cato Institute and the traditionalist Chronicles magazine. But Will's migration toward the antiwar camp represented a significant shift: full-fledged members of the conservative establishment were now expressing doubts about the prospects for American success in Iraq. Indeed, Will has been joined by a small legion, from the powerful Representative Henry Hyde to the influential lobbyist Stephen Moore. ''I supported the war and now I feel foolish,'' the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson confessed to The New York Times. While this backlash against the war may seem unexpected -- the Bush presidency has inspired fierce loyalty from conservatives -- it is hardly surprising if one looks at the movement's past. The right's skepticism of the state has long reverberated within its foreign policy. Conservatives have raised questions about the ability of the American government to spread democracy abroad, just as they have doubted its ability to deliver social welfare at home. They have long feared that wartime is like a strong fertilizer heaped on government, causing it to sprout new departments and programs that never manage to disappear once peace resumes. For most of the cold war, conservatism sublimated these doubts to pursue its overriding objective of eliminating global Communism. But with the Iraq war hitting a rough patch, this anti-interventionist tradition is suddenly poised for revival. The conservative movement has its own creation myth, told in books like William A. Rusher's ''Rise of the Right.'' Before the early 1950's, these histories usually begin, there was no such thing as a conservative. Sure, you could find scattered libertarians and traditionalists camped in obscure little magazines. But they hardly constituted a movement, and they certainly didn't have a coherent ideology. In the early 50's, however, the tide began to turn. Whittaker Chambers unleashed his masterwork, ''Witness,'' in 1952, and Russell Kirk published ''The Conservative Mind'' a year later. Two years after that, National Review was founded to bottle this new energy and serve as a vanguard for a coalescing movement. This version of events almost makes it seem as if the right mystically appeared from nowhere. It's easy to understand why conservatives would want their movement's biography to exclude its earlier history. Before World War II, isolationism had been a major tendency, perhaps the major tendency, on the right. And by the 50's, isolationism had been badly (often unfairly) stigmatized. One of conservatism's early and now largely forgotten folk heroes was Albert Jay Nock, the flamboyant author of ''Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,'' who wore a cape and celebrated Belgium as his ideal society. In 1933, Nock wrote about ''the Remnant,'' borrowing the term from Matthew Arnold and the Book of Isaiah. By the Remnant he meant an enlightened elite that rejected the phoniness of mass society. A few historians have used Remnant as a synonym for the pre-National Review right -- a group that included the economic journalists Garet Garrett and Frank Chodorov, Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter) and, to an extent, H. L. Mencken. Nock's allusion to Isaiah works nicely for these polemicists, who issued thunderous, Old Testament-like warnings about American decline. Finding themselves at the forefront of opposition to World War II, they turned to the America First movement. Their hatred for war followed from their radical individualism. As the essayist Randolph Bourne (not a conservative) famously put it about World War I, ''War is the health of the state.'' Since these writers disliked the state, they came to dislike war, too. While the greatest generation has become deeply etched into the national mythology, only a smattering of scholarly monographs, like Wayne S. Cole's ''Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945,'' have dwelt on the opposition to World War II. But the America First Committee achieved a significant following in the late 30's. At its pre-Pearl Harbor peak, it claimed approximately 800,000 members -- and not just angry farmers and protofascists. Its Yale Law School chapter included Gerald Ford and Potter Stewart, the future Supreme Court justice; John F. Kennedy sent the organization a $100 check. Even though the antiwar movement drew support from across the political spectrum, it included many of the intellectuals and activists who would help revitalize the conservative movement in the 50's. Russell Kirk supported the Socialist Norman Thomas because of his antiwar stand. Henry Regnery, the seminal conservative publisher (whose house, now run by his son, Alfred, has had a recent success with ''Unfit for Command''), broke into the business with pro-German tracts critical of the Nuremberg trials. Willmoore Kendall, William F. Buckley's intellectual mentor at Yale and the inspiration for Saul Bellow's short story ''Mosby's Memoirs,'' began on the far left. But when his comrades renounced their neutrality to side with the Allies, a disillusioned Kendall took a major leap in his journey rightward. As a precocious child, Buckley followed his father's anti-interventionist politics and named his first sailboat Sweet Isolation. At times, these conservatives foreshadowed the arguments made by 60's radicals opposing American intervention in Vietnam. In a wartime speech, the Ohio senator Robert A. Taft intoned, ''Political power over other nations, however benevolent its purposes, leads inevitably to imperialism.'' So how did these isolationists turn into the cold war's most fervent hawks? The most persuasive explanation is also the most obvious: Communism. National Review -- filled with Catholics and former leftists -- viewed the Soviet Union as such an overwhelming threat that it willingly set aside its fear that the cold war would create a Leviathan federal government. In fact, anti-Communism's primary importance to the movement came to be enshrined in a doctrine called fusionism, formulated by the National Review writer Frank Meyer, an ex-Communist. The doctrine, which Meyer hashed out in his 1962 book, ''In Defense of Freedom,'' held that conservatism's competing wings, traditionalist and libertarian, should make ideological peace. Above all, they faced a common Red enemy. Even if they hadn't been so eager to combat Communism, conservatives would have had good political reasons to distance themselves from their earlier isolationism. After Pearl Harbor, public opinion swung heavily in support of the war. In the process, isolationism emerged as a synonym for disloyalty and anti-Semitism. At the height of the so-called Brown Scare, Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio and pronounced them ''Americans we can do without.'' Given the abuse suffered by isolationists during World War II, it may seem surprising that they often became the most fervent boosters of the fierce cold warrior Joseph McCarthy. But in fact, McCarthy helped ease the isolationists into their new hawkish identity. In his history of the postwar era, ''Troubled Journey,'' Fred Siegel argues that McCarthy served as the isolationists' ''tribune of revenge.'' He enabled them to retaliate against the internationalist liberals who had sent our boys to war, and to strike back at the very men who had tarred them as traitors during the struggle against fascism. As George H. Nash put it in his classic book, ''The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,'' Joseph McCarthy's crusade had drawn many of the embattled conservatives together in ''a bruising common struggle.'' But it hadn't drawn all of them together. Conservatism emerged out of the McCarthyite moment with a new enemy: that small band of conservatives who continued clinging to isolationism. National Review, for one, didn't have any place for them in its pages. According to Buckley's biographer John B. Judis, with the founding of the magazine, and its masthead brimming with stalwart interventionists like James Burnham, Buckley ''was turning his back on much of the isolationist and anti-Semitic Old Right that had applauded his earlier books and that his father had been politically close to.'' And he did more than turn his back. He waged war against them. After the John Birch Society announced its opposition to the Vietnam War in 1965, National Review spent 14 pages denouncing the group and its conspiracy theories. (The Birchers considered Communist infiltration of the American government the threat that required attention.) Upon the death of the libertarian isolationist Murray Rothbard in 1995, Buckley quipped, ''We extend condolences to his family, but not to the movement he inspired.'' The historian Jonathan M. Schoenwald has documented many of these struggles between National Review and its fellow conservatives in his book, ''A Time for Choosing.'' Without a home in the conservative movement, the isolationists had no choice but to search for allies in unlikely quarters. During the late 60's, they often teamed up with the New Left, becoming stalwarts of the antiwar movement. Karl Hess, a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign and the author of the memoir-cum-political tract ''Dear America,'' argued, ''Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.'' In 1969, Hess joined with a libertarian antiwar faction that quit the Young Americans for Freedom (Y.A.F.), the campus conservative group. And a few on the New Left returned the favor, heartily embracing the apostates. In 1975, the historian Ronald Radosh (then a man of the left) published ''Prophets on the Right,'' a book championing the prescience of Robert A. Taft and other ''conservative critics of American globalism.'' This long history of residing on the fringe ended suddenly with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 1992, Buchanan ran a surprisingly strong campaign in the Republican presidential primaries on an explicitly ''anti-imperialist'' platform -- a platform that he further developed in his revisionist history, ''A Republic, Not an Empire.'' ''When we hear phrases like 'New World Order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers,'' he wrote in one of his newspaper columns. Even if his party ultimately rejected him, it co-opted much of his program, and in 1995, a year after Republicans ascended to the majority in the House of Representatives, 190 of them voted to deny funds for American troops stationed in Bosnia. By the end of the decade, condemnations of ''foreign policy as social work'' and ''nation building'' had become standard in conservative boilerplate. Buchananite foreign policy has an intellectual wing, paleoconservatism. Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them. Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals -- or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism. Clustered around journals like Chronicles and Southern Partisan, the paleocon ranks included the syndicated columnist Sam Francis and the political theorist Paul Gottfried. Their writings have been anthologized in ''The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right,'' edited by Joseph Scotchie. The paleocons explicitly hark back to Garrett, Nock and the Remnant, what they lovingly call the ''Old Right.'' Like their mentor, Russell Kirk, the paleocons venerate traditional society, celebrating hierarchy, patriarchy and even the virtues of the antebellum South. They bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism. A foreign policy naturally follows from these domestic views. The dismal state of American civilization so depresses them that they see no point in exporting its values abroad. Kirk announced in a 1990 lecture to the Heritage Foundation that America's contribution to the world will be ''cheapness -- the cheapest music, the cheapest comic books and the cheapest morality that can be provided.'' Counterattacking, the neocons often accused the paleocons of anti-Semitism. David Frum, for instance, built this case in his 1994 book, ''Dead Right.'' Indeed, this is a charge that has dogged isolationists -- from Nock to Charles Lindbergh (who is elected president in Philip Roth's new counterfactual novel, ''The Plot Against America'') to Buchanan. With their pleas for ''America first'' and their rejection of cosmopolitan foreign policy, they have occasionally vilified the oldest symbol of cosmopolitanism -- the Jew. During the gulf war debate, Buchanan spoke of the Israel defense ministry's ''American amen corner.'' Even the best thinkers in this tradition haven't been immune from repeating canards about Jewish dual loyalties. In 1988, Kirk accused the neocons of mistaking ''Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.'' George W. Bush entered office implicitly promising agnosticism in the long-running debate between neocons and paleocons. On the 2000 campaign trail, he promised a ''distinctly American internationalism'' that would provide ''idealism, without illusions; confidence, without conceit; realism, in the service of American ideals.'' Of course, after 9/11, Bush dispensed with this doctrinal neutrality. And in adopting a neocon foreign policy, he rallied most conservatives behind his ambitious agenda, a dramatic turnabout in opinion from the 90's. Will this consensus hold? Already, many conservative writers seem primed to abandon it. Even when they haven't gone as far as Will or Carlson in their criticisms of the war, they have flashed their discomfort with Bush's goal of planting democracy in Iraq. National Review has called this policy ''largely, if not entirely, a Wilsonian mistake.'' With these signs of restlessness, it's easy to imagine that a Bush loss in November, coupled with further failures in Iraq, could trigger a large-scale revolt against neoconservative foreign policy within the Republican Party. A Bush victory, on the other hand, will be interpreted by many Republicans as a vindication of the current course, and that could spur a revolt too. If the party tilts farther toward an activist foreign policy, antiwar conservatives might begin searching for a new political home. In the meantime, the publishing industry may be providing a test of the Bush consensus: Pat Buchanan's new book, ''Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency,'' has already climbed onto the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps the movement's current state of mind is best reflected in its godfather, William F. Buckley. In June, he relinquished control of National Review. When asked about Iraq by The New York Times, he confessed: ''With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extraterritorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.'' It is noteworthy that Buckley's departure from the right's flagship journal should be accompanied by such ambivalence and profound questions about the movement's first principles. Conservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley's steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts. Franklin Foer, a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing editor for New York magazine, is the author of ''How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.'' -- ----------------- 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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Implant replaces ID cards for access to restricted areas.
by Nomen Nescio 09 Oct '04

09 Oct '04

Mexican Attorney General, Staff Get Chip Implants Implant replaces ID cards for access to restricted areas. The Attorney General of Mexico, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, recently announced at the opening of Mexico's National Information Center that he and some of his staff had been implanted with VeriChips to replace their ID tags for access to restricted areas, and to access the country's crime database. http://www.govtech.net/magazine/channel_story.php?channel=24&id=90885

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Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money)
by R. A. Hettinga 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

Okay. So I'm coming to the conclusion that book-entry settlement, with its absolute requirement for both "identity" and float between transactions, is becoming more and more *un*-safe to use as internet ubiquity increases. Anyone want to pick up the other side of this and tell me why not? No bugbears or horsemen need apply... Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6175738/print/1/displaymode/1098/> MSNBC.com Fake companies, real money Elaborate con wrings cash out of stolen credit cards By Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent MSNBC Updated: 7:15 p.m. ET Oct. 7, 2004 T-Data, a small New-York based software company, doesn't take credit cards -- never has in its 20-year history. But a few weeks ago, owner Jeff Duhl found himself looking over $15,000 worth of credit card charges seemingly accepted by his store. A quick investigation revealed most of the charges had been made using stolen credit cards. Slowly, he caught on: Someone had stolen a batch of credit card accounts, then stolen his company's name, set up an imposter version of T-Data, and rung up thousands of dollars worth of fake purchases. The "profits" were then desposited into checking accounts controlled by the imposters. "It is ingenious," said Dan Clements, who operates merchant advocacy site CardCops.com. Duhl wasn't the only victim of this new brand of corporate identity theft: At least 50 other firms apparently also had their identities stolen in the scheme. For credit card thieves doing their best to wring money out of a stash of stolen accounts, it seems like the perfect scam. How to profit from stolen credit cards While millions of credit card account numbers are stolen every year -- 60 million last year, and perhaps 120 million this year, according to one estimate -- turning them into cash can be tricky. Merchandise ordered with the card must be delivered somewhere, which is risky. Massive cash withdrawals are quickly spotted by credit card associations. The scheme Duhl's firm was caught up in is a heady, complex alternative: First, credit card thieves find a legitimate company unlikely to already be accepting credit card transactions. They then impersonate that company and set up accounts with merchant processing providers, whose role it is to transfer funds between credit card companies and merchants. Using stolen credit cards, the thieves then start sending small payments, usually $498 or $598 at a time, to the fraudulent merchant accounts. The credit card companies send funds to the processors and they in turn send the funds off to bank accounts controlled by the criminals. "They are flying under the radar on each transaction unless someone does a whole lot of work," Duhl said. A key part of the scheme: The thieves went to the trouble of registering the domain www.T-datasoftware.com, then set up a fake Web site. The site looked like a believable business to the merchant processing providers, who gave the thieves their accounts. Duhl's imposters were able to set up accounts at seven different payment processing firms. When Duhl investigated, he discovered some 50 other Web sites -- most mere imitations of one another -- all sitting on the same computer server. "They got away with $15,000 (in charges) at my company," Duhl said. "Multiply that by the number of sites, the number of companies, these folks could be getting away with millions of dollars," he said. It's not clear how much money the criminals really did get away with in the end. Many of the processing firms interviewed for this article claimed they caught on to the fraud after the transactions had cleared, but before the suspects had withdrawn the money from various checking accounts around the country. One did concede, however, that the scheme has real potential. 'Hundreds of thousands' over a weekend "If you don't catch it you could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars over a weekend," said David Steinberg, chief credit officer at Merchant E Solutions, one of the processing firms used by the thieves. Steinberg said his company had never suffered such a loss, but that the industry is bustling with fraud attempts. Some 5 to 10 percent of all applications his firm receives are turned away as potentially fraudulent, he said. Phyllis McNeill, a spokeswoman for Global Payments, another processing firm hit in the scam, confirmed a fake account had been set up in T-Data's name with her company. She said the account was actually set up through a reseller, and was shut down after eight transactions had been performed. Randy Lobban, director of risk management at North American Bancard, said the con artists were able to open up an account at his firm and pass eight charges through the system, but the funds were never released. "They never got any money," Lobban said. He alerted the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to the incident. Representatives at First Data and Wells Fargo also confirmed that fake accounts had been opened at their firms. An official at Beacon Bank in Minnesota, where one of the checking accounts used to receive the stolen funds had been set up, confirmed that he had discussed the situation with Duhl, but would not provide further comment. Corporate ID theft Whoever impersonated T-Data were clever enough to throw a few monkey wrenches in the path of anyone trying to detect them. When applying for the compulsory credit check needed to obtain the fake merchant account, for example, the thieves didn't use T-Data's tax ID number. Instead, they used the name and credit profile of a man unconnected with the company. Steven Wiencek, who lives on Long Island near the company, didn't even know his credit had been checked until contacted by MSNBC.com for this story. But the application, which listed Wiencek as company president, gives his Social Security number and driver's license number, suggesting the people behind this scheme have access to a wide swath of stolen credit cards and stolen identities. Another attempt at misdirection was foiled by an alert mail carrier. The application for the merchant account used a slight variation of Duhl's address -- apparently an attempt to ensure that mail to Duhl would be lost. But a knowledgeable local postal worker recognized the company name anyway, leading Duhl to discover the dupe. "Without that, I may not have found out about this for a long time," he said. The thieves were also persistent. Using one stolen credit card, they attempted to steal $2,500 through five separate faked merchant accounts, according to an affidavit of credit card fraud supplied by Duhl. Another corporate ID victim, John Bartholomew of Abcom Services, said he was lucky, because Duhl contacted him just as the scam began. "We are a management company in long-term health care. We would have no reason to use credit cards," he said. The firm had been in business for 21 years, and never accepted a single charge -- until the criminals stole his company's name, Bartholomew said. True to form, the criminals hijacked his brand name and set up merchants accounts using his company's name and a similar -- but slightly altered -- street address. The good news is, Bartholomew was able to warn the merchant account providers soon enough that only about $4,000 in charges were run through his company's name. The bad news is, some of the providers are still trying to make him pay the bill for the charges. He figures he's spent about $5,000 in legal fees trying to clean up the mess. Who are they working with? Rob Douglas, a consultant who operates PrivacyToday.com, blames the merchant account providers for never checking to see if the name on the account application actually represented a real person who worked at the firm. "You have to ask what the companies that set up the merchant accounts are doing?" he said. "Who has the responsibility to do due diligence that they are in fact working with who they think they are working with when they open an account?" But several of the merchant service providers pointed out the difficulty of stopping all fraudulent applications in a world where identities are so easily stolen. "For all of us, it's a tough business," Steinberg, of Merchant E Services, said. "It's a large, large problem." Duhl himself blames the banks where the money was to eventually wind up -- wondering how the thieves were able to set up accounts in the post-Patriot Act era. Apparently worried as much about security implications as his personal loss, Duhl contacted the FBI, the Secret Service and the U.S. Postal Inspector's Office. None of the agents he spoke to returned phone calls placed by MSNBC.com. He says he is frustrated that none of the agencies seem to have taken any interest in the incident -- particularly because at least one phone call was placed to Pakistan using the cell phone purchased in his company's name, and one of the bank accounts used to funnel money was established by suspects who presented Russian passports as identification, he says his own research revealed. "No one in the government seems like they are going to get interested in establishing a case," Duhl said. Douglas, who consults with firms trying to deal with the new trend of corporate identity theft, says there's little small companies like Duhl's can do to prevent this kind of incident. But one piece of practical advice he offers larger firms: search the Web once a week for evidence of impersonation. "As strange as it sounds, companies need to have one or more people assigned to surf the Web and see if there are mirror sites out there, just like we tell parents to surf for their child's name," he said. Bob Sullivan is the author of Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic -- ----------------- 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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Bush "wins"
by Sunder 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

http://www.boingboing.net/images/wbay.jpg http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/07/tv_station_reports_t.html Thursday, October 7, 2004 TV station reports that Bush has been elected President WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin is running an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. (Click image for enlargement." wbayAt this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting.... <SNIP> ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ <--*-->:and our people, and neither do we." -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + : War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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FBI Raids Indymedia
by Eric Cordian 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

According to http://www.indymedia.it/, the FBI seized Indymedia's servers from their host, Rackspace. > Thursday Oct 7 2004, at 6 PM, FBI issued an order to Rackspace in the US > (Indymedia's provider with offices in the US and London) to remove > physically two of our servers. The order was so short term that > Rackspace had to give away our hard drives in the UK. The servers > hosted numerous local IMCs, including italy.indymedia.org. If you find > a site is down: that might be the reason The reason why the hard drives > were taken are unknown. And at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html ----- The FBI has issued an order to hosting provider Rackspace in the US, ordering it to turn over two of the servers hosting the Independent Media Centre's websites in the UK, a statement from the group says. Rackspace has offices in the US and the UK. Independent Media Center, which is better known as Indymedia, was set up in 1999 to provide grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle. Rackspace complied with the FBI order, without first notifying Indymedia, and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This affects over 20 Indymedia sites worldwide, the group said. Indymedia said it did not know why the order had been issued as it was issued to Rackspace. Rackspace told some of the group's volunteers "they cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations which prevent them from updating the parties involved on what is happening. Indymedia said a second server was taken down at Rackspace. This provided streaming radio to several radio stations, BLAG (a Linux distribution), and a handful of miscellanous things. In August the US Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the New York city Independent Media Center before the Republican National COnvention by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the US and the Netherlands. Last month the US Federal Communications Commission shut down community radio stations around the US. Two weeks ago the FBI asked Indymedia to remove a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue. Indymedia said the list of local media collectives affected included Ambazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil, UK, part of the Germany site, and the global Indymedia Radio site. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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Re: Quantum cryptography gets "practical"
by Tyler Durden 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

Oops. You're right. It's been a while. Both photons are not utilized, but there's a Private channel and a public channel. As for MITM attacks, however, it seems I was right more or less by accident, and the collapsed ring configuration seen in many tightly packed metro areas (where potential customers of Quantum Key Exchange reside) does indeed make such attacks much easier. Come to think of it, an intruder that were able to gain access to a CO without having to notify the public (Patriot Act) should easily be able to insert themselves into a QKE client's network and then do whatever they want to (provided, of course, they have the means to crack the 'regular' encryption scheme used to encode the bits--NSA). Which means that, should a $75K/year NSA employee want to strike it really, really rich, they'd be able to procure advanced notice of any mergers/acquisition deals. -TD >From: Dave Howe <DaveHowe(a)gmx.co.uk> >To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >Subject: Re: Quantum cryptography gets "practical" >Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 11:26:32 +0100 > >Tyler Durden wrote: >>An interesting thing to think about is the fact that in dense metro areas, >>you pretty much have a "star" from the CO out to a premise (which is the >>cause of deployment of "Collapsed SONET Rings"). This means the other >>photon of your encrypted pair might easily pass through the same CO >>somewhere, which would make the system suscpetible to a sort of man in the >>middle attack. Or at least, your fancy quantum crypto system has defaulted >>back to standard crypto in terms of its un-hackability. > Unless I am mistaken as to the Quantum Key Exchange process, only one >photon is ever transmitted, with a known orientation; the system doesn't >use entanglement AFAIK. > I note also that, as QKE is *extremely* vulnerable to MitM attacks, a >hybrid system (which need only be tactically secure, not strategically >secure) can be used to "lock out" a MitM attacker for long enough that his >presence can be detected, without having to resort to a classical but >unblockable out of band data stream. I think this is part of the purpose >behind the following paper: >http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/229.pdf >which I am currently trying to understand and failing miserably at *sigh* > >>Moral of this story is, even if this thing is useful, you'll probably have >>a very hard time finding a place it can be deployed and still retain its >>"advantages". >I have yet to see an advantage to QKE that even mildly justifies the >limitations and cost over anything more than a trivial link (two buildings >within easy walking distance, sending high volumes of extremely sensitive >material between them) > > >> >>-TD >> >> >>>From: Dave Howe <DaveHowe(a)gmx.co.uk> >>>To: Email List: Cryptography <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com>, Email >>>List: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net> >>>Subject: Re: QC Hype Watch: Quantum cryptography gets practical >>>Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 17:48:30 +0100 >>> >>>R. A. Hettinga wrote: >>> >>>>Two factors have made this possible: the >>>>vast stretches of optical fiber (lit and dark) laid in metropolitan >>>>areas, >>> >>>which very conveniently was laid from one of your customers to another of >>>your customers (not between telcos?) - or are they talking only having to >>>lay new links for the "last mile" and splicing in one of the existing >>>dark fibres (presumably ones without any repeaters on it) >> >> >>_________________________________________________________________ >>On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to >>get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement >> >> > _________________________________________________________________ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee. Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

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Quantum cryptography gets "practical"
by Tyler Durden 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

Actually, that's an interesting point. In places like downtown NYC, if the fiber doesn't actually go to the basement of a building, it will certainly go within a few 100 feet, so that last hop is trivial. (But the kind of companies this would be targeted for this would already have fiber to the premises or FTTP anyway....however, that fiber will only on occasion make it all the way to the telecom room...the internal building wiring will often be copper.) However, it's not like you'd have a continuous piece of fiber all the way from Customer X Location A to Customer X Location B...you'd definitely go through at least one fiber distributing frame (FDF) aka an optical "patch panel". However, the connectors will almost certainly be at least slightly anisotropic, so you'd get a wavefunction collapse, or at least diminish the distance you can go. So I imagine they actually perform a splice and remove the connectors...this will limit you of course to new, high quality fiber (which is extremely isotropic, and I know this for a fact having previously done a lot of testing for PMD, or Polarization Mode Dispersion.) An interesting thing to think about is the fact that in dense metro areas, you pretty much have a "star" from the CO out to a premise (which is the cause of deployment of "Collapsed SONET Rings"). This means the other photon of your encrypted pair might easily pass through the same CO somewhere, which would make the system suscpetible to a sort of man in the middle attack. Or at least, your fancy quantum crypto system has defaulted back to standard crypto in terms of its un-hackability. Moral of this story is, even if this thing is useful, you'll probably have a very hard time finding a place it can be deployed and still retain its "advantages". -TD >From: Dave Howe <DaveHowe(a)gmx.co.uk> >To: Email List: Cryptography <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com>, Email >List: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net> >Subject: Re: QC Hype Watch: Quantum cryptography gets practical >Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 17:48:30 +0100 > >R. A. Hettinga wrote: >>Two factors have made this possible: the >>vast stretches of optical fiber (lit and dark) laid in metropolitan areas, >which very conveniently was laid from one of your customers to another of >your customers (not between telcos?) - or are they talking only having to >lay new links for the "last mile" and splicing in one of the existing dark >fibres (presumably ones without any repeaters on it) _________________________________________________________________ On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement

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