From today's PARADE magazine, that valuable source for insight into the

popular heart and mind, "explaining" why "we" haven't been able to catch Iranian terrorists:

Thanks to the highly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, American intelligence agencies have intercepted enough telephone messages from Iran, ordering acts of terrorism, that Iran's terrorist network stopped using the phone. Reportedly this has caused them to start using codes on the Internet that are "practically" impossible to track and isolate.

"Just when we thought we had outsmarted them, they caught on and started using codes on the Internet", an expert in international terrorrism tells us. "There's so much crazy srewball stuff on the Internet that it's practically impossible to track down and isolate the terrorists. No government can analyze those millions and millions of messages."

And from another piece of hard-hitting quote-the-official-source journalism in PARADE, "A New Worry: Terrorism in Cyberspace"

The danger of computer-based "cyper" attacks is second only to that posed by nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, says CIA's Director, John Deutch. He expects the threat to grow as we rush to connect the world on the Internet.

<SNIP>

There were more than 250,000 attacks on Department of Defense computers last year, and 65% were successful. Little is known about who launched them, why, or what they found. In a recent test, Defense Department "red teams" admit to intentionally hacking into 18,200 systems, with only 5% of the attacks detected; only 27% of those attacks were reported.

Wonder if the timing of these stories has anything to do with the end of term legislative push on wiretapping. Don Weightman dweightman@radix.net