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[ISN] Britons go 'toothing' for sex with strangers
by InfoSec News 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/21/1082395891416.html [Who would have thought a security vulnerability would lead to wild anonymous sex? :) - WK] London April 21, 2004 British commuters take note - the respectable person sitting next to you on the train fumbling with his or her cell phone may be a "toother" looking for sex with a stranger. "Toothing" is a new craze where strangers on trains, buses, in bars and even supermarkets hook up for illicit meetings using messages sent via the latest in phone technology. "Toothing is a form of anonymous sex with strangers -- usually on some form of transport or enclosed area such as a conference or training seminar," says the Beginner's Guide To Toothing on a website dedicated to the pursuit. It is made possible by Bluetooth technology which allows users to send phone contacts, pictures and messages to other Bluetooth-enabled equipment over a range of about 10 metres. Users discovered they could send anonymous messages to people they didn't know with Bluetooth equipment, spawning a craze dubbed "bluejacking". Jon, aka "Toothy Toothing" and the guide's author, explained toothing was born after he was "bluejacked" by an unknown girl while commuting to work in London. After a few days of flirting, she suggested a brief encounter in a station lavatory. "The meeting wasn't a romantic thing - it was purely sexual. Barely anything was said," he said via e-mail. He said potential toothers begin by sending out a random greeting -- usually "Toothing?". "If the other party is interested, messages are exchanged until a suitable location is agreed -- usually a public toilet, although there are tales of more adventurous spots such as deserted carriages or staff areas," his guide adds. Jon, who's in his 20s and works in finance, estimates there could be tens of thousands of toothers from all sorts of professions and lifestyles. Certainly the website's message board is busy. "Any toothing on these trains?" asks one message about services between Cambridge and London, prompting positive responses from "Dannyboy" and "Zeke". "I'll be around London Bridge mainline station around 9.45 - 10am tomorrow if anyone's interested...," another messager called "Boi" wrote hopefully. While some happily recount their successful encounters, others suggest there are a few teething problems with toothing. "I tried toothing in Tooting (south London) last night... not a device to be found," a frustrated "Snowdog" posted sadly. Although clearly not what the industry had in mind, toothing may lead operators towards similar, more mainstream projects. Last month it was reported that a team in Boston had created a service for cell phones called Serendipity, an wireless alternative to online dating. It allows subscribers to store their personal details and what they want from a partner. When there are enough similarities between two people and they happen to be in the same area, it tells their phones to communicate with each other. Dario Betti, of the British-based consultancy Ovum, said bluejacking had really taken off, helped by the fact the service was free. "The element of the unknown, that you are connecting to someone around you that you might not know, it's a novelty factor that is helping it to start," he said. If Jon and those who use his forum are right, toothing is certainly livening up life for some bored commuters. "A lot of my day's taken up with a soul-aching commute into the city, and that just feels like dead time," Jon said. "Flirting is fun, sex is fun. We're just employing expensive, complex toys to find the most basic form of entertainment." _________________________________________ ISN mailing list Sponsored by: OSVDB.org --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[ISN] Britons go 'toothing' for sex with strangers
by R. A. Hettinga 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

--- begin forwarded text

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Five Reasons You Don't Owe Income Tax, Dammit!
by R. A. Hettinga 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

<http://www.reason.com/0405/fe.bd.five.shtml> Reason: May 2004 Five Reasons You Don't Owe Income Tax, Dammit! The most heartfelt beliefs of the "tax honesty" movement Brian Doherty Here are some of the core arguments against the legality of the income tax one finds in the tax honesty movement. Devotees probably would regard them as oversimplifications. This is certainly not an all-inclusive list. 1) The IRS declares in various documents that the income tax is "voluntary." And in Flora v. U.S. (1960), the Supreme Court announced, "Our system of taxation is based upon voluntary assessment and payment." 2) In Brushaber v. Union Pacific (1916), the Supreme Court declared that "the conclusion that the 16th Amendment provides for a hitherto unknown power of taxation" is "erroneous," and thus the 16th Amendment did not give Congress any taxing powers it did not already have. Hence, an unapportioned direct tax such as the income tax still cannot be legal. (Most mainstream readings of this extremely hard-to-follow decision say the Court meant Congress always had the power to levy an income tax, and that it was merely the question whether it should have to be apportioned that was at issue.) 3) Income, for the purposes of the tax code, should not be understood in any "common sense" way but only as defined by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in Merchant's Loan and Trust Company v. Smietanka (1921), defined it as having the same meaning as in the Corporation Excise Tax of 1909-and as Irwin Schiff has written, "nothing that was received by private persons was taxable as 'income' under that Act." Income is defined as "gain derivedVfrom labor" in a previous Supreme Court decision, Stratton's Independence v. Howbert (1913). 4) Title 26 of the U.S. Code, in which tax-related statutes are found, is inherently "void for vagueness" because it lacks precise definitions of such terms as state, United States, employee, and person. Again, "common sense" definitions aren't good enough. (Many tax honesty types interpret the use of the word includes in the tax code as properly meaning, "is limited to.") 5) According to the tax-honesty reading of U.S. Code 26, Section 861, only income from foreigners or from overseas activity appears to actually be subject to the income tax. Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man, to be published this summer by Little, Brown. -- ----------------- 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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"It�s So Simple, It�s Ridiculous": Taxing times for 16th Amendment rebels
by R. A. Hettinga 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

<http://www.reason.com/0405/fe.bd.its.shtml> Reason: May 2004 "Itms So Simple, Itms Ridiculous" Taxing times for 16th Amendment rebels. Brian Doherty "I wonmt go to jail." Bob Schulz announces this in late January to a rapt crowd of 200 gathered in an auditorium in Crystal City, Virginia. Itms the first national conference of the We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, a nonprofit advocacy group Schulz founded and runs. He delivers his declaration not with reckless bravado but with a dignified, quiet, middle-management-lifer assurance, in keeping with his general mien. Schulz is a serious white male in a nice conservative dark suit, a former environmental engineer for both General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency. Hems been married for 38 years to the same woman, and he has four children of whom he is quite proud. Yet when his kids begged him to reconsider the path that requires him to declare publicly that he wonmt go to jail, his wife Judy told them, "Your father put his country before his family, and I support him." Schulz has stopped paying federal income tax, and he isnmt afraid to let anyone, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), know it. Not only is he not paying, but hems also leading a national movement telling everyone else they shouldnmt pay either. When I talk to him after the conference, he doesnmt seem quite so confident he wonmt go to jail. But he doesnmt seem to care one way or the other. "Clearly [the government is] going to react," he says. "They may well sooner or later come at me in one way or another. You hear people say, kBob, theymre going to take you out. Dozens of armed agents will come turn your life upside down.m You hear all these things. I have to say I have no fears. I fear God and God alone." Americans have been protesting and avoiding taxes since before the U.S. officially existed. We are a nation born of tax protests. This tradition feeds the attitude that unites the serious, almost obsessed crowd here: the belief that they are the true patriots,staunch constitutionalists fiercely dedicated to the ideals that make America great. A radical transvaluation of values is going on right here in Crystal City. Far from being the very foundation of solid citizenry, acceding to the federal personal income tax is, among this crowd, an act of treason against what defines America: its Constitution and its "true laws." Schulzms We The People Foundation is transforming the often subterranean struggle to deny the legitimacy of the income tax. For decades this movement has been an inchoate collection of small congregations following varied gurus. Schulz and his crew, by contrast, offer a unified church with a canon of Right Arguments. The anti-income tax movement now has, through Schulz, a united, highly activist national membership organization claiming around 5,000 dues-paying members, a mailing list of 64,000, and local coordinators in 39 states and 600 counties. While in the past evangelists of the "income tax is a fraud" message have tended to sell books and seminars, the We The People Foundation has the advantage of being hard to blithely condemn as a scam. It is not a business selling advice but a nonprofit dedicated to spending money -- more than $1 million since taking up this fight -- to spread the word. Its founder claims Gandhi as his influence: From him Schulz learned that to fight an unjust tyranny, you need a proactive, nonviolent mass movement, and that is what he is trying to create. The movement against the income tax has lately adopted one of the tropes that define an on-the-rise minority in modern America: Its members want to be called what they call themselves -- the "tax honesty" movement -- and not be slapped with the pejoratives that most people have known them by (if aware of them at all). At the politest, their nemesis the IRS calls them "tax protesters." (Less politely, theymve been known as "income tax cranks.") A woman who runs a small business making and selling display boards in Massachusetts, who claims to have not paid personal income tax for a few years now with no practical repercussions, tells me that "when people say ktax protester movement,m it drives me nuts. I do not protest taxes. I think they are absolutely necessary. I protest illegal confiscation of assets, which is what the income tax is." She has no problem, she assures me, with sales taxes, property taxes, or corporate taxes. The partisans of the tax honesty movement go beyond complaining that the income tax is too high, or that out-of-control IRS agents enforce it in thuggish ways. They claim, for a dizzyingly complicated variety of reasons, that there is no legal obligation to pay it. The continued life -- and even flourishing -- of that notion, in the face of obloquy, fines, and jail sentences, says something fascinating about a peculiarly American spirit of defiance. It may even say something encouraging about what it means to live in a nation of laws, not of men. "I Used to Be Normal, But..." Bob Schulz has a long history of fighting the government in the name of constitutionally limited powers and proper procedure. His battles date back to 1979, when he successfully sued to halt a new sewage treatment system near Lake George in New York. (According to Schulz, the proposal ignored environmental impact requirements.) Since then hems been involved in more than 100 such lawsuits and won many. All that is small beer compared to his latest crusade. Since 1999 Schulz has presented his contentions regarding the income taxms illegality to the IRS, the president, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and every member of Congress. He has humbly beseeched them to answer a list of questions regarding whether he, or any American citizen, has an actual constitutional, statutory, legal obligation to pay the federal income tax. Hems led marches around IRS headquarters in D.C., and he went on a brief hunger strike in 2001. In July of that year his persistence prompted representatives of the IRS and DOJ to promise to show up at a public meeting Schulz was organizing. They promised to lay forth their official arguments as to why we do indeed have a legal obligation to pay income tax. That meeting was scheduled for September 25-26, 2001. The 9/11 attacks made Schulz reschedule, and the feds bowed out of appearing at the rescheduled event. Schulz feels he has pursued every proper step to find an answer to his questions. Now, he says, itms time to fight. When The New York Times asked IRS spokesman Terry Lemons why the Schulz petition was being ignored, Lemons "said that courts had upheld the validity of the tax laws and that the agency did not want to waste time and resources dealing with well-settled issues. Mr. Lemons added that the recent spate of enforcement actions taken by the IRS against promoters of abusive tax schemes...show other ways that government is answering the petition." Not the answer the movement wants, obviously. But itms one they should have expected. Never has any court anywhere -- much less the IRS -- accepted as valid any of the many arguments the movement offers for how and why there is no legal obligation for individuals to pay federal income tax. In fact, courts will fine you up to $25,000 for even raising them, insisting such arguments have been rejected so often by so many courts at so many levels that they are patently frivolous and time-wasting. Despite this, the dominant vibe at this conference, even among those whose pursuit of these curious doctrines has led them to conflicts with government or employers, is hopeful in a religious sense. They clasp valiantly to belief in their own righteousness and the certainty that through that righteousness they one day will be delivered. I eavesdrop on one smiling lady with a shock of short white hair telling a fellow attendee of her long fight over garnishment of her wages from a tax lien. It sounds like plenty of trouble came her way, and in the end the courts were taking her money anyway. But she was still cheerful, evincing no regret for the path shemd taken. Wrapping up her tale, she confided, with a smile and an only slightly wistful sigh, "I used to be normal, but...." No one at the conference -- from the man who tries to pay for his Au Bon Pain lunch with a privately minted silver coin to the airline employee whose union is getting tired of his fights over tax withholding -- strikes me as merely fumbling for some scam to avoid paying taxes. Their concerns are higher than that. The Constitution and a properly limited government are their guiding lights. Indeed, the conference isnmt only about the income tax: Panels about the Second Amendment, jury nullification, and the questionable pedigree of the Federal Reserve are also offered, and also well attended. Mel Gibsonms controversial father, Hutton Gibson, gives a rousing speech on the need to fight the New World Order to defend our traditional liberties and is cheered heartily. Most everyone here seems aware therems a good chance they will pay a price far higher than the mere cash of taxes for pursuing the movementms difficult truth. When a speaker announces that his listeners need to be prepared to go to jail, almost all clap. In one question-and-answer session, a woman airs her concerns about all the practical difficulties that accompany the tax honesty path. How, for example, can one get a mortgage loan without tax returns to show? She seems to be begging for some loophole in the loopholes -- some reason she doesnmt have to refrain from paying income taxes. But the crowd and Schulz are pitiless. After she offers up too many what-ifs and how-do-yous, Schulz acknowledges that this path of truth might not be for everyone -- only, by implication, for the bravest and staunchest of patriots. Reality does, however, toss the tax honesty movement the occasional sweet crumb of hope. A couple of the crumbs that materialized in the last year seemed substantial and nourishing at first nibble. Most significantly, a tax honesty true believer named Vernice Kuglin, a vivacious and attractive Federal Express pilot who has a crowd of admirers following her everywhere during the conference, was slammed with criminal charges for failure to file and for tax evasion. She beat the rap in August, acquitted of all charges by a federal jury in Memphis. Also last year, Texas plastics manufacturer Dick Simkanin was finally brought to trial for failure to withhold income taxes for his dozens of employees. Simkanin had been a poster child in We The People-sponsored ads in USA Today, featured as a businessman who honestly believes it is his right under law not to withhold. Two grand juries who had gotten to speak to Simkanin failed even to indict him. Finally a third grand jury, whom he didnmt get to speak to, did indict. But at the end of his first trial in November, the jurors could not reach a verdict. Both these events occasioned great rejoicing in the tax honesty community. But both had grimmer denouements. Kuglin stayed out of jail, but she was slapped with civil liens for past taxes due and penalties. These days shems only collecting around $290 per pay period from her FedEx job, with the rest snatched by the IRS. Simkanin was promptly retried and found guilty in January, and he now faces a potential 129 years in prison. How the Simkanin case played out should give the tax honesty movement pause. Judge John McBryde was not entirely fair to his client, says Simkaninms lawyer, Arch McColl, who spoke at the conference. Schulz and other movement heroes testified on Simkaninms behalf in vain. McBryde prevented McColl from mounting a real defense, the attorney complains, sustaining the prosecutorsm objections almost every time he tried to raise tax honesty arguments. The jury sent back a question to the judge asking to see the codes that directly stated Simkanin was required to withhold. (Some of the defendantms ideas clearly had gotten through.) The judge told them simply to trust him when he said the law required Simkanin to withhold -- essentially directing the verdict, since Simkanin never denied not withholding. (McColl has strong expectations that this response, among other things, will help guarantee a successful appeal.) Other aspects of how the system treated Simkanin should further discourage tax rebels. Despite being a 59-year-old heretofore-respectable small-business owner not yet convicted of anything, he has been in jail since June. (A federal plant claimed via hearsay, denied in court testimony by someone who was present when the comment was allegedly made, that Simkanin had threatened to kill some judges. The prosecutors sure knew their audience.) During the trial Simkanin was dragged into court in leg irons. The IRS doesnmt resort to criminal prosecution very often, so when it does, it wants to make a vivid example. Itms Magic, You Know: Never Believe Itms Not So The We The People conference brought together many of the movementms leading lights. It also presents some new strategies. Schulz, with the help of superstar radical lawyer Mark Lane, is in the process of launching a class action lawsuit to call the governmentms cheating hand on this whole income tax matter. Lane has a mysterious tendency to be wherever the quirky action is in American politics and law. Hems famous for being one of the first Warren Commission revisionists with his 1966 book Rush to Judgment and for being the lawyer for Peoplems Temple death cultist Jim Jones. He has successfully defended some tax honesty clients, though he tells me: "I pay taxes and never advise any client not to. But I can tell you, Imve read all these cases, and I donmt see where it says you have to pay, and I donmt understand why the government doesnmt answer [Schulzms] questions." The planned suit relies on interestingly fresh grounds: Schulz is claiming that all these government officials who refuse to answer his questions about the income tax are violating his First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Surely, after all, that right must include the ability not merely to send in such petitions but to get some sort of reasonable response. Schulz recruits plaintiffs at the conference for another planned class action, this one against employers who have refused to stop withholding income tax from their paychecks when employees request it. This is illegal according to Schulzms reading of U.S. Code Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 24, Section 3402(n), which does indeed seem to indicate, to quote that section, that "notwithstanding any other provision of this section, an employer shall not be required to deduct and withhold any tax under this chapter upon a payment of wages to an employee if there is in effect with respect to such payments a withholding exemption certificate...furnished to the employer by the employee certifying that the employee -- (1) incurred no liability for income tax imposed under subtitle A for his preceding taxable year, and (2) anticipates that he will incur no liability for income tax imposed under subtitle I for his current taxable year." This is an option on every W4 form. Schulz maintains that the language of the law clearly implies the employer canmt get in trouble with the IRS for not withholding as long as the employee thus certifies. As a matter of fact, if not law, the IRS will regularly question such W4s (or ones that claim "too many" exemptions) and lean on employers to start deducting as if a straight one-exemption W4 has been filed. Schulz thinks any employer doing that -- and some do so even without the IRSms prodding -- should be sued, and he intends to do so in the spring. To his mind, and those of the 200 gathered at the conference, they are doing everything an American citizen needs to do when faced with injustice: using every legal, reasonable means to seek a redress. The Constitution will not defend itself, Schulz tells me; it is just a piece of paper. Keeping it healthy requires bold action, often expensive and time-consuming action, from those who love it. After Lane gives his presentation about the redress of grievances suit, with its announcement that parties to the suit intend to withhold their cooperation with the income tax until the questions are answered, a sour-voiced, heavy-set woman toward the back is appalled. No one owes the tax, she exclaims, so what kind of weapon is that to hold over the governmentms head, withholding something that wasnmt even due in the first place? In his role as general MC for the conference, Schulz is clearly wearied by the obsessions of some of his audience members -- for example, the notion that hiring an attorney means abandoning personal sovereignty before the law, or that having a yellow-fringed flag in a room means you are under martial law. But he is generally polite about it, if in a pained way. He tries to explain to the woman that lots of people are paying, and that they were seeking to enjoin the IRS from enforcing any tax liabilities on them until the petition is answered. Sessions at the three-day conference often run late -- through lunch and into the evening, past the announced closing time -- and the crowds stay through it all. I meet computer industry workers, violin makers, and even ex-IRS agents, from all across the country; they are overwhelmingly white, about two-thirds male, and mostly between 30 and 60 years old. Their comportment and appearance are not kooky by any means. They dress in business casual mostly, evincing no untoward whooping or mania or anger. Gauging audience reaction to certain statements from the podium, Imd say the majority of them are serious Christians. They are serious people in general: rebels without cool, with no sense of humor or irony, armed merely with the conviction that they are right. Their devotion to their beliefs is certainly religious. Indeed, tax litigation consultant Daniel Pilla, author of The IRS Problem Solver, says theymre "like programmed cult members -- you canmt reason with them." More charitably, the tax honesty people are staunch exemplars of Americams glorious Protestant heritage. This observation is not merely a pun on their status as "tax protesters." Their attitude toward the Constitution and the statutes and legal decisions regarding the income tax are uniquely Protestant, relying on a laymanms ability -- indeed, obligation -- to read and study and parse the original documents himself, to come to his own personal relationship with the law and the cases, and to prefer his understanding to that of the priesthood of lawyers, judges, and accountants. "Case law" -- the kind that proves that you can and will be arrested or fined for not filing or paying income tax -- means nothing to them; they like to rely strictly on the statutes as written, or on Supreme Court cases and straight constitutional interpretation. Irwin Schiff, the godfather of the movement, is insistent that you shouldnmt just take his word for anything: You should check the statutes. He is, he declares, the biggest reseller of the published version of the U.S. tax code. He sells specially tabbed copies leading you straight to the pages in the multithousand-page behemoth you must see to understand his own interpretations. Not merely Protestant, the tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom -- of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. Itms just that, in this case, that world of words isnmt a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series -- itms U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, itms like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillainms origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man. The tax honesty movementms vision of the world is fantastical in another way. It is not merely obsessed with continuity; it is magical in a traditional sense. Itms devoted to the belief that the secret forces of the universe can be bound by verbal formulas if delivered with the proper ritual. There are numerous formulae in the tax honesty spellbook, with rival mages defending them. Which spell is best: The summoning of the Sovereign Citizen? The incantation of the Constitutional Definition of Income? The banishing spell of No Proper Delegation? The tax honesty folks similarly believe that their foe the IRS must also be bound by these grimoires of magic: that without the properly sanctified OMB number an IRS form holds no power, that without uttering the mystic word liable no authority to tax can truly exist. And always, always, the ultimate incantation, The Question: Where does it say that I owe income taxes? Show me the law! "There Is Hereby Imposed on the Taxable Income of..." You hear this all the time. When presented with the simple request to "show me the law that unambiguously requires me to pay income tax," I was told, everyone from congressmen to tax lawyers to IRS agents is stymied, even when Schiff and others offer enormous rewards to anyone who can do so. It didnmt take me long to find what seemed to be an answer to that question. In U.S. Code Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter A, Part I, Section 1, it says, "There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of...," followed by subcategories that seem to include most Americans, complete with tables showing the percentage owed for each income range. (Subchapter A even comes close to that magic word liable that many in the movement insist is nowhere applied to personal income taxes -- itms called "Determination of Tax Liability.") But "taxable income" is the rub. Tax honesty types claim the "constitutional" definition of income, as set forth in such Supreme Court cases as Doyle v. Mitchell Brothers (1918), is corporate profits, not individualsm wages. (Courts have knocked down this claim regularly during the last 30 years.) The movement has an argument against the income tax for every level of abstraction, from the highest (taxing the fruits of our labor is against our natural rights as sovereign individuals) to the lowest (the IRS canmt manage to get everyone, so it is reasonably safe just not to file). One California paralegal who speaks at the We The People conference relies on everything from the Magna Carta to the Treaty of Paris of 1765 to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights to defend her contention that she doesnmt owe any income tax. Massed together, the chorus of tax honesty voices canmt help but remind you of the lawyer in the old joke who argued that his client was not even in town when the victim was killed; and if he was in town, he didnmt kill him; and if he did kill him, he was insane when he did it. At the conference you learn that taxing violates our natural rights; and anyway, the Constitution does not permit an unapportioned direct tax like an income tax; and if you think the 16th Amendment took care of that, well, it wasnmt properly ratified; and even if it was, it didnmt give any new taxing powers to Congress; and even if it did, the statutes and codes of the IRS as written arenmt officially U.S. law; and even if they were, they donmt define liability and income such that any normal working American owes taxes; and anyway, if you just donmt file they might never catch you. And there are plenty of complications on every step of this tangled path. (The claim that the 16th Amendment wasnmt properly ratified actually holds up pretty well. To judge from the pathbreaking research of Bill Benson -- a marvelous example of legal Protestantism -- there were enough procedural irregularities in its passage that it technically should not have been declared ratified in 1913. Still, it was thus certified, and the courts tend to respond to Bensonite arguments by saying itms too late to do anything about it now, and it isnmt the courtms problem.) This doesnmt mean anything goes in stabbing at the income tax. There are fringe beliefs even on this fringe. Larry Becraft is a lawyer who has actually won a handful of acquittals -- including one for Vernice Kuglin -- in defending people on trial for tax evasion. He gives a talk that is basically a warning to the movement to get its act straight and stop being absurd. Among the beliefs even others in the movement condemn as silly are the notions that by using a ZIP code or allowing a government document to spell your name in all capital letters, you surrender your sovereignty and make yourself a serf of the federal government, and that the income tax applies only to people who live in a federal territory or district, not to residents of the states. "Here I Am, IRS, and I Donmt Believe in You!" Far from that sort of futile reliance on concepts of personal sovereignty that U.S. law just does not recognize, I encounter a remarkably frank and refreshing approach from Peymon Mottahedeh and his Freedom Law School. (Technically, he tells me, the school is a function of a church he runs.) Peymon has a table set up at the We The People conference seeking customers ("students," he prefers to call them) for the "tax defense funds" he sells (both "simple" and "royal" packages). Peymon and his crew do believe the basic catechism of the movement: that one technically does not have a legal obligation to pay the individual income tax. They also know these arguments never succeed in court. When we meet later at his U.S. Code-lined office, attached to his home on the rural outskirts east of Los Angeles, he tells me hems never seen much value in waving your hands in the air tauntingly and bellowing, "Here I am, IRS, and I donmt believe in you!" Thus Peymon advocates simply not filing and relying on the luck of the draw. Peymon claims more than 60 million Americans a year donmt file. (There is no official number for this, though some more recent estimates from the government have it that only around 10 million people a year who are supposed to be filing arenmt. The IRS admits that in the last three years fewer than 230 nonfilers a year have been convicted.) The next step is to ignore the threatening letters and audit re--quests you receive until you get an official Notice of Deficiency from the IRS. Then you go to Tax Court and stonewall like crazy, making the IRS prove you owe them something without the aid of the "tax confession form," as Peymon calls the 1040. (This all works better for you if you are self-employed and the IRS hasnmt already gotten its hands on your money through withholding.) Peymon is a natural-born salesman, a handsome Iranian man with thick black hair swept back. He says he doesnmt really fear retaliation from the IRS since, after escaping from the Shahms Iran, he feels hems living a second life now anyway. "If we lose our freedom here, where else are we going to go?" he asks. Since hems been selling this advice for only a couple of years, and tax court proceedings often stretch out that long, he says he doesnmt have solid stats on how well this approach is doing, and he shies from announcing his number of customers -- wouldnmt the IRS love to know? But he thinks his approach is the smartest one the movement has come up with. The IRS is a big bully; the smartest thing to do is stay out of the bullyms way and not call attention to yourself. Itms too late for that for the movementms biggest star, Irwin Schiff. At the We The People conference I witness a young fellow enthusiastically shake the hand of this compact 75-year-old man with a broad and squeaky voice and call him his hero; Schiff takes it in stride. He is the man, the granddaddy, in many ways the Founding Father of the modern tax honesty movement. Some of his signature ideas were floated by earlier figures, including Pete Soehnlen and Robert Golden, but he became the first mass phenomenon of tax honesty with his 1982 book How Anyone Can Stop Paying Income Taxes, originally self-published and later distributed by Simon & Schuster. He says hems sold nearly half a million copies of his various books. Schiff used to sell tax shelters, and he first came to prominence in anti-statist circles with a 1976 Arlington House hit called The Biggest Con -- which, despite the title, is a standard right-wing peroration against taxing, spending, and Social Security and does not take a radical anti-income tax stance. Even though he tells us anyone can stop paying income taxes, Schiff has spent a few years in prison as a result of criminal prosecutions on various charges stemming from his own failure to pay taxes. He has been out of jail since the early m90s and has avoided "failure to file" convictions since then by filing an innovation he popularized, the "zero return." That means you file a 1040 but claim to have had no taxable income -- which by Schiffms reading of the tax code and various Supreme Court cases, he does not (and neither do you). His latest book-length disquisition on these matters, The Federal Mafia, is a work of baroque complexity. Yet when Schiff hears Imm a reporter writing about the movement, he says the truth about taxes is easy to grasp. "Itms so simple, itms ridiculous," he tells me. Sometimes Schiffms arguments are not really about the law, just an appeal to a basic sense of fairness. For example, how can a country with a Fifth Amendment require us to file and sign 1040s under penalty of perjury when the information on them can be used against us in civil and criminal prosecutions? Mostly, though, his shtick is based on various sorts of word magic. While some sections of the excise tax code specifically list the circumstances under which one becomes liable for them, for example, there appears to be no such section for the income tax. Therefore, Schiff argues, no one is actually liable for it -- even though, as detailed above, the tax is "imposed." Similarly, he posits a terribly significant distinction between a "notice of levy" and a "levy." I get hit with a hilarious application of Schiffms verbal judo as he attempts to convince me and another apparently confused attendee that "compensation for services" could not mean the same thing as "wages" for tax liability purposes. (This all fits in with his argument that only corporate profits should be considered "income.") He shows us a place in the code that seems to define "compensation for services" as taxable while not mentioning "wages." The other guy objects that surely a wage falls into the category of a "compensation for services." "Itms not the same!" barks Schiff, the Socrates of the tax code. "And Imll prove it to you: Can a corporation receive compensation for services?" His interlocutor admits that yes, wise Schiff, it cannot be denied this is indeed so. "Can a corporation receive wages?" The guy pauses a moment, then grants that this proposition seems doubtful. "See!" Schiff is pleased. "Theymre not the same!" It all seems so sensible with the energetic Schiff yapping at you. Of course, to say that something falls into a category is not the same as saying it is identical to the category. Schiffms argument is ultimately as convincing as saying that if an apple is a fruit, and an apple is not an orange, then an orange canmt be a fruit. Still, he seems happy with it. How, one might ask (and many have), can Schiff continue to maintain there is no legal obligation to pay income taxes when he has spent time in jail for not paying income taxes? He addresses this question in the latest edition of The Federal Mafia: "Unfortunately, some people who were persuaded by [my books] that they could legally stop paying income tax (they could) went to jail. How many, I donmt know. But they and their families paid a terrible price because of what they learned....I must again warn you regarding the use of this information. There is no question that it is all correct. Paying and filing income taxes are, by law, voluntary. The law...also provides you with a means for stopping the withholding of that tax, which, by any legitimate standard, you have a perfect right to do. But, by doing so, you run the risk of going to jail!" "Liable, Liable, What Makes Me Liable?" The reason for that seeming paradox, Schiff says, is simple: The IRS and the judges it brings cases before are corrupt and donmt care what the law says. Which is why, since February 2003, Schiff has had his Las Vegas office raided and records of all his clients seized; the IRS has moved for judgment on $2.5 million in back taxes and penalties it claims he owes; and a federal judge has banned the sale and distribution of The Federal Mafia by Schiff and forbade him from publicly saying what he believes about the income tax. (That ban is under appeal now.) Schiff tells a group of well-wishers this latest wave of statist oppression swamped him momentarily -- he went into a depression and lost 20 pounds -- but "Imm back! Imm back! Imm going to kick their ass!" He proudly points out that all the back taxes in the $2.5 million judgment are from many years ago and that the IRS has done nothing to him for his more recent zero return filings. This proves to him that strategy must be foolproof. Vernice Kuglinms acquittal on criminal charges has made her one of the movementms new saints and heroes. I witness her taking aside a man troubled by the mess hems in because he advocated these beliefs as an accountant; she tells him kindly but firmly, "We know in our core thatms what we have to do." She was involved in Libertarian Party activities in the early m90s and through that was exposed to tax honesty ideas. By 1995 she was sending letters to the IRS asking what specific section of U.S. code or statutes made her liable for the federal income tax. Were she legally liable, she insisted, she would be more than happy to pay. Despite the liens on her income, Kuglin is optimistic. A juror in her case, she tells me, had a dream during deliberations in which he heard Kuglin repeating, "Liable, liable, what makes me liable?" This was apparently the crack in his mind that convinced him to lead the jury to acquittal. And then her son had a dream in which she and her lawyer were standing in front of the courthouse, and a ball of light spread around them and enveloped the world. She believes it is all fate, that the universe is taking care of her, that her victory is the beginning of the end of the whole evil lie of the income tax, and that "every setback is one more step to the win" in this battle. A sober assessment of the empirical evidence shows that the exact opposite is true -- that victories for the tax honesty movement (the occasional criminal acquittal or mistrial) lead inevitably to a later defeat (further convictions or civil seizures). But that realization doesnmt rely on contemplating the Constitution, statutes, codes, or rabbinical parsings of word definitions. Thus, it is not quick to occur to the devotees of tax honesty. They move, with heavenly grace, through an existential hell: In their minds and hearts they are absolutely certain that they are right, and even doing Godms work. (The contention that the Constitution was divinely inspired elicits a fair amount of clapping and no open unrest at the We The People conference.) But they are also fully aware that all the powers and dominions of the earth are arrayed against them and regularly torment them. They believe, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that their citizenms understanding of the written law should, and in some Platonic sense does, trump the realities of dealing with the government. This makes them uniquely American rebels -- more true, they maintain, to the nationms core values than those of us who follow the pragmatic advice an accountant once gave to one man at the conference. When the tax honesty devotee showed him a Schiff-marked copy of the tax code, the accountant replied: "You mess with that shit, you are going to jail." Well, not necessarily to jail. Tax honesty folks adore the Supreme Courtms 1991 decision Cheek v. U.S., which authoritatively ruled that a belief, however objectively unreasonable, that one was not liable to pay income tax could negate the element of willfulness necessary to establish criminal culpability for income tax crimes. In this area, in essence, ignorance of the law is an excuse. But as Daniel Pilla puts it, Cheek "might keep you out of jail, but it wonmt mean you donmt owe the tax." Still, the tax honesty folks believe, to their core, that a written Constitution and written laws truly can restrain the unbridled force of government. They push a naive Americanism, but an Americanism nonetheless. They are no more insane, in principle, then anyone else anywhere who has ever tried to fight city hall, sue the government, or halt congressional action by relying on, say, the Commerce Clause. Their facts are mostly wrong. But whether wrong or not, they are irrelevant -- and the tax honesty folks know it. Not a one seems unaware that jail and property confiscation are a likely result of acting on their ardently held conclusions. But they refuse to believe it. This makes them foolish, to be sure. But it doesnmt necessarily mean they arenmt heroic. As one conference attendee tells me, "I donmt care how many cowards there are. Therems one less on the planet, and thatms me. Everyone has to stand up for something in their lifetime." Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man, to be published this summer by Little, Brown. -- ----------------- 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'

1 0

[wearables] mobile phone exploits: bluejacking and remote monitoring
by Thad E. Starner 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

Folks- I'm getting interview requests on the (lack-of) privacy aspects on mobile phones and need some help formalizing my ideas. I've included an article on bluejacking (exploiting bluetooth to extract info from mobile phones) below, but what I'm really interested in is methods to turn on the microphone on a mobile phone without the owner's awareness. Has anyone done this or heard of an exploit to do this yet? I can see three methods off-hand: 1) Bluejacking the phone, sending over a Java app, turning on the mic, and either a) sending the audio over bluetooth b) actually calling back the cracker's phone directly (either immediately or in a time-delayed fashion) c) storing the audio on the owner's phone and then uploading the data at a later time (with PDA cell phones with 4G flash cards, you could store a full year's worth of speech) 2) Having a Java (J2ME) trojan horse app on a website that, when the owner clicks on it, does variants of 1 3) The "service provider" remote downloads software "updates" that do the same thing as #1. (Does anyone have specific knowledge of service providers uploading software updates remotely) a) because the service provider is being forced to do so by a government agency (e.g. in the US based on a subpoena using the FBI wiretap law, for example) b) because the service provider is actually a cracker who got the appropriate software update codes c) because the service provider just thinks this is a good idea for some reason (I can put together some pretty paranoid scenarios for this, but nothing that is really compelling yet) (Note with some of these scenarios, the phone could actually look "off" because almost all phones use soft switches instead of actually disconnecting the power) Other things I'm interested in are 1) When the mobile phone is off, exciting the phone at the carrier frequency, looking at the back scatter, characterizing the specific characteristics of the phone, and then using these as a unique signature that I can use the phone like a passive RFID. I have a pretty good source that says this is actually being done now, but I can't use this info publicly. Anyone have a source I can quote or point to? 2) Using clusters of phones as phased array microphones. Sumit Basu did a phased array microphone based on mics in clothing where the topology was changing. Does anyone know if the math works well enough to do this on a room full of cell phones in people's pockets? Thad ------------ Bluetooth May Put You At Risk of Getting 'Snarfed' By JEREMY WAGSTAFF Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 15, 2004; Page D3 If you spot someone tailgating you on the road or standing next to you wearing a backpack, then watch out: You may have been "snarfed." All the data on your cellphone, including addresses, calendars, whom you called and who called you, may now be in that person's computer. Many cellphones use Bluetooth technology, which allows them to communicate wirelessly with other Bluetooth-equipped devices -- computers, personal-digital assistants and other cellphones. This means you don't need a cable, for example, to synchronize the address books on your laptop and your cellphone. It is convenient, but that makes it possible for someone to steal your data, or even hijack your cellphone for their own purposes. Last year, London security consultant AL Digital spotted flaws in the way some Bluetooth cellphones swapped data with one another -- flaws that could be used to gain unauthorized access to everything stored on that phone without the user ever knowing. AL Digital's Adam Laurie, who discovered the problem, shared his findings with cellphone makers and with the public (leaving out the detail that might allow ne'er-do-wells to copy his experiments at street level). He termed the trick Bluesnarfing. Not a lot has happened since then. Nokia Corp., the market leader in the cellphone industry, acknowledges the flaw but says in an e-mail response to questions that it is "not aware of any attacks against Bluetooth-enabled phones." Sony Ericsson, a joint venture of Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson and Sony Corp., didn't reply to an e-mail. Even those highlighting the danger say they haven't heard of specific attacks. Still, these attacks -- also known as Bluejacking -- nevertheless are possible. Mr. Laurie cites a scenario in which paparazzi could steal celebrity data. He says he was able, with permission, to snarf from a friend's phone details of her company's shops, door codes and safe combinations. "There's any number of angles you can look at, and they are all bad as far as I can see," he says. Martin Herfurt, a 27-year-old German student at Salzburg's Research Forschungsgesellschaft, last month set up a laptop at a technology trade fair in Hannover, Germany, and ran a snarf attack. He found nearly 100 cellphones from which he could have stolen data, sent text messages or even made calls. He has published his findings to prove that this kind of thing can be done easily. How does it work? The attacker can use a Bluetooth-enabled laptop to discover other Bluetooth gadgets within range. Anything with Bluetooth activated and set to "discoverable" will show up, usually identified by its default device name. Being "discoverable" means your gadget is visible to anyone searching, but even if it isn't, an attacker still can find it, using software freely available on the Internet. The attacker then can use more software to take, delete, change or add data. So what is a consumer to do? Turn off Bluetooth on your phone unless you really need it to communicate with your other gadgets. In most cases, phones that have Bluetooth will have prominently displayed the fact on the box the phone came in, or you can expect to find "Bluetooth" in the index of your phone's manual. Otherwise, the Bluetooth settings can usually be found in the "Communications" or "Connections" menu on your phone. More importantly, there shouldn't be anything on your phone that you don't want someone else to have. Write to Jeremy Wagstaff at jeremy.wagstaff(a)feer.com4 --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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'

1 0

[wearables] mobile phone exploits: bluejacking and remote monitoring
by Thad E. Starner 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

Folks- I'm getting interview requests on the (lack-of) privacy aspects on mobile phones and need some help formalizing my ideas. I've included an article on bluejacking (exploiting bluetooth to extract info from mobile phones) below, but what I'm really interested in is methods to turn on the microphone on a mobile phone without the owner's awareness. Has anyone done this or heard of an exploit to do this yet? I can see three methods off-hand: 1) Bluejacking the phone, sending over a Java app, turning on the mic, and either a) sending the audio over bluetooth b) actually calling back the cracker's phone directly (either immediately or in a time-delayed fashion) c) storing the audio on the owner's phone and then uploading the data at a later time (with PDA cell phones with 4G flash cards, you could store a full year's worth of speech) 2) Having a Java (J2ME) trojan horse app on a website that, when the owner clicks on it, does variants of 1 3) The "service provider" remote downloads software "updates" that do the same thing as #1. (Does anyone have specific knowledge of service providers uploading software updates remotely) a) because the service provider is being forced to do so by a government agency (e.g. in the US based on a subpoena using the FBI wiretap law, for example) b) because the service provider is actually a cracker who got the appropriate software update codes c) because the service provider just thinks this is a good idea for some reason (I can put together some pretty paranoid scenarios for this, but nothing that is really compelling yet) (Note with some of these scenarios, the phone could actually look "off" because almost all phones use soft switches instead of actually disconnecting the power) Other things I'm interested in are 1) When the mobile phone is off, exciting the phone at the carrier frequency, looking at the back scatter, characterizing the specific characteristics of the phone, and then using these as a unique signature that I can use the phone like a passive RFID. I have a pretty good source that says this is actually being done now, but I can't use this info publicly. Anyone have a source I can quote or point to? 2) Using clusters of phones as phased array microphones. Sumit Basu did a phased array microphone based on mics in clothing where the topology was changing. Does anyone know if the math works well enough to do this on a room full of cell phones in people's pockets? Thad ------------ Bluetooth May Put You At Risk of Getting 'Snarfed' By JEREMY WAGSTAFF Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 15, 2004; Page D3 If you spot someone tailgating you on the road or standing next to you wearing a backpack, then watch out: You may have been "snarfed." All the data on your cellphone, including addresses, calendars, whom you called and who called you, may now be in that person's computer. Many cellphones use Bluetooth technology, which allows them to communicate wirelessly with other Bluetooth-equipped devices -- computers, personal-digital assistants and other cellphones. This means you don't need a cable, for example, to synchronize the address books on your laptop and your cellphone. It is convenient, but that makes it possible for someone to steal your data, or even hijack your cellphone for their own purposes. Last year, London security consultant AL Digital spotted flaws in the way some Bluetooth cellphones swapped data with one another -- flaws that could be used to gain unauthorized access to everything stored on that phone without the user ever knowing. AL Digital's Adam Laurie, who discovered the problem, shared his findings with cellphone makers and with the public (leaving out the detail that might allow ne'er-do-wells to copy his experiments at street level). He termed the trick Bluesnarfing. Not a lot has happened since then. Nokia Corp., the market leader in the cellphone industry, acknowledges the flaw but says in an e-mail response to questions that it is "not aware of any attacks against Bluetooth-enabled phones." Sony Ericsson, a joint venture of Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson and Sony Corp., didn't reply to an e-mail. Even those highlighting the danger say they haven't heard of specific attacks. Still, these attacks -- also known as Bluejacking -- nevertheless are possible. Mr. Laurie cites a scenario in which paparazzi could steal celebrity data. He says he was able, with permission, to snarf from a friend's phone details of her company's shops, door codes and safe combinations. "There's any number of angles you can look at, and they are all bad as far as I can see," he says. Martin Herfurt, a 27-year-old German student at Salzburg's Research Forschungsgesellschaft, last month set up a laptop at a technology trade fair in Hannover, Germany, and ran a snarf attack. He found nearly 100 cellphones from which he could have stolen data, sent text messages or even made calls. He has published his findings to prove that this kind of thing can be done easily. How does it work? The attacker can use a Bluetooth-enabled laptop to discover other Bluetooth gadgets within range. Anything with Bluetooth activated and set to "discoverable" will show up, usually identified by its default device name. Being "discoverable" means your gadget is visible to anyone searching, but even if it isn't, an attacker still can find it, using software freely available on the Internet. The attacker then can use more software to take, delete, change or add data. So what is a consumer to do? Turn off Bluetooth on your phone unless you really need it to communicate with your other gadgets. In most cases, phones that have Bluetooth will have prominently displayed the fact on the box the phone came in, or you can expect to find "Bluetooth" in the index of your phone's manual. Otherwise, the Bluetooth settings can usually be found in the "Communications" or "Connections" menu on your phone. More importantly, there shouldn't be anything on your phone that you don't want someone else to have. Write to Jeremy Wagstaff at jeremy.wagstaff(a)feer.com4 --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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'

1 0

Security Companies: Shadow Soldiers in Iraq
by R. A. Hettinga 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/international/middleeast/19SECU.html?th=&…> The New York Times April 19, 2004 Security Companies: Shadow Soldiers in Iraq By DAVID BARSTOW his article was reported by David Barstow, James Glanz, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Kate Zernike and was written by Mr. Barstow. They have come from all corners of the world. Former Navy Seal commandos from North Carolina. Gurkas from Nepal. Soldiers from South Africa's old apartheid government. They have come by the thousands, drawn to the dozens of private security companies that have set up shop in Baghdad. The most prized were plucked from the world's elite special forces units. Others may have been recruited from the local SWAT team. But they are there, racing about Iraq in armored cars, many outfitted with the latest in high-end combat weapons. Some security companies have formed their own "Quick Reaction Forces," and their own intelligence units that produce daily intelligence briefs with grid maps of "hot zones." One company has its own helicopters, and several have even forged diplomatic alliances with local clans. Far more than in any other conflict in United States history, the Pentagon is relying on private security companies to perform crucial jobs once entrusted to the military. In addition to guarding innumerable reconstruction projects, private companies are being asked to provide security for the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer III, and other senior officials; to escort supply convoys through hostile territory; and to defend key locations, including 15 regional authority headquarters and even the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, the center of American power in Iraq. With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias - by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000. "I refer to them as our silent partner in this struggle," Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican and Armed Services Committee chairman, said in an interview. The price of this partnership is soaring. By some recent government estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18 billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants, electric lines and oil refineries. In Washington, defense experts and some leading Democrats are raising alarms over security companies' growing role in Iraq. "Security in a hostile fire area is a classic military mission," Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a member of the Armed Service committee, wrote last week in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed by 12 other Democratic senators. "Delegating this mission to private contractors raises serious questions." The extent and strategic importance of the alliance between the Pentagon and the private security industry has been all the more visible with each surge of violence. In recent weeks, commandos from private security companies fought to defend coalition authority employees and buildings from major assaults in Kut and Najaf, two cities south of Baghdad. To the north, in Mosul, a third security company repelled a direct assault on its headquarters. In the most publicized attack, four private security contractors were killed in an ambush of a supply convoy in Fallujah. The Bush administration's growing dependence on private security companies is partly by design. Determined to transform the military into a leaner but more lethal fighting force, Mr. Rumsfeld has pushed aggressively to outsource tasks not deemed essential to war-making. But many Pentagon and authority officials now concede that the companies' expanding role is also a result of the administration's misplaced optimism about how Iraqis would greet American reconstruction efforts. The authority initially estimated that security costs would eat up about 10 percent of the $18 billion in reconstruction money approved by Congress, said Capt. Bruce A. Cole of the Navy, a spokesman for the authority's program management office. But after months of sabotage and insurgency, some officials now say a much higher percentage will go to security companies that unblushingly charge $500 to $1,500 a day for their most skilled operators. "I believe that it was expected that coalition forces would provide adequate internal security and thus obviate the need for contractors to hire their own security," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the new inspector general of the authority. "But the current threat situation now requires that an unexpected, substantial percentage of contractor dollars be allocated to private security." "The numbers I've heard range up to 25 percent," Mr. Bowen said in a telephone interview from Baghdad. Mark J. Lumer, the Pentagon official responsible for overseeing Army procurement contracts in Iraq, said he had seen similar estimates. But Captain Cole said that the costs were unlikely to reach that level and that the progress of reconstruction would eventually alleviate the current security problems. Still, in many ways the accelerating partnership between the military and private security companies has already outrun the planning for it. There is no central oversight of the companies, no uniform rules of engagement, no consistent standards for vetting or training new hires. Some security guards complain bitterly of being thrust into combat without adequate firepower, training or equipment. There are stories of inadequate communication links with military commanders and of security guards stranded and under attack without reinforcements. Only now are authority officials working to draft rules for private security companies. The rules would require all the companies to register and be vetted by Iraq's Ministry of Interior. They would also give them the right to detain civilians and to use deadly force in defense of themselves or their clients. "Fire only aimed shots," reads one proposed rule, according to a draft obtained by The New York Times. Several security companies have themselves been pressing for the rules, warning that an influx of inexperienced and small companies has contributed to a chaotic atmosphere. One company has even enlisted a former West Point philosopher to help it devise rules of conduct. "What you don't need is Dodge City out there any more than you've already got it," said Jerry Hoffman, chief executive of Armor Group, a large security company working in Iraq. "You ought to have policies that are fair and equal and enforceable." Company executives argue that their services have freed up thousands of troops for offensive combat operations. But some military leaders are openly grumbling that the lure of $500 to $1,500 a day is siphoning away some of their most experienced Special Operations people at the very time their services are most in demand. Pentagon and coalition authority officials said they had no precise tally of how many private security guards are being paid with government funds, much less how many have been killed or wounded. Yet some Democrats and others suggest that the Bush administration is relying on these companies to both mask the cost of the war and augment an overstretched uniformed force. Mr. Rumsfeld has praised the work of security companies and disputed the idea that they were being pressed into action to make up for inadequate troop levels. Still, the government recently advertised for a big new contract - up to $100 million to guard the Green Zone in Baghdad. "The current and projected threat and recent history of attacks directed against coalition forces, and thinly stretched military force, requires a commercial security force that is dedicated to provide Force Protection security," the solicitation states. Danger Zones: Rising Casualties and Deal Making The words did not match the images from Iraq. At a Philadelphia conference last week, a government official pitched the promise of Iraq to dozens of business owners interested in winning reconstruction contracts. William H. Lash III, a senior Commerce Department official, said Baghdad was flowering, that restaurants and hotels were reopening. He told of driving around Baghdad and feeling out of place wearing body armor among ordinary Iraqis. In any case, he joked, the armor "clashed with my suit," so he took it off. But the view from Iraq is considerably less optimistic, with contracting companies and allied personnel alike hunkering down in walled-off compounds. "We're really in an unprecedented situation here," said Michael Battles, co-founder of the security company Custer Battles. "Civilian contractors are working in and amongst the most hostile parts of a conflict or postconflict scenario." One measure of the growing danger comes from the federal Department of Labor, which handles workers' compensation claims for deaths and injuries among among contract employees working for the military in war zones. Since the start of 2003, contractors have filed claims for 94 deaths and 1,164 injuries. For all of 2001 and 2002, by contrast, contractors reported 10 deaths and 843 injuries. No precise nation-by-nation breakdown is yet available, but Labor Department officials said an overwhelming majority of the cases since 2003 were from Iraq. With mounting casualties has come the exponential growth of the little-known industry of private security companies that work in the world's hot spots. In Iraq, almost all of them are on the United States payroll, either directly through contracts with government agencies or indirectly through subcontracts with companies hired to rebuild Iraq. Global Risk Strategies, one of the first security companies to enter Iraq, now has about 1,500 private guards in Iraq, up from 90 at the start of the war. The Steele Foundation has grown to 500 from 50. Erinys, a company barely known in the security industry before the war, now employs about 14,000 Iraqis. In many cases companies are adapting to the dangers of Iraq by replicating the tactics they perfected on Special Forces teams. One, Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group, has recruited Iraqi informants who provide intelligence that helps the company assess threats, said Michael A. Janke, the company's chief operating officer. The combination of a deadly insurgency and billions of dollars in aid money has unleashed powerful market forces in the war zone. New security companies aggressively compete for lucrative contracts in a frenzy of deal making. "A lot of firms have put out a shingle, and they're not geared to operate in that environment," said Mr. Hoffman, the Armor Group chief executive. One security company, the Steele Foundation, recently turned down an $18 million contract for a corporation that wanted a security force deployed within only a few days; Steele said it simply could not find enough qualified guards so quickly. Another company promptly jumped at the contract. "They just throw bodies at it," said Kenn Kurtz, Steele's chief executive officer. Early on in the war, private security contractors came mostly from elite Special Operations forces. It is a small enough world that checking credentials was easy. But as demand has grown, so has the difficulty of finding and vetting qualified people. "At what point do we start scraping the barrel?" asked Simon Faulkner, chief operating officer of Hart, a British security company. "Where are these guys coming from?" When four guards working for a subcontractor hired by Erinys were killed in an attack in January, they were revealed to be former members of apartheid-era security forces in South Africa. One had admitted to crimes in an amnesty application to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there. "We were very alarmed," said Michael Hutchings, the chief executive of Erinys Iraq. "We went back to our subcontractors and told them you want to sharpen up on your vetting." Troops and Guards: Distinctions Are Hard to Keep For private security contractors, the rules of engagement are seemingly simple. They can play defense, but not offense. In fact, military legal experts say, they risk being treated as illegal combatants if they support military units in hostile engagements. "We have issued no contracts for any contractor to engage in combat," Mr. Lumer, the Army procurement official. What has happened, Mr. Lumer said in an interview, is that the Pentagon has, to a "clearly unprecedented" degree, relied on security companies to guard convoys, senior officials and coalition authority facilities. No one wants regular troops "standing around in front of buildings," he said. "You don't want them catching jaywalkers or handing out speeding tickets." But in Iraq, insurgents ignore distinctions between security guards and combat troops. And what is more, they have made convoys and authority buildings prime targets. As a result, security contractors have increasingly found themselves in pitched battles, facing rocket-propelled grenades, not jaywalkers.. It is in those engagements, several security executives said, that the distinctions between defense and offense blur most. One notable example came two weeks ago, when eight security contractors from Blackwater USA helped repel a major attack on a coalition authority building in Najaf. The men fired thousands of rounds, and then summoned Blackwater helicopters for more. In an interview, Patrick Toohey, vice president for government relations at Blackwater, grappled for the right words to describe his men's actions. At one moment he spoke proudly of how the Blackwater men "fought and engaged every combatant with precise fire." At another he insisted that his men had not been engaged in combat at all. "We were conducting a security operation," he said. "The line," he finally said, "is getting blurred." And it is likely to get more blurred, with private security companies lobbying for permission to carry heavier weapons. "We will keep pressing for that," said Mr. Faulkner, the Hart executive - especially after four of his men spent 14 hours on a roof of their building in Kut fighting off 10 times as many insurgents. Another Hart employee was killed in the assault, his body later dismembered by the mob. "I cannot accept a situation where four of our people are being besieged by 40 or 60 Iraqis, where they're talking to me on a telephone saying, `Who's coming to help?' " Mr. Faulkner said. They are also seeking ways to improve communications with military units. Two weeks ago, a team of private security guards fought for hours to defend a coalition authority building in Kut. They later complained that allied Ukrainian forces had not responded to their calls for help. Even routine encounters between allied forces and private security teams can be perilous. Mr. Janke, the security company executive and himself a former Navy Seal, said that in a handful of cases over the last year, jittery soldiers had "lit up" - fired on - security companies' convoys. No one was killed, but standard identification procedures might have prevented those incidents, Mr. Janke said. Sorting out lines of authority and communication can be complex. Many security guards are hired as "independent contractors" by companies that, in turn, are sub-contractors of larger security companies, which are themselves subcontractors of a prime contractor, which may have been hired by a United States agency. In practical terms, these convoluted relationships often mean that the governmental authorities have no real oversight of security companies on the public payroll. In other cases, though, the government insists that security companies abide by detailed rules. A solicitation for work to provide security for the United States Agency for International Development, for example, contains requirements on everything from attire to crisis management. "If a chemical and/or biological threat or attack occurs, keep the area near the guard post clear of people," the document states, adding in capital letters, "Remember, during the confusion of this type of act, the guards must still provide security for employees or other people in the area." The words are emphatic, but empty. Government contracting officials and company executives concede that private guards have every right to abandon their posts if they deem the situation too unsafe. They are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, nor can they be prosecuted under civil laws or declared AWOL. Scott Earhart said he left Iraq because he was disgusted at the risks he was asked to take without adequate protection or training. Mr. Earhart, 34, arrived in Iraq in October to work as a dog handler for a bomb-detection company hired by Custer Battles. A former sheriff's deputy in Maryland, he said that there were not enough weapons and that his body armor was substandard. "If you didn't get to the supply room in time you wouldn't have a gun," he said. Mr. Earhart said the breaking point came when he was asked to drive unarmed to Baghdad from Amman, Jordan. "I felt my safety was in jeopardy," he said. Mr. Battles, of Custer Battles, said that it had taken longer than expected to get weapons shipments, and that the company had had "growth issues, like everybody else." But, he emphasized, "under no circumstances did we let people out into the field without proper equipment." Clearer Rules: Search for Standards, Even a Philosophy For more than a decade, military colleges have produced study after study warning of the potential pitfalls of giving contractors too large a role on the battlefield. The claimed cost savings are exaggerated or illusory, the studies argue. Questions of coordination and oversight have not been adequately resolved. Troops could be put at risk. Several senior American commanders in Iraq and Kuwait, or who have recently returned, expressed mixed feelings about the use of private security companies. "The key thing is there are many requirements that are still best filled with combat units that can call on gunship support - Apache and Kiowa Warriors overhead - medevac, and just plain old reinforcements," one senior Army general wrote in an e-mail message to The Times. "Our task is to outsource what MAKES SENSE given the enemy situation." In an unusual reversal of roles, the push for industry standards is coming from security executives themselves. In Washington, Pentagon lawyers are reviewing the rules governing security companies. At the same time, coalition authority and Iraqi officials are drafting operating rules for the private security companies. The draft rules urge the use of "graduated force" - first shout, then shove, then show your weapon, then shoot. And they spell out when the guards may use deadly force. But they do not cover precisely how security operators will be screened and trained. For now, companies are often writing their own rules and procedures for Iraq. "It's an industry that if it's not careful could easily blend into what is usually referred to as war profiteers or soldiers of fortune or mercenaries," "It is a very ill-defined operating space right now," Mr. Battles said. "We draw the lines." Custer Battles went so far as to hire an expert in military ethics, Paul Christopher, who taught philosophy at West Point. Mr. Christopher is helping the company define its place and policies in the chaos of Iraq. "He's the anti-Rambo," Mr. Battles said. "This is a deep thinker." Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article. -- ----------------- 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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[wearables] mobile phone exploits: bluejacking and remote monitoring
by R. A. Hettinga 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

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Money laundering rules 'will increase costs'
by R. A. Hettinga 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/2004/04/040415_anguilla-money.sht…> The BBC ----------- RELATED SITES Last updated: 15 April, 2004 - Published 16:13 GMT Money laundering rules 'will increase costs' Criminals are using increasingly sophiscated methods for laundering money Authorities in Anguilla have said proposed international rules to combat money laundering will increase the costs of business transactions. Deputy director of Anguilla's Financial Services Commission Carlyle Rogers said he anticipates the programme will result in greater costs of doing onshore and offshore business. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force - the financial watchdog of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - issued the 40-point programme last June. The proposals were designed to keep international law enforcement abreast of increasingly sophisticated efforts by criminals to conceal illegal money flows. The programme lays out broad recommendations for regulating businesses from banks and insurers to gem dealers and real estate agents. Mr Rogers singled out the recommendations that relate to the extension of the due diligence requirements of accountants, law firms, casinos, real estate agents, trust companies and company service providers. He has also questioned the recommendation that calls for the extension of the mandatory reporting of suspicious transactions to authorities by lawyers, accountants and other entities. Anguillan officials say as well as the issue of higher costs banks on the island would come under stricter regulation and scrutiny, in terms of the correspondence banking relationships they have with other financial institutions around the world. Anguilla has recently proposed three new pieces of legislation to bring the island in line with other offshore centres as part of the development of its financial services industry. These include a Mutual Funds Act covering the recognition and registration of offshore mutual funds; an Insurance Act, which provides for the formation of both domestic and captive insurance companies and a Protected Cell Companies Act to offer international clients the opportunity to use protected cell accounts for insurance purposes. -- ----------------- 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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<nettime> PlayFair > Sarovar
by R. A. Hettinga 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

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