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WIRED: Star Trek: Bakula to the Future

Scripps/Howard: Operation: Enterprise

The San Francisco Examiner: Living in the now

New York Daily News: Bakula's Bold New 'Enterprise'

Also, MAXIM's cover girl this month is Jolene Blalock, who plays Vulcan Sub Commander T'Pol. Presumably this is the same T'Pol that in ST:TOS Amok Time oversees Spock's Pon Farr ceremony. Many of the Trek fan site are speculating on just how long it will be before her character experiences the Pon Farr with no Vulcan males around and only Capt. Archer present to address her needs.

Yeah, that's great. Sun and RealNetworks are the most trustworthy companies around. They'd never use the system for evil.

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.

"Get over it."

It looks like a wishlist of what the FBI have wanted for a long time. They are just using this to get every bit of out digital freedom erased. They have had a problem with the internet before but blaming the "terrorists attack" on steganography?

It's only a matter of time before government sanctioned computers are all that's available to buy in this country.

Go to the EFFs website. Be afraid. Be very afraid!

Prohibition almost never works. And certainly not when you are prohibiting something that anyone with even a tiny bit of smarts can do on their own.

No law can be successfully imposed on a huge population that does not morally support it and possesses easy means for its invisible evasion.
- John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This is also pertinent here. How exactly does the government intend to enforce this law? Are they planning on trying to intercept and decrypt absolutely everything that goes by? It's just too easy to be able to violate this law w/out getting caught. So maybe I'm naive but I don't think that any such law can be effectively enforced.

So what you're saying is that groups operating within Afghanistan to expose the Taliban's activities need to use strong crypto in such a way that the Taliban don't find out they're using it.

So we need wide access to not just crypto, then, but stego too.

I think that makes my point, rather than detracts from it -- the same tools that might help Their Wackos (terrorists) infiltrate Us , can also be used to enable Our Wackos (human rights activists) to infiltrate Them.

Apart from the fact that killing 7000 civilians is arguably a war crime, the operational details of the missions of both groups are remarkably similar -- live a normal life, undetected by the authorities, until you can accomplish your mission. Whether your mission is the murder of 7000 civilians, or the surreptitious taking of pictures of stonings and public executions and leakage of said stories to the West, doesn't matter from an operational standpoint -- the ability to communicate undetected is a vital tool.

Well, up until yesterday (when the Taliban made posession of computer or communications equipment itself punishable by death, regardless of whether crypto is involved), rendering the debate moot.

Not completely moot, though -- they demonstrate by their actions that a few women with digital cameras and laptops present a greater threat to their society than their hijackers do to ours.

And based on that, my money's on the West.

• The first Sirius and XM receivers will not be compatible, however, so customers will have to choose which service they prefer. The companies did agree to cross-license their technologies so that future receivers could access both signals.

Um, when exactly wasn't /. a pro-linux site? this article from a while ago mentions that /. is up front about its biases.

Maybe we should start using tools like YAP and other tools referenced in this article to catch students trying to cheat on their Computer Science assignments. Some of these actually compare the compilation trees of two programs so even changing variable names and comments and stuff will still turn up to be the same program. It would be interesting to see what some of these tools would turn up if you starting comparing say BSD code with Linux.

> Game developers aren't scratching their heads in a huddle
> making sure some vertex shader is going to work on a MIPS box as well as a Intel one.

You don't do any PS2 coding do you? ;-)

When your game is simulatenously being ported to X-Box, and the PS2 you need to re-implement the vertex shader natively on each hardware. It would save a LOT of time if us developers could use just ONE vertex shader description language for BOTH platforms !

> A bulk of game developers and publishers won't bitch much about standards
> while they can hit an incredible percentage of the gaming market by focusing on one system.

And loose 1/2 your sales?! That's the reason a standard exists - so we DON'T have to code specifically for one card !

Game developers want to maximize their sales with the least amount of work.

Rest of your comment is correct.
~~~

WTF is "Your comment violated the postersubj compression filter. Comment aborted" and why isn't it in the FAQ ?

... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.

Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)

Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...

Engineers, wake up. You are responsible for your inventions, and you have to live with the moral consequences of those inventions. This is exactly what Bill Joy was trying to tell us. Robert Oppenheimer employed 5,000 people to build his bomb, and after it was employed against Japanese civilians he declared to Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands." To the engineers building the bomb, it was a neat hack. They did not question the moral implications of the device until it was proven. If you build something that you expect to change the world, don't snivel about your "overwhelming feelings of guilt". Either accept the moral implications of your invention or don't build it.

Okay, I posted the above as a mental excerise and then switched over to Wired News where I read the following:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47074,00 .html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Taliban have threatened to execute any U.N. worker who uses computers and communications equipment in Afghanistan, forcing a near halt to the remaining relief work in the country, U.N. officials said Monday.

The militia raided U.N. offices in Kabul, the capital, and Kandahar, where the Taliban leadership is based, during the weekend and sealed their satellite telephones, walkie-talkies, computers and vehicles to bar them from use, according to U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker.

How is the validation of an individual's identity ensuring his sanity on a flight? If I carry this card, and prove that I am indeed the holder of the thumb and body which the card indicates, what is stopping me from running into the cabin of the plane with a fork, and declaring the plane in the name of Homer Simpson? Nothing.

Stop trying to fill your pockets, Larry, at the expense of the very same freedoms which made you rich.

We have Microsoft trying to pull everyone's personal credit information into Passport and .NET, so they can control where you go, when, and how you get there, and we have Oracle, trying to capture and store and "manage" your very identity. I don't think so.

We also have the DMCA, the SSSCA, backdoored "encryption" (anything with more than one keyholder is not encryption), the RIAA, MPAA, gps tracking devices in rental cars, cameras at every intersection, Dmitry Sklyarov vs. US/Adobe, and traffic tickets being sent in the mail for infractions you were never stopped for.

How is this giving me liberty again?

What people in our government fail to see is that the collection of these events, coupled with those who are trying to restrict stem cell research, our encryption, our liberties, and now, in a very delicate potential time of war, issuing lethal foreign policies. People are leaving this country, and taking off for other places where the opportunities may not be as vast, but the freedoms certainly are.

I'm very close to taking off as well, before the borders are closed, and I have to show my passport, fingerprint, and biometric validation, along with government approval to leave this country, and I'm taking all of my loved ones with me.

He sounds a bit like Scott McNealy to me.

Since when has Slashdot been only about hard news? Will you look right above that story: Monty Python Lego! That's (IMO) one of the great things about /., it's half funny/cool stuff and half important tech news. If you don't like it, don't bitch about it, go read Wired news or the Register.

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

I decided to write my congresswoman, Tammy Baldwin, about this issue. If anyone want's to do the same but needs inspiration, here's my letter. It's far from perfect, and it certainly doesn't apply to everyone, but it expresses how I and probably most of you feel, and explains the basic issue. Feel free to rip it off or offer improvements.

Tammy Baldwin,

I've been reading on internet news sites such as Slashdot and Wired about the pending introduction of a bill known as the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, or SSSCA. It scares me. This bill requires all interactive computer systems -- PCs, palmtops, possibly even VCRs -- to include certified security technologies, under penalty of law. Major backers of this bill include Sen. Fritz Hollings and the entertainment industry, which coincidentally is a major campaign supporter of Sen. Hollings.
I am a student at Madison West High School, and laws such as these, which overstep the bounds of the constitution and interfere with citizen's rights merely to advance the cause of the media industry frankly, well, scare the shit out of me. It's disturbing to imagine a future where restrictions such as the one's included in the SSSCA are considered commonplace.
Therefore, I ask you, as a citizen who will be voting in the next congressional election, to look into this issue and realize what it's effects might be, before it has a chance to get out of hand on the floor. Laws such as the SSSCA simply serve no purpose other than to restrict the rights of consumers in order to make it easier for media conglomerates to control exactly how their content is used.
I fear that although I may have succeeded in expressing my opinion to you, I have not succeeded in expressing the scope of the SSSCA in terms a congresswoman who doesn't intimately understand information technology can comprehend. I have therefore included links to articles which describe the potential effects of the SSSCA better than I did. Please read them and understand the evil of this law.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/20/2 047211

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46655,00 .html

A current draft of the bill

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.
Sincerely,
Joseph Kohl-Riggs

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,46964, 00.html.

From WiredNEWS May 22, 2001 (emphasis mine)

The worm that sent Max to jail was programmed to close a security hole that was being exploited by another worm that was on the loose at the time.

Systems infected with Max's worm downloaded a software patch and automatically repaired the security hole that would have allowed the malicious worm to comprise the system. That's a good thing.

But Max's worm, which he developed by reprogramming the malicious worm, also left a secret backdoor in all the systems it penetrated. That's the bad part.

Bin Laden and company are better known for using steganography. There's no indication that they use PGP in email; apparently their favorite method is to get free websites at e.g. GeoCities and embed messages in image files.

If one is to make such ludicrous claims, it is apparent to me that they have gone out of thier way to push an agenda, regardless of factual basis.

Obviously you didn't even read the post accurate up to the sender.
It was me the whole time! Your he is me.
And you have an offensive way of discussing, you're mis-stating (sp?) things most of the time - I gave examples to everything in my post.
What should I do?
Should I cite a certain document? ok, done.

To be true, I just browsed your comment history and found out that you seem reasonable. That's why I don't want you to dismiss arguments because you think there's an agenda behind it. I'm writing this from IE here which I think does the best job for my work. I control who gets to use what system in our company and everyone can use the os he wants - everyone uses windows - and it' s ok. I have no agenda, but I don't trust microsoft, securitywise and otherwise.

I remember seeing an article on Wired talking about an USAF spectrum available to 3g services. It isn't the original contended Army/Navy bandwidth. Anyone know if this applies to the UTMS bandwidth as well?
slinted

This debate has been around for a long time. In particular, things to note are:

• Britain has considered introducing a system whereby a key to decrypting the encrypted data has to be sent to the government. Here is more information from a dissenting group of privacy advocates in Britain.
• Microsoft has been accused of doing this (and I remember hearing about one time where they actually lost a server containing their only key.) There was a lot of debate over that; you can read some more abuot Microsoft's key structure here.
• Here is a long but rather interesting viewpoint of the debate about crypto.
• Don't forget (and please, tell your less technically-inclined friends) that crypto is NOT just used to send secret terrorist information. It is used by major retailers on the Internet to encrypt sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers.

A hypothetical example of my biggest personal fear regarding crypto follows:

An overzealous government tries to stomp out terrorism by requiring crypto backdoors. For the sake of argument, let's say it is the United States. Now, there are millions of hackers out there. A lot of them are smart enough to realize that if the government required keys to be kept in a central location, a hack of this location would be the biggest hack EVER. It would contain ALL keys to credit card numbers used by major Internet retailers. It would contain sensitive healthcare information. It would contain numerous trade secrets sent by company representatives.

Before we go any further, let's say that it was hacked. Now Joe Consumer knows his personal information was sent to Amazon.com. Amazon was required to give the key to decrypting it to the government. Now some terrorist has it. The government blames rogue hackers. "Well, whatever," Joe thinks to himself. "All I know is that they got my information from the Internet. I'm certainly not going to buy anything from there again."

You see, in this (albeit alarmist) scenario, the government has facilitated what could possibly be the biggest terrorist attack EVER, and ruined e-commerce in the process.

As an offhand note, do you think the government would use a system like Passport to do this? If so, we're in for a really tough ride. Just something to think about.

P.S. While I abhor the thought of keeping data in one place, I do support the idea of basic security regulations so that I know that when I purchase things online, my data IS actually being encrypted instead of being sent via plaintext email to the site owner.

Heres what I was just about to submit:

LaBrea - The Tarpit: Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
- -
With the recent proliferation in worms (Code Red, Sircam, Nimda, etc) beyond either switching to a more secure? webserver or keeping up to date with the patches for your own and hoping that others do the same; approaches to actively dealing the problem have been limited. One can try to either contact the administrator[s] of the machines infected or take a slight more risky proactive approach. 'LaBrea' - The Tarpit offers proof of concept? for an interesting open source approach.
Linux today, Wired and Linuxsecurity have covered this developing project, more information is available from Hackbusters here, here, here, here, here, or here.
- -
Im off to sulk. :)

Heres what I was just about to submit:

LaBrea - The Tarpit: Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
- -
With the recent proliferation in worms (Code Red, Sircam, Nimda, etc) beyond either switching to a more secure? webserver or keeping up to date with the patches for your own and hoping that others do the same; approaches to actively dealing the problem have been limited. One can try to either contact the administrator[s] of the machines infected or take a slight more risky proactive approach. 'LaBrea' - The Tarpit offers proof of concept? for an interesting open source approach.
Linux today, Wired and Linuxsecurity have covered this developing project, more information is available from Hackbusters here, here, here, here, here, or here.
- -
Im off to sulk. :)

I can just hear Jack Nichelson's voice: "Where does he get all of those toys?"

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html%20
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

No bills are on the table yet.

Last week after the attacks Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) made a speech to the Senate calling for backdoor access to encryption software.

If you want to read more, these links have details:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-7149229-0.htm l

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46816,00 .html

Note: Congress reconvenes on Friday, so if you give a shit about nipping this in the bud, write/email/call/fax your respective officials immediately!

Don't know how to contact them? Go to congress.org

I-Mode looks a lot better. Check out this Wired article from last month.

Microsoft Software is more popular and so it gets hit more. If linux was just as popular you would see the same thing happen.

You wish. The MSFT-toadying media thought that x.c , a FreeBSD and Linux worm, was going to be the "Next Code Red". My machine got more hits from sadmind/IIS worm (Solaris) than x.c. C'mon, shill-boy, why aren't you toeing the Wagg-Ed line? The truth of the matter lies more in the fact that Windows is more-or-less a software and hardware monoculture. Any flaw in IIS affects *all* of the population. The Linux/Unix/BSD/Solaris population has much greater diversity: a flaw in the WN web server isn't going to affect sites using thttpd. Similarly, there are dozens of Linux email clients in use, from mailx to Pine to mh. I don't think there's a common scripting language amongst the diversity of Linux email clients, and I don't think *any* of them are dopey enough to execute "readme.eml" files.

People that dislike windows and love linux are the reason for this attack. Its these people that are writing the viruses and worms. You've got to be kidding, right? Have you got any evidence whatsoever to back that up?

In other news, Congressman Bob Barr (of Georgia) was on CNN today saying that enforcement of current laws is more important than cracking down on our civil liberties. If you are in Georgia, please give him your support and bring up how either the mandatory encryption backdoor issue or the amendment tacked on to H.R. 2500 vastly increasing the authority of law enforcement to wiretap with reduced oversight will impact civil liberties without any proof that they are necessary to combat terrorism.

I know about Kaffe, but I just checked www.kaffe.org and it hasn't been updated for over a year. Why has it died?

Perhaps it has something to do with Microsoft's "investment" two years ago in the company that made Kaffe. That certainly wouldn't be the first time that a company with non-Windows products mysteriously stagnated after a cash infusion by Microsoft.

"Bush, who lost California big time in 2000, won't carry it next time either, but he certainly isn't going to let northern California's biggest bribes all go to the other side."

Hello, most of No. Cal wants to see MS broken up, not the reverse. Does Oracle and Sun mean anything to this writer, along with countless other firms who are either dead now (netscape et. al) or on life support due to MS activities. If this was true, Bush would be shooting himself in the foot.

The MS folks have given a lot of $$ politically to both sides, moreso to GOP, but they hedged their bets, and Bushies caved, no suprise, and that point can be effectivly made (and is, look at Rep. Conyers recent letter to Ashcroft askiong for details of sr. Bush officials meeting with MS folks). But to say that is a grand conspiracy and that Northern California wants an MS monopoly is just ridiculous.

Once again, the nation, takes a point that could be made, but sees sinister conspiracy in all capitolism and damns the sytsem. It just aint there, and it is a hallmark of their shoddy journalism. Follow the $$, enough MS donations to convince anyone of what is going, and it was Ms caused Bush to cave, no one else. Trust me, Gates and Ballmer can do a good enough job themsleves, they don't need Hollywood helping them. Moreover, those guys are not going to waste their chits helping po' Gates when they got DMCA to expand and Holling SSSCA (see wired article) to implement.

...if one adopts the rhetorical conceit that this crime is somehow an "act of war"...

They attacked the Pentagon, a military target. If that's not an act of war, what is? Also, Bin Laden's previous targets, such as embassies, are also governmental/military -- fair game in war.

Same stuff we hit when we go to war.

goose.sauce=gander.sauce

U.S. Government charges against Bin Laden

"You've Got War"

Or just do a search for "Ladenese Epistle". This thing usually shows up in three parts. What appears to be the primary site for this document, msanews.mynet.net is not responding as I write.

Follow the news. Thursday (Fri?) the US Senate passed the "Combatting Terrorism Act of 2001" in a 97 to 0 vote. This bill allows both FBI Pen Register, AND Tap and Trace WITHOUT a warrant if used on any case involving Terrorism, or COMPUTER SECURITY (any crackers out there?). Still have to pass the House (AFAIK) but, THERE WAS NO OPPOSITION IN THE SENATE ABOUT THIS!

--Braddock Gaskill

Not if you have a backdoor. Guess these guys don't read Wired..

Oh, if only that were true, then maybe would have a chance at "mutual transparancy" as described by David Brin. Here is an exerpt of his book from Wired. Brin says either we can have the government watch us and we are oblivious to what they do, or we can watch each other, and demand full accountability from the government. I fear that the government WOULD NOT be using the backdoored software. They would defend it in the interest of "national security" and sadly, most people will simply accept the fact that they are restricted to backdoored software while the government has full access to heavy crypto.

You forgot the real reason why the FSF doesn't care about "Pitbull": because the software is crap.

I searched in the 2001 Congressional Record for any speeches made by Judd Gregg on Thursday, September 13th. (query was "GREGG AND ENCRYPTION")

Here is the entire speech, selected from the matching page.
I have bolded the snippets used in the Wired article.

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.
I appreciate his courtesy in my arriving in the Chamber a little late
for the beginning of this work, as a group of us were in a meeting on
how we are going to handle this bill and move it along, I hope.
I congratulate the chairman of the committee for this bill, which is
a soothsayer bill really. Long before the events of the day before
yesterday, which were so horrific and which reflected the threat of
terrorism to our Nation, our committee aggressively pursued the issue
of how to try to prepare for such an act.
We have held innumerable hearings over the last 4 or 5 years. One of
the lines that has flowed through all those hearings has been the fact
that our intelligence community--our communities focused on domestic
intelligence and our communities focused on international
intelligence--had concluded that it was more than likely, it was a
probability, that a terrorist event would occur in the United States
and that it would be of significant proportions. And it has occurred.
How have we tried to ready for this? Well, a lot of the response you
saw in New York--which has been overwhelming and incredibly
professional, and heroic beyond description, which has taken the lives
of many firefighters and police officers and just citizens who went to
help--a lot of that response was coordinated as a result of initiatives
that came out of the hearing process, and the question of first
responder, and how we get the people who are first there up to speed as
to how to handle this type of event. So in that area at least there has
been some solace.
But the real issue remains, How do you deal with an enemy who, as the
chairman just related, is willing to give their life to make their
point and who has, as their source of support, religious fervor, in
most instances--and I suspect this is going to be proved true
in this instance--a religious fervor which gives them a community of
support and praise which causes them to be willing to proceed in the
way that they did, which is to use their life to take other innocent
lives?
First, how do you identify those individuals because they function as
a fairly small-knit group, and it is mostly familial. It involves
families. It involves sects which are very insular and very hard to
penetrate.
But equally important, when you are trying to deal with that type of
a personality and that type of a culture, which basically seeks
martyrdom as its cause, as its purpose for life, and sees martyrdom as
part of its process for getting to an afterlife in terms of their
religious belief--how do you deal with that culture and group of
individuals without creating more problems, without creating more
people who are willing to take up the banner of hatred and willing to
pursue and use their life in a way to aggravate the situation?
I think we as a committee have concluded that the first thing you
have to do is have a huge new commitment to intelligence. And we have
made this point. We have dramatically expanded the overseas efforts of
the FBI as an outreach of this effort. But it involves more than that.
We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy to limit
the type of people we deal with in the area of human intelligence.
Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially limited and
defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area of human
intelligence gathering because the directives and the policies did not
allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence community to
basically go out and employ and use people who were individuals who
could give us the information we needed. Because of our reticence as a
democracy to use people who themselves may be violent and criminal, we
found ourselves basically sightless when it came to individual
intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I
think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, as
a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the use
of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our agencies
in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural
inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and
seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our
intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to address
specifically encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I
asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI--
and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this
response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced as
they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption capability
of the people who have an intention to hurt America, whether it
happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be terrorist
activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because
of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as a
nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are dedicated to
it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past to encrypt
information--just from telephone conversation to telephone
conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where even
our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious limitations.

So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have
the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive
community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of electronics.
These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a nation, and they
should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation
to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the search and seizure
clauses, which still require that you have an adequate probable cause
and that you have court oversight--under that scrutiny, to have our
people have the technical capability to get the keys to the basic
encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The
manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has
been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact
is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and on
which we need to have movement in order to get the information that
allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New York
and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have
the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their
targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through people
on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the effort--
and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the FBI--and the
other way is through having the technical capability to intercept the
communications activities and to track the various funding activities
of the organizations. That requires the cooperation of the commercial
world and the people who are active in the commercial world. That call
must go forth, in my opinion.

Another thing this bill does, which is extremely positive and which,
again, regrettably anticipated the event, is to say that within our own
Federal Government we are not doing a very good job of coordinating our
exercise.
There are 42 different agencies that are responsible for intelligence
activity and for counterterrorism activity. They overlap in
responsibility. In many instances, they compete in responsibility.
Turf is the most significant inhibitor of effective Federal action
between agencies. Although there is a sincere effort to avoid turf, and
in my opinion, in working with a lot of these agencies, I have been
incredibly impressed by a willingness of the various leaders of these
agencies, both under the Clinton administration and under the Bush
administration, to set aside this endemic problem of protection of
one's prerogatives and allow parties to communicate across agency lines
and to put aside the stovepipes. Even though there is that commitment,
the systems do not allow it to occur in many instances.
This bill, under the leadership of the chairman, includes language
which has attempted to bring more focus and structure into the cross-
agency activities. One of the specific proposals in the bill, which may
not be the last approach taken and probably won't be but is an attempt
to move the issue down the field, is to set up a Deputy Attorney
General whose purpose is to oversee counterterrorism activity and
coordinate it across agencies and who is the repository of the
authority to do that. There is no such person today in the Federal
Government. Of these 42 agencies, everybody reports to their own agency
head. Nobody reports across agency lines. There is virtually no one who
can stand up and say, other than the President, ``get this done.''
The purpose of the Deputy Attorney General is to accomplish that, at
least within the law enforcement area and within much of the
consequence manager's area, especially the crime area, although it is
understood that this individual will work in concert with the head of
FEMA, the purpose of which is to actually manage the disaster relief
efforts that occur as a result of an event such as New York or where
you have these huge efforts committed.
That type of coordination is so critical. Would it have abated the
New York and Washington situation? No, it wouldn't have. But can it, in
anticipation of the next event, because this is not an isolated event.
Regrettably, whether we like it or not, we are in a continuum of
confrontation here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not one or two people but rather a
culture that sees this as an expression of the way they deliver their
message for life, or after life for that matter. Regrettably, we have
to be ready for the potential of another event.
I do believe this type of centralizing of decision, centralizing
authority, centralizing the budget responsibility is absolutely
critical to getting the Federal Government into an orderly set of
activities or orderly set of approaches.
Just take a single example. If you happen to be a police officer in
Epping, NH, and you have a sense that you notice something that isn't
right, you know it isn't necessarily criminal but you think there is
something wrong, something that might just, because of your intuition
as an officer or your
knowledge as an officer, might need to be reported, you can call your
State police or you can call the FBI or you can call the U.S. attorney,
but there really is no central clearinghouse for knowledge. There is no
one-stop shopping. If you as a fire chief want to get ready in Epping,
NH, for an event, you don't have a place to go for that one-stop
shopping where you can find out how you train your people, where they
go for training, what your support capabilities are going to be, who is
going to support you. This should exist within the Federal Government.
It does not. This is an attempt to try to get some of that into a form
that will be effective and responsive to people.

Of course, when you get to the end of the line--we have talked about
all the technical things we can do as a government and all the
important things we can do to try to restructure ourselves and commit
the resources in order to improve our capacity to address this, but in
the end it comes down to a commitment of our people, understanding that
we are confronting a fundamental evil, an evil of proportions equal to
any that we have confronted as a nation, and that we as a nation cannot
allow those who are behind this evil to undermine our way of life and
our commitment to democracy.
We must make every effort, leave no stone unturned--regrettably,
these people live under stones to a large degree--to find these people
who are responsible and to bring them to justice. But we also must make
every effort to recognize that in doing that, we cannot allow them to
win by losing our basic rights and the commitment to openness as a
society and a democracy. Then they would be successful, if we were to
do that.
So as we rededicate ourselves, as we all continue to see the image of
those buildings collapsing and the horror that followed--and we all
obviously want retribution and we are all angered by it--we have to
react in the context of a democracy. We have to pursue this in the
context of what has made us great, which is that we are a people who
unite when we confront such a threat. We unite and we focus our
energies on defeating that threat. But we don't allow that threat to
win by undermining our basic rights and our openness as a society.
In summary, I appreciate all the efforts of the chairman of the
committee to bring forward a bill which, regrettably, understood that
this type of event could occur and attempted to address it even before
it did. Now I think it is important we pass this legislation. It does
empower key agencies within the Government who have a responsibility to
address the issue of counterterrorism not only with the dollars but
with the policies they need in order to be more successful in their
efforts.
There is still a great deal to do. There is still a lot of changes we
need to make, a lot of changes in the law we should make in order to
empower these agencies to be even more effective. Certainly there is
going to be a great deal more funds that have to be committed than what
are in this bill in order to give these agencies--the FBI and the State
Department--the resources they need to be strong and be successful in
pursuing the people who committed this horrific act and in protecting
Americans around the world and especially protecting our freedoms and
liberties here in the United States.
This bill is clearly a step in the right direction. I congratulate
the chairman for bringing it forward.

Wired had an article about tech news sites picking up the slack, and mentioned that Slashdot was getting up to 60 hits per second. The next part confused me, though:

"That is substantially less than major news sites. The Lycos news network -- of which Wired News is a part -- receives about 115 page views per second each day."

I can see how the entire Lycos news network can get that much traffic, but did any one site get hit that much? I haven't heard any other news site statistics.

Its a good article. Seeing steganographyin (more obvious) use is kinda weird. Check out some of the results of this google search. Read a few of the first hits and see what you notice.

Phil

According to Wired, Bin Laden didn't use cryptography so much as he used steganography. Story here. It's more creative than cryptography because it embeds a message within another message.

seems that when the cops tapped his phone line they got something they didn't expect: his dad was taking out a contract on someone.

more here

Well, I was just talking about mangling all images so that steganographic content was no longer recoverable, not detection nor decoding of it - you'd be altering images which had no hidden data, too, but it shouldn't be noticeable. You do bring up an interesting point about steganography which can withstand lossy conversions such as printing and rescanning.

I would guess that a method which could withstand such manipulations would have a lower bandwidth -- there'd have to be some kind of error correction/redundancy in those methods. I've heard of watermarking schemes which are extremely resilient, but a watermark contains considerably less information than a steganographically encoded image.

I'm no expert in information theory, but shouldn't there be a way to measure how much information would be able to survive a filter? Would it be enough to prevent hiding of reconnaisance photos and maps?

Yes, Linux is so inconvenient. I mean, it's not like a kindergartner could ever figure it out! Besides, Windows is much more S e c u r e anyway.

There are several stories around about the terrorist attacks, what the net has to do with the trail for clues, and what we're looking at in the future. To start, news.com has a story about searches conducted at ISP's. Earthlink was reportedly served with an FISA warrant, which an Earthlink representative called "equivalent to a wiretap." The only people allowed to request an FISA warrant are the directors of the CIA and FBI, and the secretaries of state and defense. All but one of the 7,539 FISA warrant applications since 1978 have been approved. According to the ACLU, not one instance can be found where the target of a FISA warrant was allowed to review the initial warrant application, as it is granted by a secret panel of seven federal judges. Msnbc has more information about the FBI and its searches, with AOL, Yahoo, and Earthlink confirming that they've been cooperating, and Microsoft only saying they "regularly work with law enforcement." Wired has more detail about "a major network service provider" saying that the FBI showed up on Tuesday "with a couple of Carnivores, requesting permission to place them in our core, along with offers to actually pay for circuits and costs." The most troubling quote, from the same anonymous source, is "I know that they are getting a lot of 'OKs' because they made it a point to mention that they would only be covering our core for a few days, while their 'main boxes were being set up at the Tier 1 carriers' -- scary." An anonymous engineer at Hotmail indicated they "are cooperating with their expedited requests for information about a few specific accounts." Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich made a commentary (RealAudio only) on last night's Marketplace on NPR about terrorism and the future of privacy. He closes with a few chilling sentences. "To gain back more of our security, we will give up more of our privacy. We'll do it gladly, if that's the price we have to pay to counter terror. The willing loss of our privacy is likely to be one of the major consequences of the horror that occured September 11th, 2001."

Apparently ISP's are allowing the installation of Carnivore. They say it's only for a few days, but we'll see how long that claim holds up...

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00. html

It's pretty damn nice to see that *someone* recognizes that the value of the internet in such a horrendous crisis doesn't come from one or two companies posting information, but from hundreds and thousands of... dare I say it... heroic individuals who do their little insignifcant part to take care of people.

Kudos to sites like Slashdot and ESPN. Super Kudos to all the individuals with webcams and mirror sites. You guys did the country and world an invaluable service yesterday. As someone who is separated by thousands of miles from the horror, I thank you for giving us a information line into what really happened.

Check this: Wired Article

Are we referring to the "innocent people" who were dancing in the streets celebrating this "victory" ? Somehow I am finding it hard to be sympathetic to their plight, I guess I already used up all my sympathy on people who deserved it.

No, Rambo. We're referring to innocent people like these women. These people are not responsible for today's actions, and do not deserve to die.