Clips June 12, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips June 12, 2002

ARTICLES

Pr. William Libraries To Keep Web Filters
Stalker tech
Playing games with free speech
Battle.net goes to war
Candy from strangers
Getting a lock on broadband
Union officials question proposed Trademark Office layoffs
Microsoft Issues Warning on Flaw
Net Music That's a Steal but Not Stolen
Cel-Sci Says Hoax Release Carried on News Wire
'Digital Corps' Job-Swapping Plan Advances in Congress
Cybersecurity guide delayed
E-grants project readied
Partnership pitches wireless
Career Channels  Job Openings
Simple password holds the key
FBI campaign against Einstein revealed
Billions in fraudulent jobless benefits paid
Congress calls up Internet domain name company
Romance, risk abound in Russia's e-mail order bride industry
Africa's digital dreams
'Big brother' Britain extends its snooping powers
Teens are keen to pay online
Wall Street aims to thwart criminals with database
FTC vows to keep closer tabs on privacy breaches






********************
Washington Post
Pr. William Libraries To Keep Web Filters
By Leef Smith

Prince William County library officials say they intend to continue 
limiting what adults can see on the Internet, even though a panel of three 
federal judges recently ruled that such restrictions violate patrons' free 
speech rights.

The policy, adopted by Prince William's library Board of Trustees in March, 
places "limited" filters on computers for adults, to block obscene 
material, and more restrictive filters on computers for children.

County Library Director Dick Murphy said the idea was to block "Web sites 
that would be obscene and would not be considered protected speech."

The policy has drawn the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, 
which said it is "blatantly unconstitutional" and contradicts several court 
decisions that have found filter technology to be unsophisticated and 
capable of blocking legitimate sites on the Internet.

"In case after case, the first problem the courts have identified is that 
there does not seem to exist a filtering device that can discern the 
difference between Web sites that are protected under the First Amendment 
and those that are not," said Kent Willis, a spokesman for the ACLU's 
Virginia chapter. "If Prince William says they've magically come up with a 
filtering device that can detect obscenity, that seems somewhat fantastic. 
. . . They're operating in contradiction to every single ruling that exists."

Two weeks ago, a judicial panel in Philadelphia struck down the federal 
Children's Internet Protection Act, which required public libraries to 
install Internet filters by July 1 or risk losing federal money for 
computers and Internet access.

The panel said the law violated the First Amendment because filters 
inadvertently cut off access to legitimate Internet sites. Justice 
Department officials have said they are considering an appeal to the 
Supreme Court.

Angela Lemmon Horan, a senior assistant county attorney for Prince William, 
said library officials researched Internet use in county libraries for four 
years. They tried less restrictive ways of keeping offensive material at 
bay, but they still received complaints from patrons that it was 
accessible, she said. They also studied a 1998 federal court ruling that 
struck down the use of filters in Loudoun County's public libraries and 
decided that they were in compliance with the law, added Horan, who has 
been advising the library board.

The July deadline in the federal law influenced the decision to use 
filters, Horan said. The board also felt that it had a responsibility to 
the community, she said.

"We serve citizens, and they're concerned," she said. "That's one set of 
considerations."

The board will be watching to see whether the Supreme Court takes up the issue.

"They're the final decision-making body in this country, and we'll probably 
wait and see what they say," said Vera Au, a member of the board, which 
probably will discuss the issue when it meets this month. "We'll have to 
see if we need to revise the [policy] or if what we've decided is 
concurrent" with the high court's opinion.

If the court lets stand the decision that filters violate the First 
Amendment, "then we've all got to go back and think," Horan said.

Last month's federal court decision in Philadelphia is the latest in a 
series of rulings on what librarians can and cannot do to block patrons 
from obscenity on the Internet.

That ruling was a huge relief for libraries across the nation, many of 
which faced a choice between following a law they opposed or losing needed 
federal money.

Libraries still are allowed to use filters for young children if parents 
request them, as many do, but that remains a local decision. In Loudoun 
County, for example, parents decide what level of Internet access their 
children can have. Fairfax County does not have filtering options.

Libraries that adopted filtering policies to get federal funds could be 
forced to repeal their decisions or face legal action, Willis said.

"I don't think there's any doubt that if Prince William doesn't voluntarily 
withdraw this policy -- if the . . . law is found unconstitutional by the 
Supreme Court -- that there will be a legal challenge," Willis said.
*************************
Salon.com
Stalker tech
Students at the University of California at San Diego are tracking their 
friends' locations with PDAs.
By Randy Dotinga



June 11, 2002  |  SAN DIEGO -- It's 11 p.m. Do you know where your 
boyfriend is? If he attends the University of California at San Diego, 
finding him may be as easy as turning on a PDA.

The university is equipping hundreds of students with personal digital 
assistants that allow them to track each other's location from parking lot 
to lecture hall to cafeteria. The technology is sophisticated enough to 
pinpoint where a person is in a building -- say, a dorm -- within a margin 
of error of one floor.

No one is forcing students to use the $549 Hewlett-Packard Jordana PDAs, 
which are provided for free, or requiring them to allow their buddies to 
watch them wander across campus on a zoomable map. But students still worry 
about protecting themselves from stalkers, university administrators, FBI 
agents and nosy parkers.

"I don't necessarily want even my friends knowing where I am," says Ben 
Shapiro, a 22-year-old senior who is designing the project's privacy rules. 
"Maybe students aren't out of the closet and don't want people to know 
they're going to the Gay & Lesbian Resource Center. Maybe you're cheating 
on your girlfriend and you don't want her to know you're in somebody else's 
dorm room. It's creepy Big Brother."

Shapiro is no stranger to speaking his mind. In his freshman year, he and 
the ACLU successfully sued UCSD after he got in trouble for posting a 
handwritten sign that said "Fuck Netanyahu and Pinochet" on his dorm room 
window. But Shapiro actually likes the location-tracking software despite 
his misgivings. "If the system has enough protections for people's privacy 
and enough people use it, it could be really great," he says.

The official goal of the PDA project is to test whether location trackers 
will encourage students to find each other more easily on a sprawling and 
rapidly growing campus. "What used to feel like a small town is starting to 
feel like a big city," said William Griswold, a computer science professor 
who is overseeing the project.

The PDAs detect each other through the university's Wi-Fi (Wireless 
Fidelity) network, the same radio wave-based system that allows lap-toppers 
to go online from coffeehouses and airports.

The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student 
at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global 
positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by 
comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to 
various Wi-Fi antennas.

The software only allows a person to track the location of another user if 
both agree. If Shapiro doesn't want his best friend to track him, he can 
leave him off his PDA's equivalent of an America Online "buddy list." 
According to Griswold, the location data is protected by the standard SSL 
Internet encryption technology.

But critics are skeptical. "They have created a security risk for every 
single student who uses the software," says Nick Van Borst, a 25-year-old 
senior majoring in world literature who criticized the tracker system in a 
university magazine. "People are hacking things on campus all the time, and 
there's always these crazy viruses going around. Somebody's going to want 
to (hack) it just for the hell of it to see if they can."

Hackers don't even need to be on the campus to invade the PDA location 
tracker system. Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check 
where their friends are. The system offers both a zoomable map of the 
campus -- with moving dots representing their friends -- and a text list of 
where people are. If students program their PDAs properly, their buddies 
can also track their locations around the world whenever they log into a 
Wi-Fi network.

System administrators can gain access to the locations of students or 
employees equipped with the PDAs, although designers hope to eventually 
make that impossible. Law enforcement officers could also conceivably try 
to track someone without their knowledge, but "it's not our intention to be 
a party to activities like that," Griswold says.

The PDA project will get bigger. UCSD has a few dozen more donated PDAs to 
give away to students, and it hopes to equip 330 freshmen with them this 
fall when it opens a sixth mini-college on campus.

Hewlett-Packard, which has provided the PDAs for free, wants to know what 
college students do with the devices, Griswold says. "What 18- or 
20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be 
doing with them tomorrow."

That's what worries privacy advocates who are already monitoring the 
growing use of location-tracking GPS microchips in cellphones.

Trouble looms around the corner "even if there's a rock-solid privacy 
policy, even if certain safeguards are built in," says Beth Givens, 
director of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. "Whenever 
someone develops a new service that uses personally identifiable 
information, there will be in the future other uses found for that 
information. You can count on it."

UCSD officials contend that students know what they're getting into. The 
PDA project is an experiment so users must sign waivers before using the 
devices, Griswold said. "The approach we've taken is to put control into 
the hands of the user and explain to them what it means. The students at 
this university are very bright, and we expect them to all be able to 
understand the things we say to them."

Some students don't even bother looking at the waiver. They turn down the 
new technology for a very old-fashioned reason. "They're afraid that if 
they break them, we'll charge them for it," Griswold said.

For now, at least, both their pocketbooks and their privacy will remain 
intact.
*******************
Salon.com
Playing games with free speech
A federal judge says computer games don't deserve First Amendment 
protection. His decision is wrong, stupid and dangerous.
By Wagner James Au



May 6, 2002  |  "[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything 
else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games 
have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion 
pictures."

-- U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr.


Saving democracy sometimes means having to wade toward the shore, while 
fascists unload hell on you from the beachhead. Which means you usually get 
killed. But you make that run, again and again, because the goal is worth 
all those lives you lose in the churning sea.

I could have learned this truth about D-Day from a film like "Saving 
Private Ryan" or a book like "Citizen Soldier." But I'm now grasping it 
just as vividly from "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault," a computer game.

While the game's Omaha Beach level is derived from the opening of "Ryan," 
it's a fully interactive re-creation. The object here is to get across the 
Normandy beach, or die. You die a lot. You're forced to repeat the process 
-- strafed every step of the way, men screaming all around you -- over and 
over (and over) again, until you're finally able to reach the bunkers. It's 
a common conceit in games: play, die, reload, and ride the karmic wheel of 
kick-ass, until you get it right. But what "Allied Assault's" developers 
have done is use this feature to express an explicit point about World War 
II, and what it took to win it.

However, according to a federal judge, this cannot be happening -- there is 
no larger purpose for computer games. On April 19, Judge Stephen N. 
Limbaugh Sr. decided that games weren't speech at all, and thus deserve no 
First Amendment protection.

At issue was a St. Louis ordinance that requires parental consent before 
children under 17 can buy or play violent or sexually explicit video games. 
The Interactive Digital Software Association had asked for a summary 
dismissal of the ordinance, arguing that it violated the First Amendment. 
Limbaugh disagreed.

How significant is the ruling? The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the 
7th Circuit has already ruled, in a separate case involving a similar 
ordinance, that games are indeed speech. According to Lee Tien, senior 
staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Limbaugh's ruling 
doesn't possess sufficient legal kung fu to take down the higher court's 
decision.

"Technically," says Tien, "no other court is bound by [Limbaugh's] 
decision, unlike the decision by the 7th Circuit, which binds many district 
courts in that circuit."

At least for now. "But if it is appealed and upheld," adds Tien, "then 
you'll have a decision of equal weight to [the 7th Circuit's ruling]."

And that could be a disaster for anyone who wants to see games evolve into 
a medium every bit as culturally relevant as movies or books. It is, of 
course, indisputable that the world of gaming is replete with titles that 
have little redeeming value, just as it is true for every other artistic 
medium. But as Medal of Honor and other games demonstrate, computer gaming 
has created a new means of conveying complex, relevant ideas. One more 
uninformed ruling, and the potential of this medium could be curtailed even 
further, by legislators with elections to win, and ideologues who've 
pincered it from both sides of the political spectrum. The stakes really 
are the future of free expression; and as this ruling makes plain, the need 
for the game industry to mount a preemptive attack is past due. The time 
for a counterstrike is now.

Limbaugh's deliberations were based in part on his review of four games: 
"Fear Effect," "Doom," "Mortal Kombat" and "Resident Evil" -- though the 
court opinion misnames two of them as "Mortal Combat" and "Resident of Evil 
Creek."

"I think it is obvious that such a small sample is not conducive to a 
thoughtful analysis," says EFF's Tien. (Not to mention that three of the 
games are 6 to 9 years old -- quite hoary, by the young medium's standards.)

"First of all," says Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's Comparative Media 
Studies Program, "the decision is remarkably ill-informed. ... Imagine if I 
took a look at four books, all within the same genre, to determine whether 
literature was worthy of First Amendment protection. ... The judge even 
manages to misidentify or mangle the titles he cites, suggesting that he 
didn't look at them very closely."

In fairness, Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software 
Association, repeated the "Resident of Evil Creek" misnomer when I asked 
him why only four games were presented to the court.

"A tape with excerpts of these games was ... submitted to the court by the 
county [of St. Louis] as part of the record," Lowenstein says. The IDSA 
legal team countered the tape with scripts to video games, he says, that 
emphasized plot and story lines aimed at proving that games qualified as 
speech. But, with the background of the 7th Circuit Court's favorable 
decision as a guide, "It was frankly inconceivable that this issue was in 
question." (Messages left with Limbaugh's office, asking if his honor had 
actually played any of these games, or if he had considered reviewing other 
games, were not returned by press time.)

From his ruling, Limbaugh appears to believe that no amount of contextual 
information, or additional narrative, in a game is enough to make it a work 
of art or expression worthy of the name "free speech."

"The court admits that these 'scripts' were creative and very detailed," 
Limbaugh says in his ruling. "However, this 'background' expression does 
not make every automobile, gadget, or machine created, a form of 
expression." In other words, any element that seemed like speech, in other 
words -- plot, dialogue, and so on -- was inconsequential to expressing 
anything substantial outside the game itself. And this was especially true 
in the narrow selection of games that Judge Limbaugh inspected. "[T]he 
Court simply did not find the 'extensive plot and character development' 
referred to by the plaintiffs in the games it viewed."

But is that enough to deny games their rightful constitutional honor? EFF's 
amicus brief for the 7th Circuit case argues that while the speech in a 
horror-themed video game is indeed trivial, it's no more so than a 
comparable gore-fest from Hollywood:

"To describe the artistic or communicative elements of such games as 
inconsequential, prompts the question, 'as compared to what?'" Certainly 
anyone familiar with the modern horror film genre would not suggest that 
this body of work contributes much to further the practice of deliberative 
democracy."

That may be, but it's hardly a banner you can rally the troops to: Computer 
games -- almost as important as schlocky drive-in crap!

The argument also seems to accept the assumption that as a communicative 
form, games can only rise to the level of exploitation film. "It is 
certainly possible for video games to convey political expression, 
criticism, etc.," Tien expands. "But as a general rule EFF does not like 
arguing that 'X can express political views, therefore X is speech.' First 
Amendment protections are not and should not be limited to political speech."

No doubt. But that still seems beside the point: As with pornography and 
gratuitously violent films, censorship inevitably targets media that's 
perceived to have nothing of value to say. (The St. Louis ordinance is 
specifically designed to regulate violent games that lack "serious 
literary, artistic, political or scientific value as a whole for minors.")

But even a brief review of several notable games from recent years suggests 
how wrongheaded that formulation really is.

At one point in Ion Storm's Deus Ex, the player (you are an American 
counterterrorist agent) must acquire important information from a Hong Kong 
bartender to progress further in the game. To talk with him, you're 
presented with a conversation tree -- a series of statements the player can 
make in the dialogue. (A common interface in gaming.) The bartender has a 
decidedly leftist bent, and he's not buying the player's naive faith in the 
Constitution. Accordingly, your options in the conversation tree are now: 
"I'll take a drink," "I'll get a drink later" and "The separation of powers 
acknowledges the petty ambitions of individuals; that's its strength."

In Lionhead Studios' Black & White, the player takes on the role of a god, 
who must care for the needs of his worshipful tribe. But as the game goes 
on, these needs expand, forcing the player to micromanage his or her 
everyday wants ever more attentively. According to Richard Evans, the 
game's artificial intelligence programmer -- who based much of it on 
concepts he learned while he was a philosophy student at Cambridge -- this 
was entirely intended by Peter Molyneux, the game's lead designer.

"Peter wanted the villagers to be increasingly reliant," Evans once told 
me, "so that the more you helped them, the less self-sufficient they are, 
so that you are drawn into a spiral of dependency. He was trying to make a 
point about human nature."

In Electronic Arts' "Majestic," the player must unearth a decades-old 
conspiracy by uncovering clues found in e-mails, instant messages and other 
media. Early on, you receive a fax, detailing one character's personal 
background -- whose motives up until then seem entirely benign. The fax 
reveals that he was actually the founder of a crack cocaine distribution 
network in the '80s, set up to funnel drug profits for financing the Contra 
rebellion in Nicaragua. Important to the game, the original author of this 
element meant to dramatize the controversial but important allegations that 
the civil war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government was partially 
financed by crack dealing in Los Angeles -- which the CIA possibly 
suspected, but did little to interdict. (I should know: I'm the one who 
wrote the fax.)

Similar examples of gameplay designed to function as social commentary are 
evident in "Max Payne," "The Sims" and "State of Emergency," to name a few 
more. (And with the possible exception of "The Sims," all contain violence 
graphic enough to run afoul of the St. Louis ordinance.) And contrary to 
Limbaugh's views, the expressions are not inconsequential, but are 
inextricably woven into the experience of the game itself.

And at least one of them confounds Limbaugh's cheeky comparison of video 
games with traditional games like backgammon, or baseball. In The Sims, 
there are no discrete conditions for "winning" or "losing" the game; the 
only goal is what you choose to do with your Sims, and the narratives you 
construct for them -- which vary wildly from player to player. (This is 
sometimes referred to in the industry as a "sandbox" game, and it's also a 
strong aspect to Black & White.)

The pity is, we can name only a few more. Because as it happens, Limbaugh 
is pretty much right that most speech in games really is inconsequential, 
with characters and plots that are largely an artifact of marketing, more 
than anything else, derived from the shuffling about of recycled archetypes 
with the necessary Q-rating. (In this game, you're a 
warrior/wizard/officer/king/commander, and you're the only one who can 
stop/escape/surpass/overrun/destroy an evil race/army/mysterious 
entity/monstrous horde/dictator that threatens your 
self/society/kingdom/planet/entire known universe.)

The industry has largely let itself decay to this state, while many in it 
seem oblivious of the larger stakes. In an apparent slam at fellow 
developers who strive for something higher, for example, "Doom" co-creator 
John Carmack recently announced, "We're doing entertainment. Saying it's 
art is a kind of sophistry from people who want to aggrandize our industry."

He's ignorant of at least one more motive: building a shield to protect the 
industry from oncoming waves of regulation-minded civic leaders, still 
unaware that games contain meaningful speech. (And who can really blame 
them, when they're asked to find the meaning in games like, well, "Doom"?)

"The computer and video game industry is in a transitional state," says 
MIT's Henry Jenkins, "finding their vocabulary, beginning to develop more 
aesthetic and thematic ambition. ... It is at such moments of transition 
that the First Amendment protections are perhaps most important."

The judiciary is not Jenkins' main concern. "This judge was simply off the 
mark and is likely to be overturned. ... Politicians are going to be a 
tougher sell because they really aren't interested in finding out the 
truth. They don't hold hearings; they hold show trials." And they'll hold 
them, until a generational shift kicks in: "until there is a significant 
portion of the public who grew up playing games and who are now part of the 
voting population."

But what to do, during the 10 or 20 years before that happens? Jenkins 
himself runs a program aimed at expanding the power of games as an 
instructional tool, while the nonprofit International Game Developers 
Association has launched an effort to create a dialogue between game 
developers and academia. Both highly laudable -- but, again, their main 
yield comes in the long term, with no immediate plan against these constant 
incursions.

But there is an opportunity for another approach. In old Hollywood, the 
studios regularly produced a few films every year whose main intent was to 
dramatize social issues and give their more ambitious artists room to 
breathe. Profit was secondary (but hardly impossible, especially when Oscar 
dividends kicked in).

Imagine what could happen if the game industry followed this example. 
Successful game publishers could invest a portion of their profits into 
games conceived with explicit social and artistic goals in mind. The ideas 
are out there, nurtured by designers aching for the chance to develop them, 
but fairly certain that their employers would never risk the investment on 
something so incomprehensible as having something important to say. The 
obstacles are steep, even for seasoned developers: Despite his stellar 
track record, Will Wright had to fight executives to secure financing for 
"The Sims." "They were all sure," he once noted, "that it would suck." 
(This, for a title that's become the most popular computer game of all time.)

Is something like this happening now? Jason Della Rocca, program director 
for the IGDA, can't come up with a single example.

"Sadly, I am not aware of any publisher that dedicates resources to these 
types of agendas. ... In the end," he suggests, "it comes down to economic 
and prestige factors. If our media was more critical and there was a demand 
for such content, we would certainly see more of it."

But as a recent Los Angeles Times article makes clear (if a much earlier 
Salon story had not), the gaming press is too beholden to game publishers, 
too cowed by their largesse to offer much objection when the curtain is 
parted on yet another iteration of an expansion pack to a sequel from a 
series of a genre that hasn't strayed outside its preconceived borders in 
years.

I'd love to be proved wrong. Because until the industry is willing to make 
those risks, we're doomed to flounder on the ramp, while the Judge 
Limbaughs of the world peer down at us through their gun sights, and slam 
the hammer back.
*********************
Salon.com
Battle.net goes to war
Is an open-source version of Blizzard Entertainment's online gaming service 
an illegal copyright violation, or just a good example of how the Internet 
works?
By Howard Wen

April 18, 2002  |  Build a better mouse trap, catch more mice. Build a 
better online gaming server, get yourself sued. That is what's happening to 
the developers of bnetd, a software program for Web servers that duplicates 
the functionality of Battle.net, Blizzard Entertainment's hugely popular 
online gaming service.

Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, two of the lead developers on bnetd, say all 
they ever wanted to do was create a place to play best-selling Blizzard 
games like Starcraft and Diablo in a friendly online atmosphere free of the 
technical bugs that plague Battle.net.

Anyone who has ventured on to Battle.net to wage war against aliens or to 
hack and slash through dungeons is likely to appreciate the sentiment. 
Battle.net's popularity has been one of its great drawbacks. Frequent 
crashes and slow response times due to a huge crush of players -- 
especially right after the release of a new game -- can often make 
Battle.net an unpleasant experience. The technical problems are exacerbated 
by social malfunctions: the malicious killing of some gamers by other 
players and the proliferation of hacks that give some players unfair 
advantages.

It all added up, recalls Combs, into making Battle.net a scene that "just 
wasn't a fun place to be." So, in classic geek fashion, coders like Combs 
wrote their own, free software version of Battle.net. With bnetd's code 
anyone could set up their own server for playing Blizzard games, and since 
the code was open to the general public, they could even modify it 
themselves if they so pleased.

For Blizzard, fun isn't the issue. The problems are copyright infringement 
and the promotion of piracy. And with a highly anticipated new game, 
Warcraft III, poised for launch this summer, the company is playing 
hardball. On Feb. 19, Blizzard sent a cease-and-desist e-mail to Internet 
Gateway, the ISP that hosts the Web site for bnetd. In language that is 
fast becoming the scourge of the Internet, the letter declared that 
"pursuant to the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act" 
(DMCA), the bnetd code was "circumvention technology" which permitted the 
violation of Blizzard's copyrights.

Specifically, Blizzard charges that bnetd allows the use of pirated copies 
of its games to be played on servers running bnetd. (In comparison, pirated 
Blizzard games won't work with Battle.net.)

In response, the bnetd team, unable to face the legal costs of contesting 
Blizzard in court, removed the bnetd code from the bnetd.org Web site. But 
this did not satisfy Blizzard. On April 5, Blizzard filed suit against 
Internet Gateway and bnetd.org's system administrator, Tim Jung. (Other 
defendants, perhaps those who contributed to bnetd's code, may be added 
later.) This time around, Blizzard did not cite the DMCA. Instead, Blizzard 
now says that bnetd serves as a way to allow unauthorized public 
performances of Blizzard's copyrighted work (its games).

It is unclear exactly what the reasoning was behind the change in legal 
tack. Blizzard's legal team may have decided that the charge that the bnetd 
code itself was a copyright violation would not stick -- the code 
"emulates" the functionality of Battle.net, but it does not actually copy 
any of Battle.net's code. It's also possible that the new legal language 
was a pre-emptive attempt to protect a new, subscription-based version of 
Battle.net that will debut for the upcoming World of Warcraft.

In a statement sent by e-mail to Salon, Michael Morhaime, Blizzard 
Entertainment's president and co-founder said, "We always have been and 
will continue to be diligent in protecting our trademarks and copyrighted 
materials. We are convinced that certain members of the bnetd project 
illegally copied parts of our code and bypassed the game's CD-Key 
authentication process. We further believe that emulators damage our 
efforts to prevent piracy, and they create safe havens for players using 
illegal copies of our products."

Whatever the case, to some observers, the new charges are even worse than 
the original.

To say that bnetd allows unauthorized public performances implies that it 
is a copyright violation just to create software that "interoperates," or 
is otherwise compatible, with Blizzard. Interoperability -- which enables 
software to work with other software -- is a core principle of how the 
Internet, or any computer network, works.

The stakes are high enough that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has 
joined the fight, agreeing to provide legal representation for the bnetd 
team. Bnetd thus joins the fast-growing list of other software causes 
célèbres -- Dmitry Sklyarov, 2600 Magazine, Napster -- that have emerged in 
the hotly contested war over intellectual property and the Internet. How 
the Net works in the future could be decided in skirmishes like these.

"It is unfortunate that the state of U.S. law has fallen to such a low as 
to affect programmers in this way," says Crittenden, 34, who lives in 
Lithicum, Md. If the bnetd team happens to lose its case, he speculates, 
"Any company could create their own mini-monopoly on network 
communications. It could bring down the interoperability of the Internet."

Bnetd's roots go back to the 1998 launch of the real-time strategy game 
Starcraft. Mark Baysinger, a Starcraft fan who was reportedly dissatisfied 
with the experience of playing the game on Battle.net, created a program 
called Starhack that duplicated the functions of Battle.net. Baysinger also 
received a cease-and-desist letter from Blizzard, but after a few weeks of 
back and forth, no legal action resulted.

Baysinger eventually moved on to other things, but his decision to 
"copyleft" his code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) ensured that 
other coders could pick up where he left off.

The basic principle involved reverse engineering the functionality of 
Battle.net by intercepting the packets of information that a game on a 
user's computer would send to Battle.net and figuring out what those 
packets were supposed to do. According to some legal experts, such reverse 
engineering is not in and of itself illegal, although the language of the 
DMCA has muddied the waters considerably on the question of what is and 
what isn't allowed.

As for Blizzard, the company's statement declares flatly that "it would 
have been impossible for a third party to recreate specific authentication 
code embedded in their games by analyzing or 'packet sniffing' network 
traffic between a Blizzard game and Battle.net." According to Blizzard, the 
lawsuit filed on April 5, 2002, "alleges that members of the bnetd project 
violated copyright law by illegally copying portions of code from 
Blizzard's computer games."

Specifically, the statement declares that "in order to make the bnetd 
software work, certain programmers at bnetd copied Blizzard code relating 
to password and username authentication, and incorporated it into the bnetd 
server program."

But according to the bnetd developers, there was never any intent to 
encourage piracy or to otherwise financially gain at Blizzard's expense.

The 27-year-old Combs, one of the programmers who picked up the reins from 
Baysinger, says a big motivation behind the creation of bnetd was to 
facilitate private gaming sessions among friends and online colleagues who 
would be respectful of one another. When the first Starcraft game was 
released in 1998, he says, problems soon became apparent with its Internet 
gameplay feature. Many players on the Battle.net servers seemed to thrive 
on abusing others. Playing with strangers often resulted in unpleasant 
surprises: It wasn't atypical for the person you were teamed with as a 
partner to unexpectedly switch sides and become your opponent (that wasn't 
intended as a feature of Starcraft's gameplay on Battle.net). The use of 
program hacks, which let some players cheat, was also a rampant problem.

"Now, I'm sure it wasn't all bad," says Combs, "but I know several people 
that were burned early on and never went back. My personal reason for 
working on bnetd was to provide a nicer gaming environment for my friends."

The open-source nature of the project has other implications as well, which 
may have inspired some of the legal problems. In February, Blizzard 
released a beta, or test, version of Warcraft III that could be played only 
on Battle.net. Shortly after the beta release, some programmers began an 
offshoot of bnetd called WarForge that would allow Warcraft III beta 
testers to play without jumping through Battle.net's hoops.

But many of the bnetd developers say they opposed adding Warcraft III 
support before the game's official release (tentatively slated for this 
summer), because they were concerned that it would encourage the pirating 
of the beta for playing on servers running bnetd.

"We had nothing to do with the addition of Warcraft III support," says 
Crittenden. "[But] we are an open-source project and anyone is free to 
[develop] their own version, and this is what WarForge did. We don't agree 
with their use of hacks to get Warcraft III to work."

Did WarForge's appearance trigger the latest round of legal fire-fighting? 
Blizzard isn't saying, but along with the upcoming release of Warcraft III, 
Blizzard is reportedly planning a new World of Warcraft multiplayer online 
version of the game that will be subscription only.

In any event, now that Blizzard has turned on the legal heat, bnetd has 
become a symbol of a fight that means a little bit more than just the 
opportunity to play Diablo online without getting killed by another player: 
It has become the latest hot-button for intellectual property and the DMCA. 
So the bnetd developers, with help from EFF, are going to fight.

"I have complained about the DMCA regularly for years," says Combs, "so it 
is only right that I would not roll over when it was waved in front of me."

"[The cease-and-desist e-mail] was one of the more egregious examples of 
overreaching we've seen under copyright law and the anti-circumvention 
provisions of the DMCA," says Cindy Cohn, a legal director with the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We at EFF have been alarmed at the growing 
number of cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and 
claims of copyright infringement have been misused to try to scare people 
out of exercising their rights. We saw Blizzard's letter as another of 
those, and one that clearly had no foundation in the law."

EFF, which has also taken a lead role in defending Russian programmer 
Dmitry Sklyarov on charges of violating the DMCA, decided to jump into the 
fray.

"We thought that the attack -- [on] a volunteer project that simply sought 
to create an interoperable computer program -- could have broad 
ramifications for the future of reverse engineering, especially for the 
free-software and open-source communities," says Cohn.

Combs and Crittenden say they have been receiving strong support from other 
programmers and software developers. The few negative responses sent their 
way have been based on misunderstandings about bnetd's purpose.

"Many seemed to think that we were simply around to let people who had 
pirated copies [of Blizzard games] play against each other, which isn't the 
case," says bnetd developer Crittenden.

To address this matter the bnetd developers would like to offer Blizzard a 
concession: to include code that would make bnetd servers work only with 
legitimate copies of Blizzard games, not pirated ones. Doing this, though, 
would require cooperation from Blizzard, since such a security check would 
need to access Blizzard's online database that identifies legitimate copies 
of its games.

However, Cohn points out that putting in anti-piracy measures isn't even 
something that the bnetd team is legally obligated to do: "The bnetd code 
has many reasonable uses that have nothing to do with piracy. It should not 
be banned just because it can also be used by infringers to play games. In 
fact, the bnetd code is even further away from piracy than the VCR. The VCR 
actually makes infringing copies. Here, the bnetd code doesn't do the 
infringing -- it just allows both infringing and noninfringing games to play."

"This reminds me a bit of the Aibo pet case, where Sony threatened one of 
its customers who wrote a computer program that made the Aibo do more 
tricks than Sony intended," says Cohn. "Fortunately, Sony had the wisdom to 
withdraw their threat once public outcry began. Here, Blizzard is suing its 
customers for making a server that has more functionality and provides a 
better experience -- by letting you play with just your friends and other 
things -- than they do."

Aside from the piracy issue, Combs says that he doesn't "understand how we 
are threatening [Blizzard's] business. Battle.net is a free service to 
anyone with a copy of any recent Blizzard game." Blizzard makes money from 
the games sold, whether they are used on Battle.net or not. Just as 
Battle.net exists to improve Blizzard's sales by adding value to its games, 
bnetd does the same, the bnetd developers argue.

But what happens if, as speculated, Blizzard turns Battle.net into a 
subscription-based service? The company's upcoming World of Warcraft will 
be a persistent online world where the gameplay runs nonstop, and for which 
players will probably need to pay. Combs says that even then Blizzard still 
needn't be concerned about bnetd. Updating and maintaining the gameplay for 
a persistent online world requires much more time and money than hobbyist 
programmers and gamers could ever provide.

However, he admits that bnetd does remove a large measure of Blizzard's 
control over its products. Through Battle.net, the company can keep track 
of a game's popularity and usage patterns, and force players to view 
advertisements hyping its upcoming products. Additionally, Blizzard can 
alter features of the games on Battle.net. When Blizzard decides that bots 
-- automated software assistants -- are no longer allowed, then that 
decision is final. When moderated private chat channels are disabled, there 
is no recourse. The bnetd developers feel that users should be able to 
choose whether they want to accept these changes or not.

While the EFF confidently believes that bnetd's chances of prevailing over 
Blizzard are "very good, and even better if Blizzard's customers begin to 
speak up," Cohn points out what could happen if things turn out otherwise: 
"If bnetd can be successfully sued, many other reverse engineering 
projects, both open source and not, are at risk."

A loss for bnetd could also have implications beyond emulation. 
Theoretically, it could affect companies and hobbyist programmers who 
create programs that are compatible with other products. The very concept 
of compatibility as a feature in software and hardware could be brought 
into question. And that's a loss that could be a bit more severe than the 
typical bloody ending to a game of Warcraft.
************************
Salon.com
Candy from strangers
Teen girls flash some skin on their "cam sites," and fans shower them with 
gifts. Who's exploiting whom?
By Katharine Mieszkowski

Aug. 13, 2001 | One of the favorite gifts that Charisma, 17, has gotten 
from a fan of her Web site was a "Fantasia" DVD trilogy. It was just what 
she wanted, because she'd asked for it on her Amazon.com wish list.

But that's nothing compared to the loot that a fellow "cam girl" friend has 
raked in off of hers: "Somebody bought her a really nice digital camera, a 
graphing calculator and a $100 gift certificate," Charisma says. Sheila, 
18, got a new $129 webcam, while "Katneko," 19, raked in teen reading 
classics like "Catcher in the Rye," "Of Mice and Men," "To Kill a 
Mockingbird," plus a Depeche Mode CD, a scanner and a $250 gift certificate 
to the site Fetish Factory.

The gifts came from total strangers and online friends alike, people the 
girls had gotten to know through their Web sites. Katneko's younger sister, 
15-year-old Brandi, was so impressed by all of the goodies arriving at 
their home from people the girls had never met in person that Brandi set up 
a personal page on her big sis's site so she could beg for her own loot. 
Brandi's pages bear this label: "underaged piece of ass." (Her sister 
quickly points out that this is a joke.) Among Brandi's heart's desires on 
her wish list: four Sailor Moon dolls.

Teen webcams have met the e-commerce version of the wedding registry -- the 
wish list. And the result of this virtual marriage is an online beg-fest 
that makes it easy to take candy from strangers on the Internet. Kids as 
young as 15 are getting into the act of asking for handouts online -- toy 
and books and CDs and, of course, webcams -- so their online fans can get 
an even better look at them.

"I don't think that it's weird that people I don't know buy things for me," 
writes the 17-year-old who calls herself "Perfekt" on her Web site. 
"They're gifts, and like all good things, acceptable. ;-)" Even so, Perfekt 
got so much booty from her fans that she has since taken down her wish 
list: "A lot of people were very generous -- too generous in my opinion -- 
around the holidays and the guilt was too much for me to swallow."

Cam sites range from simple photo galleries to elaborate diaries and art 
projects; some have live cameras and others just feature stills captured 
from video cameras. They're as diverse as the girls who create them -- and, 
in the grand tradition of their ancestor, Jennicam, they offer a strange 
mixture of distance and intimacy. There are cam boys too, but -- chalk it 
up to hetero-horndogging -- it's girls who rule in the popularity game of 
the cam portals, gathering fan clubs and shaking down gifts.

The wish list is the perfect tool for cam kids because it allows them to 
ask for exactly what they want and have it sent to their house without ever 
revealing a home address -- the e-commerce vendor, whether it's Abercrombie 
& Fitch or Amazon, doesn't reveal the "wisher's" location. So the 
relationship between the online pen pal or fan can remain entirely virtual, 
yet still produce the goods.

The Internet may not be, as it is so often caricatured, one big cesspool of 
pedophiles and pervs searching for unsuspecting and underage kids to prey 
upon. But the spectacle of teenagers displaying themselves online in 
exchange for material favors is something that could make anyone a little 
queasy. Still, in the search for online sugar daddies, young or old, it's 
the kids who understand what power they have -- through what they choose to 
reveal and what they conceal -- to titillate and suggest, with just a 
smile, or a bit of a tummy, or more.

The cam universe is "basically like high school blown up exponentially," 
says Marissa, 24 (old, by the standards of this world). "It's a huge 
popularity contest. Popularity rules." Some of the better-known cam girls 
have fan clubs with hundreds of members who swap photos and exchange e-mail 
with their idols. Earlier this year, the cam world even had its own version 
of the reality TV show "Survivor" -- called Survivorcam -- where 16 cam 
kids competed for $300 by completing various silly, bawdy and outrageous 
immunity challenges in front of their cams, some claiming to be as young as 
14. The Survivorcam motto: "Outpose. Outshine. Outwhore." Marissa won the 
contest, but was accused by other contestants of showing too much skin to 
do it.

Like everything else in the insular webcam community, the meaning and 
morality of the wish lists is hotly debated by the cam kids themselves. Are 
you a "cam whore" if you put up a wish list? If you don't show your tits, 
does that mean you're not "whoring for hits"? What if you put up a wish 
list, but don't show skin?

Katneko's site Linuxkitty self-consciously mocks some of the seductive 
come-ons of the cam world. Her cam and diary entries have won her 500 
members in her fan club, along with those copies of "Catcher in the Rye" 
and other teen classics, but, she says, "The Internet community views me as 
untouchable because I won't get naked on my cam." She recently mused on her 
site: "Some people show tits, and some people don't. I wonder what it is 
I'm whoring to get presents exactly, since I'm not the showy-fleshy type of 
girl."

Other girls don't see wish lists that way. "To me, it's the newest form of 
prostitution," says Camilla, 19, from Trondheim, Norway, who has had her 
own site -- now at Wallflower.nu -- since she was 15. She doesn't have a 
wish list on her site because she sees such blatant solicitation as a quid 
pro quo transaction, where fans who give gifts expect something, like a 
topless or suggestive photo via e-mail, in return. None of the cam girls 
interviewed for this story copped to any such payoff.

Charisma says: "I never promise to do anything in return for the gifts 
other than to say thank you or send a thank you card. I'm not tricking 
people into sending me things. I think strangers on the Internet like to 
send things to other people because they're lonely, and they try to find 
their happiness in our surprise and thankfulness of their gifts. Sure, you 
could possibly argue that we're 'taking advantage' of these depressed 
people, but, if they aren't sending us gifts, they'd probably be doing 
something just as useless with their money."

Marissa, who in her offline life is a junior lobbyist in Washington, mocks 
the wish list phenomenon on her site. Her wish list parody begins: "If you 
love me, you'll buy me things." She says, "I'm boldly mocking the people 
who are buying people stuff, just totally mocking the prostitution angle of 
wish lists." Needless to say, no one has bought her anything.

Other cam kids abhor the begging and commercialism. "I don't have [a wish 
list] because I don't want strangers buying me stuff. My site isn't out 
there to make money for me, it's just for my pleasure only," says Ashley, 
17, a self-described vegetarian Virgo with three pets -- "two dogs and a 
13-year-old brother." Ashley gets so many e-mails from drooling fans 
begging for naked pictures of her that she offers this chilly FAQ on her 
site to fend them off. "I get annoyed by people asking about my appearance, 
and the same 20 questions repeatedly," she explains. This is from the same 
girl who has her fans show her the love by sending her digital images of 
themselves with the words "fuck frosty" in the picture, which she posts on 
her site. Go figure.

Actually, racier versions of such photos are the transgressive currency of 
the webcam world; fans take photos of their naked body parts, often with 
the name of the site written on their cleavage or naked butt, which the cam 
kids then proudly display on their sites. Galleries of such devotion can be 
found on sites like Infinity Decay, State of Confusion and Xeres.com.

All this butt-flashing and begging for goodies from strangers may seem 
tawdry or crass, but Lynn Ponton, M.D., author of "The Sex Lives of 
Teenagers," cautions against jumping to conclusions. Psychologists have 
found that offline diaries of teenage girls are filled with lists of things 
that they'd like friends and parents to buy for them; the online wish lists 
just represent the next step -- showing their desires to the world. 
"There's always a thought that someone like Santa Claus is going to come 
along and take care of you and not expect anything," Ponton says. "Kids 
still believe that they're going to get all these free gifts in life." For 
Ponton, the cam sites represent the kind of risk-taking kids engage in to 
form their identity -- and which can go too far.

What do the parents make of all this? Several kids said their parents 
wouldn't even know how to find their Web sites if they gave them the URLs, 
much less what their children do online. Others say their parents use the 
diaries on their sites to keep up with what's going on in their lives.

And Mom can be a big fan: "My mom loves the site," brags Katneko. "She 
thinks that I'm beyond hilarious, because I talk about everything from guys 
having dinky winkies to guides on butt sex." Other parents hope that all 
this monkeying around online could be the ticket to a hot career. Brittany, 
19, says: "My dad thinks I should apply my skills to getting a 
computer-related job, and that's pretty much the only thing he says about it."

Brad Danielson, 35, a Maine Web designer, is one older guy who has seen a 
lot of cams. He's one of the creators of Eyefever.com -- one of the many 
cam portals from the tame to the explicit and smutty (like Stile Project, 
Superhyperdemonchild and Sinnocence) that cam kids submit to in hopes of 
getting listed and ranked by popularity.

"At 14, 15, 16, I also think that girls are really starting to come into 
their sense of what their sexuality can do," says Danielson. "I think that 
some really enjoy that attention for whatever reason." After all, isn't it 
potentially safer to show a little skin on a webcam than pretty much 
anywhere else? "They're pushing their sexuality out into the world a bit, 
pushing it out to the public to see what kind of response they get, while 
still in a safe environment," says Danielson. "It's even safer than if some 
young gal decided to wear something revealing on a beach or on a street -- 
you're not going to get whistled at or approached."

Of course, as Ponton points out, there may well be risks for young women in 
revealing themselves to strangers online, too -- just different kinds. And 
even Danielson admits a certain unease about the cam sites: "I don't know 
if I'd want my 14-year-old daughter doing that, if I had a daughter."

"I think that these girls are just now discovering that they can make men 
do things, buy them things, and especially say things just because the men 
think that they are desirable," says Bridget Therease Guildner, an 
18-year-old from Corvallis, Ore., who posts her online diary, writing and 
photography on the Web, but no voyeuristic webcam. "However, I think that 
the reason why we don't see many 25-year-olds running cam girl sites is 
that with experience comes the realization that being used is unpleasant, 
even if you are using the person back."

In the do-it-yourself world of the cam sites, the girls choose exactly how 
much they want to reveal or conceal. "Some of the young girls really aren't 
showing that much skin to be worried about it," says Marissa. "They're 
showing enough to have that Lolita-esque hint of desire. It teases 
vulnerable men -- 'Maybe if I buy her stuff, she'll show me more.'"

But the Web has a way of making even the most straightforward picture of a 
14-year-old caught on her webcam into a pornographic image. "Everything can 
be sexualized online because it all lies in your imagination," says 
Marissa. Some cam portal sites create databases of hundreds of images 
lifted without always asking permission of the girls in the images. The 
sites mix nude images with photos of ordinary girls that are hardly 
suggestive at all.

It's the mixing of soft-core porn with lifted photos that raises the ire of 
the cam community. Daign of Daign.com, who specializes in writing bitchy 
reviews of cam sites on his lunch hour at work, recently posted a 
call-to-arms to send hate e-mail to an especially egregious site: "Did you 
know that our friends over at the pedophile site ... are back up? So nice 
that a bunch of 40 year olds are jackin it to your daughter's webcam."

"I think that these databases take undue advantage of the girls. The line 
for me is drawn when they are divorced from their personalities and become 
literal objects," says Bridget Guildner.

It's the occupational hazard of being a cam girl to have your image stolen 
without your permission and put into a vast database of cam images without 
even your name on it. That's the contradiction of the cam girl world -- the 
technology that gives the girls a place to be themselves and show off is 
the technology that can strip them of their identity and reduce them to a 
nameless database of images.

For the girls themselves, running cam sites is about a lot more than 
scattering their image across the Web or nabbing wish-list booty. Brittany 
says that running her site since she was 17 has made her better able to 
deal with the scrutiny of others: "It's helped me be more open and 
accepting of myself. I used to be terribly shy. Now, I'm more comfortable 
with people passing judgment on me. That used to be one of my biggest 
fears, people judging me without knowing me. Now, I couldn't care less."

The girls also learn about the demands of a public life. Perfekt, who has 
had a site since she was 13 and is now 18, says, "Some days, I want to 
break my camera. I hate feeling obligated to take pictures, and yet, if you 
don't update your cam, it's like you're not in circulation."
******************
Salon.com
Getting a lock on broadband
How the FCC is paving the way for a few big companies to control everyone's 
high-speed Internet access.
Editor's note: Fifth in a series on the consolidation of power and 
ownership in the media landscape.
By Jeffrey Benner

June 7, 2002  |  The Federal Communications Commission is quietly handing 
over control of the broadband Internet to a handful of massive corporations.

In March, the FCC ruled that cable companies do not have to open their 
networks to competing Internet service providers, or ISPs. A FCC proposal 
to extend the same exemption to DSL service is pending. If approved, the 
proposal will allow local phone companies, now down to four "Baby Bells," 
to deny other DSL providers access to local phone networks. Currently, all 
DSL providers are guaranteed access to phone networks under the FCC's 
interpretation of federal telecommunications law.

Telecommunications, cable, and media companies (increasingly one and the 
same) and their allies in Congress have campaigned for years to deregulate 
most aspects of the telecom industry. Under the current administration, and 
the leadership of FCC chairman Michael Powell, those efforts have finally 
begun to pay off.

The trend profoundly concerns consumer advocates and some Internet policy 
experts. They warn that if the FCC goes through with its plans, cable 
companies and the Baby Bells will quickly establish a monopoly on broadband 
service over their own networks. Consumers accustomed to thousands of 
competing ISPs to choose from for dial-up narrowband Internet access will 
be left with just one or two options for broadband service. One worry is 
that the lack of competition will yield high prices and poor service. But 
the far more urgent concern is that media conglomerates will use their 
control over broadband pipes to restrict access to content, information, or 
technologies that compete with their own content or otherwise threaten 
their interests.

"The past two decades on the Internet have been a uniquely 
consumer-friendly environment," says Mark Cooper, research director at the 
Consumer Federation of America. "Now that is up for grabs. The essential 
ingredient of the Internet was preventing the owner of the facilities from 
dictating content. Now, eight cable companies will decide what the public 
will be offered, not 8,000 ISPs." The CFA, along with the Media Access 
Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, and the Consumers Union are 
challenging the FCC ruling on cable broadband in federal court.

Despite those dire warnings, the FCC's policy on broadband enjoys strong 
support. Companies with a stake in the matter are gung-ho for it, at least 
for their own networks, and many independent economists and public policy 
experts also find the FCC's deregulatory approach to broadband enlightened 
and long overdue. They scoff at the idea that the freewheeling Internet can 
be controlled by any company or group of companies. And they argue that the 
current regulations, particularly the open-access requirements for DSL, 
actually discourage private investment in new broadband infrastructure and 
technology. Who wants to build a new network -- whether it's DSL, 
satellite, or "fiber to the home" -- if you then have to share it with 
competitors?

If the government steps aside, they say, robust competition will develop 
between different technology "platforms" such as cable, phone, satellite 
and local wireless, giving consumers plenty of choices and stimulating a 
build-out of broadband infrastructure at the same time.

"If you have competition between platforms, consumers will be better off," 
says Randolph May, a communications policy expert with the Progress and 
Freedom Foundation. "The problem is that [regulation] impedes investment 
and new entrants to the market."

Further complicating the picture is the massive consolidation in the media 
and telecommunications industries that has been building for years. That 
consolidation is expected to accelerate as the FCC throws out limits on how 
large and broad media companies can grow. Once those limits are gone -- 
some have already been eliminated -- it is quite plausible that a single 
media company could control the broadcast television stations, newspapers, 
radio and broadband Internet access in a single city.

Even some conservatives worry about this concentration of power among the 
very companies seeking unregulated control over broadband Internet access. 
Kenneth Arrow, a Stanford economist who won the Nobel Prize for his 
free-market theories, supports the deregulation of broadband. But he also 
expresses concern about pushing reliance on the free market too far. "I am 
worried about concentration in the media," he says. "That does bother me."

The heart of the anti-deregulation camp's argument is that the narrowband 
Internet owes its phenomenal success as an engine of innovation, creativity 
and economic growth to government regulations that guaranteed open 
competition. Current telecommunications regulations, originally written to 
break up the Bell telephone monopoly, require open access to phone lines 
for all ISPs and forbid the Baby Bells to tweak with the content flowing 
over their networks. If such protections are not extended to broadband 
service over cable, and are lifted from DSL over the phone lines, those 
against deregulation fear that the openness, innovation, and creativity 
that made the narrowband Internet revolutionary will wilt in the tight fist 
of corporate control. Huge media companies -- increasingly fearful of the 
threat posed by the Internet to their proprietary content -- will jump at 
the chance, they say, to lock things down.

"There is a fundamental battle going on," said Larry Lessig, a Stanford law 
professor and an expert on Internet history and policy. "There is a strong 
political movement to remove all obligations to keep the network open [and] 
the Internet as we knew it."

On March 13 the FCC commissioners ruled, 3-1, that cable broadband is an 
"information service" rather than a "telecommunications service." By 
toggling definitions just so, the commission cleverly managed to exempt 
cable broadband -- widely acknowledged as the key communications network of 
the future -- from all the rules that apply to telecommunications services 
under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The most important piece of 
telecom legislation in 60 years, the act, among other things, requires 
telecommunications companies to open up their networks to competition.

This open-access requirement is the reason you can choose from among 
hundreds of long-distance carriers and from among thousands of ISPs for 
dial-up access to the Internet. Under the law, local phone companies must 
allow other companies to sell services over the phone lines, even if they 
compete with the phone company's own services or products. The 
Telecommunications Act also forbids network owners from meddling with 
content on their network. This is why narrowband users -- and thus far, DSL 
users -- can fax, or talk, or download music off the Internet without 
permission or fear of interference from the local phone company. The rules 
were written to prevent the owners of the telephone wires from using their 
power over the lines to control content or stifle competition.

Over the past several years, as cable companies have begun offering 
services generally considered to be telecommunications -- Internet access, 
digital telephone service, video conferencing -- there has been an 
increasingly bitter battle between cable companies and consumer advocates 
over whether open-access requirements and other regulations that apply to 
telecommunications should also apply to cable. The March ruling settled the 
question: Telecom rules won't apply to cable broadband.

The 1996 act defines "telecommunications" as simply "the transmission, 
between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's 
choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent 
and received." Consumer advocates argue this should apply to cable 
broadband. Although the act, and the FCC, have long referred to high-speed 
Internet access as "advanced telecommunications services," the FCC decided 
in its March ruling that cable broadband is really better described as an 
information service. Although technically still under FCC jurisdiction, 
there are no significant regulations on information services, which include 
services like voice mail. As a "declaratory ruling," the commission reached 
its decision without a hearing or public comment period.

FCC commissioner Michael Copps, the lone Democrat on the four-member 
commission, wrote in his dissenting statement that the ruling amounted to a 
breach of the Constitution.

"Today we take a gigantic leap down the road of removing core 
communications services from the statutory frameworks established by 
Congress," Copps wrote, "substituting our own judgment for that of Congress 
and playing a game of regulatory musical chairs by moving technologies and 
services from one statutory definition to another. Last month I remarked 
that we were out-driving the range of our headlights. Today I think we are 
out-flying the range of our most advanced radar."

But the FCC is not stopping there.

For years there has been clamoring from all sides that the same regulations 
should apply to all types of broadband access, although opinions differ on 
what the rules should be, or if there should be any at all. Public policy 
for broadband is particularly confusing, because the service is offered 
over cable, phone and wireless connections, and each of those sectors has 
traditionally had a separate set of regulations. Chairman Powell has made 
it plain he would like to clear up the confusion and have consistent rules.

In February, the FCC proposed lifting the current open-access requirement 
for DSL service. No decision has been reached yet, but now that the FCC has 
ruled that cable companies will not have to open their networks to 
competition, and given Powell's enthusiasm for consistent regulations -- or 
lack of them -- it seems a safe bet the FCC will let the Baby Bells shut 
out their competitors, too. The logic is essentially that one monopoly 
deserves another.

The prospect of broadband provision reduced to a few competitors, each with 
a monopoly on their own platform, scares the hell out of consumer groups 
that have fought the creation of corporate monopolies over media and 
information sources for years. Because media conglomerates such as AOL have 
begun buying up the pipes that deliver the content they produce, the 
situation seems even more ominous. In short, consumer advocates worry these 
companies will mess with content in order to force the Internet to serve 
their own interests. They argue, for example, that a cable company will 
never allow streaming video to flow over its cable broadband lines if it 
competes with its cable television service. Even the right to "click 
through" to the Web won't be guaranteed, they warn, and companies are 
likely to turn the Internet into walled gardens of their own content -- 
think AOL with no escape hatch to Google.

"The path the FCC is currently on will change the Internet that you know," 
said Cheryl Leanza of the Media Access Project (MAP), a public interest 
telecommunications law firm. "Currently, rules prevent phone companies from 
controlling content in any way. There is no content protection for cable, 
and the FCC has proposed to take away the protections on content 
discrimination for DSL. The impact will be breathtaking."

Like consumer advocates, free-market supporters trumpet the importance of 
competition among ISPs, and fear a monopoly on broadband. But they think 
the access requirements and the other rules in the Telecom Act stifle 
rather than secure competition, innovation and investment, and the 
monopolist they are concerned about is Uncle Sam. "I'm a lot more worried 
about John Ashcroft than John Malone," quipped Gerald Faulhaber, chief 
economist of the FCC from 2000 to 2001, referring to the attorney general 
and to one of the top power brokers in the cable industry.

At the heart of the argument that the free market will save us lies the 
belief that competition between DSL, cable, satellite, local wireless and 
other technology "platforms" not yet imagined will be more than enough to 
guarantee that consumers will get the Internet when, where, and however 
they want it. Even if one company enjoys a monopoly on one of those 
platforms, the theory goes, it will not amount to a monopoly on high-speed 
Internet access overall. Better still, they say, encouraging a horse race 
between platforms will mean that billions of dollars in private investment 
will pour into broadband infrastructure and equipment.

"It's clear the FCC is moving toward putting cable off-limits to regulation 
[under the Telecommunications Act], and I think that's a great idea," said 
Faulhaber, who now teaches economics at Wharton. "I wish Michael Powell 
would do more to encourage platform competition. As long as people think 
this will be regulated, no [competitor] is going to jump in."

Competition between platforms would indeed steal an awful lot of thunder 
from those making dire predictions that mega-corporations are about to 
capture control over the next generation of the Internet. If my cable 
company won't let me click through to the Web or get streaming video, I can 
get DSL, or a satellite dish, or a wireless connection.

But the likelihood that robust competition will actually develop for a 
majority of households remains a hotly contested question. As of June 2001, 
the latest official statistics available from the FCC show 2.7 million U.S. 
households using DSL, 5.2 million using cable modem, and 200,000 broadband 
via satellite. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. zip codes (not necessarily 
households) had more than one broadband option available. Twenty percent of 
zip codes had no broadband service at all.

Advocates of broadband deregulation tend to be very optimistic about the 
potential for interplatform competition to improve; its critics are not.

The pessimists say that cable is too far ahead, that DSL doesn't have the 
bandwidth to compete with cable on key applications like video streaming, 
and that satellite broadband -- besides its tiny market share -- works well 
for downloading but not uploading. "In the abstract, no one would deny that 
10 different platforms would be good," said Leanza of the Media Access 
Project. "But it's naive to assume that most people will have more than one 
platform available."

Optimists point out that DSL is catching up and network upgrades would make 
it just as fast as cable modem, that satellite is a real option just 
needing time to develop, and that new options like local wireless, fiber to 
the home, even networks over power lines, will take off if local, state and 
federal bureaucracies would stop standing in the way.

In the most extensive independent study of broadband to date, the National 
Research Council came to a mixed conclusion regarding interplatform 
competition. The report found that interplatform, or "facilities based," 
competition, is important and should be encouraged. But it also predicted 
it would not take hold everywhere and should not be relied on exclusively 
for consumer protection.

"The report found that facilities-based competition is important, but don't 
assume you're going to get it," says David Clark, a computer scientist at 
MIT and a coauthor of the NRC study. Some locations, like big cities, might 
get three competitors, others two, and some just one, he said. 
Nevertheless, Clark cautiously endorsed the current FCC policy of 
deregulation.

"The gamble is to get broadband out there, no matter what it looks like," 
Clark said. "You might try for a level of competition you don't get. You 
might gamble and lose. But I would say, get it out there."

That is a gamble consumer advocates are not willing to take. In their view, 
the best possible outcome of the bet is bad, the worst case catastrophic. 
"Even if three top platforms reached every household, we will be trading 
hundreds of [ISP] choices for three," says Leanza, but she thinks even that 
number is too much to hope for. "Deregulation can only work if competition 
is in place," Leanza says. "You can't have both deregulation and monopoly, 
and that is where we are headed."

Viewed in the context of the FCC's campaign to deregulate media and 
telecommunications in general, the concerns about who will control 
broadband become even more urgent. With quite a bit of prodding from the 
courts, the FCC has been tossing out or rewriting rules, called "ownership 
caps," that limit how large and broad media conglomerates can grow. The cap 
on how large cable companies can grow is gone. So is a limit on how many 
broadcast television stations one company can own. A "cross-ownership" rule 
forbidding cable companies from buying broadcast television stations has 
been scrapped. Another that forbids ownership of newspapers and television 
stations in the same market is under review, as is a restriction against 
owning more than one broadcast television station in the same city.

Analysts agree the regulatory changes already made will soon unleash a new 
wave of consolidation in the media sector. Among companies that deliver 
broadband, the consolidation is already under way. In December, AT&T agreed 
to sell its cable division to Comcast, in a deal valued at $72 billion. If 
approved, the combined company will have 27 million subscribers, or about 
40 percent of the cable market. EchoStar and DirecTV, the top two satellite 
television companies, have also announced plans to merge. The combined 
company would essentially have a monopoly on satellite television. The two 
companies argue they need to merge in order to compete with the likes of 
AT&T Comcast.

"At the end of this, one company in a community could own the newspaper, 
several TV and radio stations, the cable company, the principal ISP -- 
maybe even the phone company!" said Jeff Chester, director of the Center 
for Digital Democracy. "This stands the First Amendment rights of citizens 
in the digital age on its head."

For those who, like Chester, are worried that deregulation will result in a 
dangerous consolidation of power among a handful of media companies in 
traditional media like television, print, and radio, keeping the Internet 
out of their control has become all the more urgent. In their minds, the 
battle for broadband could amount to democracy's last stand. "This is a war 
for the heart of the Internet," Chester said. "Will a few telecoms be 
allowed to seize control of it, or will it be preserved as a democratic 
resource? It's David versus Goliath."

The cable companies and Baby Bells disagree, arguing that there is 
sufficient competition both within and between platforms and that more can 
be expected. AT&T's cable division has voluntarily agreed to let EarthLink 
sell cable modem service over AT&T-owned cable in Boston and Seattle, and 
it is promising to open more markets soon. But skeptics say the company has 
been dragging its feet on opening access for years and is giving token 
access now to head off mandatory requirements as a condition of its pending 
merger with Comcast, another major cable company. As a condition of the 
merger between AOL and Time Warner last year, the Federal Trade Commission 
required the combined company to open its lines to at least three competing 
ISPs.

But, oddly, the same cable corporations that oppose mandatory open access 
for their own cable networks are among the most eloquent and spirited 
advocates of continued mandatory access for the telephone lines. Both AT&T 
and AOL Time Warner have asked the FCC to maintain open access for DSL -- a 
market both would like to crack -- arguing that the rules protect 
consumers. Both companies oppose placing the same requirements on their 
cable networks, markets they would like to protect.

"For decades, the FCC has successfully promoted the openness of our 
nation's wireline infrastructure," AOL Time Warner lawyers wrote in 
comments submitted to the FCC on its proposal to eliminate open-access 
requirements for DSL. "It understood that by ensuring non-discriminatory 
access to wireline networks, consumer welfare would be optimized."

Hearing AOL laud the benefits that open access offers consumers on DSL, 
despite its opposition to such access for cable, triggers eye-rolling fits 
among consumer advocates who want open access for both cable broadband and 
DSL. "This double standard illustrates what's at stake," said Chester. 
"Media giants are manipulating broadband for their own purposes -- not the 
public interest."

Asked why AT&T supported open-access requirements for phone lines of local 
carriers, but not for its own cable network, AT&T spokeswoman Claudia Jones 
said: "Cable and telephone are different animals. There is ubiquitous 
competition for cable. Satellite is really bringing competition to the 
cable market. But there is virtually no competition in the local telephone 
market. The Bells can't get what they wanted in Congress, so they are 
looking to the regulators."

"The hypocrisy is outrageous," said the Consumer Federation of America's 
Mark Cooper. He thinks getting regulators to overrule Congress is exactly 
what AT&T's cable division has done by successfully persuading the FCC not 
to apply open-access requirements to cable broadband.

In the end, the battle over broadband is about who has control over 
information. One unlikely but eloquent spokesman for the importance of fair 
access to information is FCC chairman Powell himself. Speaking at the 
Broadband Technology Summit in April, an event sponsored by the U.S. 
Chamber of Commerce, Powell said:

"You name it, and information plays a vital role in making a decision, 
making a commitment, taking a risk, or agreeing to part with something of 
value. Often in these transactions the information one has will determine 
if the transaction is fair, or whether someone gets taken -- the taker 
having superior knowledge about the deal."

For those who are convinced Powell's policy on broadband could permanently 
tip the balance of power over information toward massive corporations, the 
irony of his statement must be almost unbearable.

But catastrophe is hardly assured. Perhaps technology and the free market 
will come to the rescue. They have before. What is certain is that by 
deregulating broadband, the FCC is taking a tremendous risk that could have 
unforeseen consequences. A risk few people even know they are taking, fewer 
still understand, and only four get to vote on.

The scenario is not new. In 1981, Congress quietly eased restrictions on 
savings and loan houses, allowing them to invest their federally insured 
deposits however they pleased, even in, say, junk bonds. In the mid-1990s, 
the SEC softened rules that had prevented accounting firms from consulting 
for their auditing clients. Aside from a few stray government watchdogs, a 
handful of Beltway bureaucrats, and a clutch of corporate lawyers, those 
obscure but radical experiments in deregulation went unnoticed -- until it 
was too late.
*********************
BBC
'Massive abuse' of privacy feared

Plans to increase the number of organisations that can look at records of 
what you do online could lead to widespread abuse of personal information, 
warn experts.
The UK Government this week unveiled a draft list of organisations that 
will be given the right to request information about the web, telephone and 
fax lives of British citizens under the controversial Regulation of 
Investigatory Powers Act.

Civil liberty campaigners have little faith that government safeguards will 
be effective in policing the use of sensitive information passed to 
organisations not connected with law enforcement.

Industry groups also warn that the technical and financial burden of 
complying with huge numbers of requests for information could cause 
problems for some firms.

'Massive abuse'

Before now under the RIP Act, only law enforcement organisations could ask 
for permission to look at logs of the sites people visit, who they are 
exchanging e-mail with and which telephone or fax numbers they call.


Only police forces, intelligence services, Customs and Excise and the 
Inland Revenue could ask communication service providers for logs of what 
their customers are doing.

Now another 24 organisations, which include every local authority, are 
getting the power to request these logs.

Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research 
(Fipr), said many of the organisations being handed these powers had little 
or no experience of handling such confidential information.

He told BBC News Online that this meant there was "massive scope for abuse" 
of personal information and would likely mean a huge increase in the number 
of requests.

Before now law enforcement organisations wanting to look at communication 
information had to get permission from a judge.

By contrast the RIP Act allows organisations that want to look at this data 
to get permission from their own senior managers.

The government is currently drawing up rules dictating how organisations 
should treat this sensitive communication information.

"But," said Mr Brown, "how seriously in practice they will follow these 
guidelines we do not know.

"Just what experience the Department for the Environment or the Office of 
Fair Trading would bring to this is another question."

Mr Brown also doubted that the government's own watchdog, called the 
Interception Commissioner, would be able to police requests for the use of 
information about someone's communication habits.

"The Interception Commissioner has been under-resourced for what they are 
supposed to do at the moment," said Mr Brown. "How they are supposed to 
oversee the use of these powers by these 20 plus government bodies is 
beyond me."

The Internet Service Providers Association also has worries about the 
extension of RIP Act powers to more organisations.

"It all amounts to high costs for the industry in terms of time and money," 
said an ISPA spokesman.

He said ISPA was still waiting to hear from the government about financial 
help for members that have to collect, store and pass on data about customers.
****************
Government Executive
Union officials question proposed Trademark Office layoffs
By Tanya N. Ballard
tballard@xxxxxxxxxxx

Union officials plan to use legislative, regulatory and legal methods to 
fight a proposed layoff of up to135 trademark examining attorneys by Sept. 
30 at the Patent and Trademark Office.


National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley met with about 
250 trademark attorneys on Monday, outlining the organization's plan to 
stave off proposed layoffs announced May 30 by Trademarks Commissioner Anne 
Chasser. PTO officials said reductions in trademark application filings 
require them to cut as much as one-third of the staff of examining 
attorneys beginning next month. The agency currently employs 383 examining 
attorneys.


"We think the reduction-in-force is without basis, it's risky and 
completely unnecessary," said PTO attorney-advisor Howard Friedman, 
president of NTEU Local 245, which represents the attorneys.


During Monday's meeting, Kelley promised to ask PTO to negotiate issues 
surrounding the proposed reduction-in-force, and said the union plans to 
make formal requests for detailed information to help analyze the impact of 
the agency's proposal. In addition, NTEU will seek assistance from Congress.


"NTEU will be looking for PTO to make a convincing business case for its 
proposed reduction-in-force of up to 135 trademark examining attorneys," 
Kelley said. "PTO is under no budgetary pressure to reduce staff, there are 
adequate funds in this year's budget, and the administration's budget 
proposal for the next fiscal year does not even have the PTO spending all 
of the fees it collects."

According to PTO officials, trademark applications peaked at 375,000, but 
last year that number dropped 21 percent to 296,000the largest single-year 
decrease ever. Applications are expected to fall again this year to 
250,000. That decline coupled with future projections means there isn't 
enough work to support the existing staff, according to PTO. Friedman, who 
has worked with the agency for more than eight years, disputes those numbers.


"Filings were down last year, but they picked up in the first quarter of 
this fiscal year, and the second quarter was even higher," he said. "People 
are straining to get to new cases, people are drowning in cases, so for the 
office to take a position like that is just contrary to what's going on, 
and frankly, they have been very quiet when it comes to providing any data 
that shows that this reduction-in-force is necessary."


Customer service will decline if the workforce is scaled back, Kelley said, 
and more thought needs to be given to customer needs, including how a 
reduction-in-force will affect turnaround time, quality and implementation 
of the agency's new e-commerce initiative.

"Instead of looking to eliminate experienced and dedicated employees, PTO 
should be putting these employees to good use in clearing out the backlog 
of pending trademark applications, improving the quality of services 
provided, and advancing e-commerce efforts at the agency," Kelley said.


Former PTO Director Todd Dickinson said that agency officials seemed to be 
predicting that the economy and trademark filings would be depressed for a 
while. "Trademark applications are often a function of the economy: if the 
economy turns up, applications are up," he said.


"I think it's the first time that there have ever been layoffs at the 
trademark office. It's sad that it has to be done, but I understand it," 
Dickinson said about the proposed layoffs. "I think it's important that 
everybodythe PTO and the private sectorwork together to minimize the impact 
of this."
********************
Associated Press
Microsoft Issues Warning on Flaw
Tue Jun 11, 9:30 PM ET

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) - Microsoft Corp. issued two bulletins Tuesday, 
disclosing "critical" flaws in its popular Internet Explorer Web browser, 
as well as in MSN Chat, MSN Messenger and Exchange Messenger.


The Chat and Messenger flaws were to have been corrected by an earlier patch.

The first bulletin involved Internet Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5, 6.0 and 
Proxy Server 2.0 and ISA Server 2000. The flaw involves a piece of faulty 
code that can let an attacker access a user's computer to run various programs.

The flaw was found and made public by a Finnish company last week. 
Microsoft is issuing detailed instructions for users to work around the 
vulnerability as a stopgap measure until Microsoft develops a patch for 
users to download, said Christopher Budd, security program manager for 
Microsoft's Security Response Center. He was uncertain when the patch would 
be available, but said the company will post it for downloading when it is 
ready.

The second bulletin involves MSN Chat, MSN Messenger and Exchange Messenger 
software. Users of those software programs were instructed in May to 
download a patch to fix a flaw. Although the patch worked, Budd said, it 
does not protect against renewed vulnerability if users then download 
earlier versions of the software. The vulnerability would allow an attacker 
to run a program on the user's computer.
*********************
Reuters
Mobile Firms Link to Set Standards, Boost Sales
Wed Jun 12, 5:22 AM ET
By Ben Klayman

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Industry giants from around the high-technology world 
are forming a new alliance to simplify how wireless telephones can be used 
on any network, whether to play games, share photos or trade instant messages.


Faced with maturing growth for traditional voice calls and slow uptake of 
newer Internet-ready mobile phones, almost 200 companies will unveil on 
Wednesday plans to form a new global organization to develop open standards 
for phones and other wireless devices to operate seamlessly together.

Members of the alliance include mobile phone leader Nokia ( news - web 
sites) of Finland, software giant Microsoft Corp., top computer chip maker 
Intel Corp., British wireless operator Vodafone Group Plc and media 
conglomerate Walt Disney Co.

"The most important value to consumers is that no matter what device I 
have, no matter what service I'm going to get, no matter what carrier I'm 
using, I can get access to the information. The consumer will see no issues 
of access to content," Jon Prial, IBM's vice president of content, told 
Reuters.

And it will also be good news for companies, he added, as happy consumers 
surfing the Internet on their wireless devices translates to higher usage 
rates and thus more sales. That would be welcome in an industry where sales 
have slumped over the past year.

Others in the Open Mobile Alliance include Motorola Inc., Sweden's Ericsson 
( news - web sites), Texas Instruments Inc., International Business 
Machines Corp., Lucent ( news - web sites) Technologies Inc., Japan's NTT 
DoCoMo ( news - web sites) Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.

NO OVERNIGHT CHANGES

However, consumers should not expect things to change overnight, analysts 
said.

"The average person probably won't care for another two or three years when 
the things that this alliance develops start to show themselves on cell 
phones and mobile devices," said David Cooperstein, research director at 
technology research firm Forrester Research.

Nokia vice president Pertti Korhonen agreed: "This is not something which 
is going to happen as one big bang where we would deliver a solution for 
everything on this planet. It will come in steps."

Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Networks Architects, a 
Washington-based consultant, said it has taken the industry too long to get 
to this point.

"This is after the fact. This is everybody getting together and saying, 'We 
screwed up,"' he said. "The attempt here is to at least get things to 
interoperate. Yes, it's a big deal, but, no, lightning hasn't struck."

Others said better late than never.

"If this didn't happen, every time you picked up a device you would have 
access to some services and some data and not all, and everything would be 
accessed in a different way, with potentially different credentials, with 
different displays," Michael Wehrs, director of technology and standards 
for Microsoft's mobility group, told Reuters.

He said the new standard will not mandate how things are done, just what 
needs to be done to meet the base minimum capabilities. The key will be 
rolling out some services quickly under the new standard to show how it 
will work.

Nokia's Korhonen said the problem up to now has been industry 
fragmentation, as too many standards caused headaches for companies and 
consumers alike, slowing development of new content and applications. 
Numerous other groups will merge into the new organization, although 
officials acknowledged there are numerous legal issues still to be ironed out.

The common standard also will solve such business issues as digital rights 
management and payment, officials said.

The introduction of new wireless technologies -- two-and-a-half generation, 
also called 2.5G, and 3G -- offered the industry an opportunity to offer 
new content and companies realized they needed a more simple approach or 
the slowdown would continue, officials said. A weak market certainly helped 
boost cooperation.
*******************
Los Angeles Times
Net Music That's a Stealbut Not Stolen
By JON HEALEY
Times Staff Writer

Acknowledging that online piracy is forcing dramatic changes in the music 
industry, the world'stwo largest record companies are poised to make it 
easy and cheap for fans to buyrather than stealsongs off the Internet.

The moves by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment accelerate 
the industry's transition to an era in which music is distributed 
electronically. Other major labels are likely to follow as the record 
business grapples with the rise of online music copying through 
unauthorized services such as Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus and potentially 
billions of dollars in lost sales.

Rather than trying to force consumers to buy music on the labels' terms, 
the services signal that record companies are slowly adapting to 
Internet-fueled changes in the marketplace.

This summer, Universal plans to sell tens of thousands of high-quality 
digital singles for 99 cents or less and albums for $9.99 through online 
retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy and Sam Goody, according to sources and 
company executives. Universal plans to make new releases available for 
downloading as well as older ones, and possibly offer downloads before the 
music is available on CD.

Significantly, the company plans to let consumers download songs and record 
them freely onto CDs a major shift from the company's practice of limiting 
what users could do with downloaded music.

The question is whether consumers accustomed to getting music for free will 
pay even 99 cents. Executives hope that, at some point, consumers will 
elect to pay a modest fee rather than steal.

"Forty-nine cents seems like the appropriate amount," said Ron Stone, 
president of Gold Mountain Entertainment, an artist management firm. "If 
you can get kids to spend 49 cents, consider it a gift. Make it 99 cents, 
you won't sell any, particularly if the singles market is a kids market."

Consumers have flocked to digital formats that let them build custom 
collections and transfer music freely between their computer, portable 
players and CDs. But most of the music industry services offer relatively 
small selections and restrict how the music is used. As a result, they are 
considerably less popular than free pirate services.

The new services suggest that Universal and Sony no longer will handicap 
their online music business for fear of eating into CD sales, which have 
been the industry's lifeblood. Billions of song files have been copied for 
free through the Net, and consumers have no legitimate source for the vast 
majority of those songs.

Sony also has quietly changed its policy on downloads to allow CD burninga 
change that should go into effect any day, according to company executives. 
That is expected to increase the number of downloadable songs dramatically 
this summer, and a spokeswoman said prices would drop to $1.49 a song as 
soon as Sony's vendors could make the change.

Although some music retailers and analysts applauded the moves Tuesday, 
they said it would be a challenge to wean consumers from the steady diet of 
free downloads they have enjoyed for more than two years.

"I think the consumers ultimately are going to decide if it's too late to 
come back to the market," said Matt Durgin, director of retail 
merchandising for BeMusic, a Bertelsmann unit that owns online music 
retailer CDNow. "The only thing you can do is put the product out there ... 
and hopefully the consumers will come back."

The efforts by Universal and Sony mark a reversal on three key issues for 
the record industry.

By discounting the songs, the labels acknowledge that music delivered 
through the Net should be sold for less than a packaged good. By allowing 
the songs to be recorded on CD, they are sacrificing security for the sake 
of consumer acceptance. And by working through independent retailers, they 
are relinquishing some control over online music distribution.

In fact, the downloadable songs will compete with the subscription music 
service from Pressplay, a fledgling joint venture by Universal and Sony.

Pam Horovitz, president of the National Assn. of Recording Merchandisers, 
praised the Universal initiative as "a great first step in the right 
direction" because it provides a legitimate source of singles at 
entry-level prices. The association has criticized the labels for 
abandoning the singles market, leaving consumers no alternative to the 
unauthorized free services.

Lawrence Kenswil, president of Universal ELabs, the record company's 
new-media arm, said Universal planned to offer downloadable versions of 
every song to which it holds the digital rights. That's tens of thousands 
of tracks from a total of 10,000 to 11,000 albums.

The songs will be distributed first by Liquid Audio of Redwood City, 
Calif., whose audio format provides better sound quality than MP3 files. 
Liquid Audio delivers music to dozens of online retailers, including CDNow, 
Amazon.com, Best Buy and Sam Goody.

Liquid Audio files are scrambled so they can't be freely copied from 
computer to computer. But Universal has decided to let buyers burn the 
files onto conventional CDs in unscrambled formats, meaning they could be 
copied or moved freely from that point.

The major labels have resisted the idea of letting consumers burn 
downloadable songs because they believe it would encourage piracy. But 
Kenswil noted that songs are widely being pirated, so "you're not keeping 
anything from being open [to piracy] by copy-protecting the download."

The Liquid Audio files are designed to help labels enforce their 
copyrights, though, by helping them trace the source of pirated copies.

The downloads contain watermarks that are designed to stay with any digital 
copies made of the song, enabling authorities to identify the original buyer.

Sony initially offered downloadable singles only through its Web site, 
using a special player, and with stiff restrictions on copying. The company 
cut the price to about $2, and it expanded availability by striking a deal 
with online distributor RioPort Inc. of San Jose, whose partners include 
MTV.com and Best Buy.

Jim Long, chief executive of RioPort, said, "I expect to have 70,000 to 
100,000 total downloads for sale before the end of the year."

One key to success, he said, is removing the restriction on recording songs 
onto CDs.

"If you want to sell downloads, they've got to be burnable.... You can't 
change the way people use music. You try to do that, sales will plummet."
*******************
Washington Post
Cel-Sci Says Hoax Release Carried on News Wire
By Andrea Orr
Reuters

VIENNA, Va.Biotechnology company Cel-Sci Corp. Tuesday said it had become 
the victim of a hoax when a news wire carried a false press release stating 
that it was working on a potential cancer cure.

The phony release did not cause a significant move in its stock and Cel-Sci 
said it appeared most investors had not believed the item, which ran for 
several hours Monday on the online news wire, Internet wire, and briefly on 
Yahoo! Inc's Finance Web site.

Still, the incident raised fresh concerns over whether tighter safeguards 
had been put in place to prevent fictitious and potentially damaging news 
about publicly traded companies from being widely disseminated.

Two years ago Internet Wirewhich carries corporate news releases as a 
source for other news outletspublished a false release that about the 
earnings of data networking equipment maker Emulex Corp.. That news was 
picked up by more mainstream news outlets including Bloomberg and Dow Jones 
and caused Emulex stock to fall by more than 50 percent.

Aside from Yahoo Finance, no other news outlets picked up the Cel-Sci 
release from Internet Wire on Monday.

Cel-Sci and Internet Wire both said Tuesday they had no information on the 
source of the phony press release, and were cooperating with the Securities 
and Exchange Commission in investigating the matter.

The phony release, which was issued before the market opened on Monday, 
said that Cel-Sci had partnered with Takeda Chemical Industries Ltd. to 
commercialize a "potential cancer cure."

"It would be nice if it were true, but there is no such deal," a Cel-Sci 
spokesman said.

The spokesman said Cel-Sci, which is working on developing cancer 
treatments, has no relationship with Takeda and said it was never contacted 
by Internet Wire to verify the contents of the release before it was published.

Internet Wire's Chief Executive Jim McGovern said it has safeguards in 
place to prevent false news from being published, but that those steps were 
not followed over the weekend, when the false news about Cel-Sci was received.

Cel-Sci shares fell two cents on Tuesday to close at 30 cents per share, 
not far from their 52-week low of 27 cents. Its high point in the past year 
was $1.94.
*********************
Washington Post
'Digital Corps' Job-Swapping Plan Advances in Congress
Ben Hammer

The federal government may soon assign its best information technology 
managers to private industry, though they are in high demand, in the hopes 
they'll return to their jobs more experienced and better trained.

Federal legislation that has cleared the House of Representatives, the 
Digital Tech Corps Act, would allow government and private sector IT 
managers to swap positions for up to two years.

Critics, including a key union for government workers, say participants 
won't return with improved skills they can use on the job and that the 
program is another way to outsource government jobs to contractors.

Supporters, including major contractors like Accenture and EDS, say 
government and private tech workers can learn a lot from each other.

Employees would return with a better understanding of how their clients 
operate, not to mention, they add, that government participants would be 
better customers for future contracts.

Congressman Tom Davis, a Republican whose district includes tech-rich 
Northern Virginia, sponsored the act to address government's recruiting and 
retention problems in IT through a partnership with private industry.

He also sees it as a way to bring talented private management to government 
"to kick start e-government initiatives and help fight the war on terrorism 
at home and abroad."

The bill could help many large federal IT contractors, responsible for 
thousands of jobs in the Washington area. Two of the firms, Accenture and 
EDS, helped Davis draft the bill.

Davis' bill would allow government chief information officers to transfer 
IT workers ranked GS-11 through GS-15 to private firms for up to two years. 
The civil servants would be required to return to government for a length 
of time equal to their assignment or repay the salary and benefits they 
received during that time.

Private sector employees, who work for the government for up to two years, 
would be barred from lobbying the agency they worked at for a year.

Participants, who have to be considered an "exceptional performer," are 
paid during the exchange by their initial employer and must be expected to 
take on additional IT roles in the future.

Annual salaries vary for government managers, but a civil servant with a 
GS-13 ranking and five years experience earns $67,329. The average 
technology worker in Northern Virginia earned $67,000 in 2000 according to 
the Northern Virginia Technology Council.

The Information Technology Association of America and the large systems 
integrators it represents say the program would give participants new insights.

"The knowledge of how an agency operates, even in terms of culture and the 
architecture is very helpful to a contractor," said Olga Grkavac, ITAA 
executive vice president. "The same thing holds true for a government 
person. They learn about how to manage the contractor better internally."

The American Federation of Government Employees, representing 600,000 
federal workers, opposed Davis' bill and views it as another step in the 
outsourcing of government management positions rather than a change in the 
government's human resources system that will address the problem.

"Developing a reliable in-house capability to train people and give 
agencies the people they need is a better solution," said AFGE lobbyist 
John Threlkeld. "There are some IT contractors out there that are casing 
the joint and for whom this legislation gives them the mechanism for coming 
in, knowing who to follow up with and how to beat the system.

All sides agree that if Davis' bill passes the Senate, the Digital Tech 
Corps would be a modest program. In the program's first few years, the tech 
corps might place into government 50 workers from private contractors that 
employ more than 5,000 workers and take in more than $1 billion in annual 
revenues, suggests Grkavac.

Accenture has already committed five managers to the program, and other 
firms with large area offices like Electronic Data Systems Corp, IBM Global 
Services and Lockheed Martin Corp. are likely to participate. A similar 
group of managers from the Department of Defense might be assigned on 
short, six-month assignments at private firms.

Accenture's interest in the bill grew out of its own outsourcing business, 
said Sharon Spigelmyer, an Accenture associate partner in the government 
markets group, who helped Davis draft the bill. The company wants its 
managers to work on e-government initiatives in homeland security and other 
growth areas.

In fiscal 2001, the company took in $1 billion in revenues from government 
contracts, about 9 percent of all revenues. Spigelmyer says the program is 
likely to be a one-way exchange that sends private sector managers into 
government positions after Sept. 11. Still, she is optimistic it can help 
meet government IT needs while improving Accenture's position for future 
government contracts.

"We think the better educated, the better trained, the more sophisticated 
management teams are, the more they are really going to want the kinds of 
goods and services we provide."

EDS' involvement also grew out of enlightened self-interest: in 2001, the 
company took in $4.5 billion in revenues from its worldwide government 
business, or about 20 percent of its overall revenues, mostly from the U.S. 
government. The company also had a hand in crafting the legislation.

So how would the program help EDS?

"We can gain insight into IT managers and what they're looking for on bids 
and acquisitions," said Booth Jameson, a director of EDS' Global Government 
Affairs, who lobbies Congress and manages federal contracts. "And see and 
think about the types of problems and challenges they think about on a 
weekly basis."

With about 6,000 Washington-area employees, EDS might send between five and 
10 managers to work in the government and take in the same number of 
government managers, he said.

Computer Science Corp. believes the program exposes future government 
clients to its outsourcing management and IT services. "It also helps them 
to understand the commercial environment so that they're a more informed 
customer," said Guy Copeland, a CSC vice president who often works with 
federal national security policymakers.

For the year ending March 30, 2001, CSC took in $2.6 billion in revenues 
related to federal contracts. The revenues represent about 25 percent of 
all CSC's revenues for the year, and about 22 percent of the company's 
employees work in its federal sector group. The Digital Tech Corps Act 
passed the House in early April and is before the Senate Governmental 
Affairs Committee. It's likely to be attached to a bill that eases hiring, 
increases professional training and authorizes alternative personnel 
systems in the federal government.

Jameson gives the act about a 70 percent chance of passing the Senate and 
becoming law this year.
*********************
Federal Computer Week
Cybersecurity guide delayed

The federal government is pushing back plans to unveil a national roadmap 
for securing cyberspace from this summer to mid-September, President Bush's 
cybersecurity czar said June 10.

Richard Clarke, White House special adviser for cyberspace security, said 
the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace will not be written by 
bureaucrats, but by people in such areas as higher education, banking, 
transportation, oil and gas, and state and local governments.

The effort has been under way for several months, with town hall meetings 
conducted in Portland, Ore., Denver and Chicago. Another is scheduled for 
next week in Atlanta.

Clarke spoke at the third annual Networked Economy Summit, which focused on 
technology security. The conference is sponsored by George Mason 
University's National Center for Technology and Law.

He said the number of cyber incidents is on the rise  causing $15 billion 
in damage last year  and they are more complex, but many businesses and 
public agencies are not taking it seriously and believe that it won't 
happen to them. For example, the Nimda worm, which alone did $2 billion in 
damage, hit many banking institutions that thought they were doing a good 
job on cybersecurity, he said.

"Well folks, digital Pearl Harbors are happening every day," Clarke said. 
"It could happen to any company any day.

"At any time, [the number of incidents] could spike," he said. "At any 
time, we could have a much more serious attack on a piece of the 
infrastructure or what holds the infrastructure together."

People need to move away from a "threat paradigm" to a "vulnerability 
paradigm," he said. Instead of reacting to an attack or impending attack, 
the public and private sectors should conduct a "vulnerability 
self-examination" at every level.

But the federal government should not regulate, dictate or take a command 
role in securing the Internet, he warned. That's because in cyberspace, 
technology and threats move rapidly and the government is not fast enough 
to keep up, nor does it have the expertise, he said.

Instead, he said the government should:

* Try to stimulate the economy.

* Keep encouraging information technology customers to buy products with 
adequate security.

* Continue talking with insurance companies to establish cybersecurity 
insurance based on certain criteria.

* Encourage development of standards and best practices for each sector.

* Help foster a private-sector certification program for IT security companies.

* Help create information-sharing analysis centers.

* Create education and training programs, including funding for the 
Cybercorps program and centers for excellence.

He also said the federal government should show the private sector the 
seriousness of the issue. For example, last October, federal agencies were 
asked to resubmit proposed budgets to include funding for IT security 
programs, he said. The Office of Management and Budget said certain agency 
programs would not be funded if agencies did not factor in security. That 
resulted in a 64 percent increase  representing more than $5 billion  on IT 
security spending.

He said the proposed Department of Homeland Security  which would house the 
National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Critical Infrastructure 
Assurance Office and the National Communications System  should create a 
concentration of operational, policy, outreach, and threat responsibilities 
in one place, pool skilled staff and perform better coordination.

But he said maybe the best way the federal government could help the issue 
is by being a "nudge," that is, constantly talking about the issue.
*********************
Federal Computer Week
E-grants project readied

The federal government is launching a "storefront" project July 1 for state 
and local governments to apply online for e-grants, one of five major 
initiatives to help the government deliver its services electronically.

The e-grants project would use an existing portal, FedBizOpps, adding 
details about applying for the estimated $400 billion in grants from the 
federal government each year. The Health and Human Services Department 
issues half the grants, including tens of millions of dollars to the states 
for Medicaid. But other agencies also provide grants for everything from 
art projects to community initiatives.

Charles Havekost, the e-grants program manager at the HHS, where the 
project is being developed, said June 10 at a Digital Government Institute 
conference on e-grants that the project would save money by avoiding the 
cost of building its own portal. They also plan to use existing government 
contract vehicles and off-the-shelf products. He likened the project to a 
storefront, where people can shop for what they want.

Havekost said the $20 million price tag of the project would be spent on 
such big-ticket items as an integrator, who will put all the pieces 
together. Eventually, the public will be able to buy a package to apply for 
e-grants, much like the public can buy tax preparation software.

The e-grant initiative is one of 24 government projects to bring electronic 
services to the public. In April, the Office of Management and Budget 
selected five e-government initiatives for funding, including e-grants. 
While the project is to be launched in October 2003, there are many details 
still to be worked out including signature authentication and whether to 
charge a fee, according to Havekost.
************************
Federal Computer Week
Partnership pitches wireless

ArrayComm Inc., a provider of smart antenna technology, and the IIT 
Research Institute announced an agreement June 10 to offer wireless data 
solutions to the public and private sectors  including one proposal 
supporting the Army's Future Combat Systems.

IITRI, a nonprofit contract organization with expertise in such areas as 
wireless communication, information technology, defense operations support 
and spectrum management, will use ArrayComm technology to offer wireless 
communication solutions that range from improving commercial services to 
enhancing soldiers' field communications.

The solutions will use ArrayComm's IntelliCell adaptive antenna technology 
and i-Burst mobile broadband wireless Internet access system.

I-Burst offers a wireless IP connection to various devices and delivers 
data rates of 1 megabit/sec per user to hundreds of users in a "cell," or 
group of users. The i-Burst network also incorporates IntelliCell, a 
"personal cell" approach of transmitting voice and data signals that 
establishes an individual cell for each user for the duration of a 
transmission.

According to the company, traditional wireless systems broadcast energy in 
all directions, but IntelliCell technology sends energy directly to each 
user while avoiding interfering with others.

The personal cell approach therefore reduces interference, enables wider 
coverage, improves capacity, reduces transmission power and costs, and 
creates clearer signals, said Nitin Shah, chief strategy officer for ArrayComm.

Rick Meidenbauer, group senior vice president at IITRI, said the partners 
have submitted a proposal outlining a new approach to high-bandwidth mobile 
data in a combat environment in support of the Army's Future Combat 
Systems. The Army's vision for FCS is to create an integrated battlespace, 
where networked information and communications systems provide a 
competitive edge to soldiers in the field and commanders in the control room.

Boeing Co.'s Space and Communications group and Science Applications 
International Corp. are the FCS lead systems integrator team and recently 
sought proposals for technologies that could increase performance in the 
system. IITRI and ArrayComm responded with the I-Burst system as a way to 
provide "high-bandwidth, spectrally efficient" communications on the 
battlefield, Meidenbauer said.

ArrayComm, based in San Jose, Calif., and IITRI have already developed a 
target list of about 12 potential government customers and are working to 
develop those and find more, Meidenbauer said, adding that homeland 
security initiatives are a natural fit.

ArrayComm's Shah added that initial government feedback has been positive 
because agencies have been impressed with the commercial applications. When 
they realize that high-bandwidth communications through multiple devices 
and channels are also possible for them, instead of traditional radio and 
voice vehicles, it helps "stimulate those ideas," he said.

Chicago-based IITRI has numerous commercial and public-sector partnerships, 
and it also is the prime engineering support contractor for the Defense 
Department Joint Spectrum Center.
*****************
Federal Computer Week
Career Channels  Job Openings

Series/Grade: GS-2210-11
Position Title: Information Technology Specialist, Ft Collins, CO (S) 
(Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: WO-376-02G(RB)
Closing Date: July 1, 2002
Contact: Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Room 900 RPE, 1621 N 
Kent St, Arlington, VA 22209; 703-605-0816

Series/Grade: GS-2210-12
Position Title: Information Technology Specialist (Network), Washington, DC 
(NS) (Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: 02-19
Closing Date: June 18, 2002
Contact: Agency for International Development, OIG, 1300 Pennsylvania Room 
8.7A RRB, Washington, DC 20523; Ms. Barksdale 202-712-4189

Series/Grade: GS-2210-13
Position Title: Information Technology Specialist, Washington, DC (NS) 
(Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: ODEP 02-078
Closing Date: June 18, 2002
Contact: Department of Labor, Francis Perkins Bldg, 200 Constitution Ave 
NW, Room C-5516, Washington, DC 20210; Fleata Carr 202-693-7719

Series/Grade: GS-2210-15
Position Title: Supervisory Information Technology Specialist (Chief 
Technology Officer), Washington, DC (NS) (Request vacancy; must address 
ranking factors)
Announcement #: DEU-02-042A
Closing Date: June 28, 2002
Contact: Securities & Exchange Commission, 6432 General Green Way MS#0-1, 
Attn AL Robinson, Alexandria, VA 22312

Series/Grade: GS-2210-13
Position Title: Information Technology Specialist, Peachtree City, GA (S) 
(Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: M-NWS-02-129JL-LLB
Closing Date: June 11, 2002
Contact: Department of Commerce, MASC/HR, MC21C, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 
80305; Lisa Lawrence 303-497-3075

Series/Grade: GS-335-7
Position Title: Computer Assistant, Pine Knot, KY (NS) (Request vacancy; 
must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: R802-047-02D
Closing Date: June 10, 2002
Contact: Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 2500 Shreveport Hwy, 
Pineville, LA 71360; Edward Harris 318-473-7135

Series/Grade: GS-1530-11/13
Position Title: Survey Statistician, Hyattsville, MD (NS) (Request vacancy; 
must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: MP / DE4-02-018
Closing Date: June 18, 2002
Contact: Health & Human Services, CDC, Box 12214, MS P-09, Research 
Triangle Park, NC 27709

Series/Grade: GS-1530-14
Position Title: Statistician (Health), Rockville, MD (NS) (Request vacancy; 
must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: AHRQ-02-018
Closing Date: June 14, 2002
Contact: Health & Human Services, Prog Support Ctr, DPO-Parklawn, HRS/PSC, 
Box 5346, Rockville, MD 20848-5346

Series/Grade: GS-2210-13
Position Title: Information Technology Specialist (Network), Bethesda, MD 
(NS) (Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: CIT-02-0020A
Closing Date: June 10, 2002
Contact: Health & Human Services, NIH, Cinformation Technology Hro, Bldg 
12A/3013, Bethesda, MD 20892-5644

Series/Grade: GS-334-15
Position Title: Supervisory Computer Specialist, Hyattsville, MD (NS) 
(Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: IR-02-138
Closing Date: June 20, 2002
Contact: Department of Treasury, FMS, HR Div, 3700 East West Hwy, Room 
170A, Hyattsville, MD 20782; 202-874-8090

Series/Grade: GS-2210-15
Position Title: Supervisory Information Technology Specialist, St Louis, MO 
(S) (Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: 02-234CP
Closing Date: June 10, 2002
Contact: Defense Information Systems Agency, Civ Pers, Attn 02-234CP, 701 S 
Courthouse Rd, Arlington, VA 22204-2199; Carolyn Pankey 703-607-4458

Series/Grade: GS-854-14
Position Title: Computer Engineer, Ft Monmouth, NJ (NS) (Request vacancy; 
must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: ALU201286
Closing Date: July 3, 2002
Contact: Department of Army, NE Staffing Div-DEU, 314 Johnson St, Aberdeen 
PG MD 21005-5283; 410-306-0031

Series/Grade: GS-334-14
Position Title: Information Technology Business Continuity Program Manager, 
Portland, OR (NS) (Request vacancy; must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: 001471-02-DE
Closing Date: June 19, 2002
Contact: Department of Energy, Bonneville Power Admin, 5411 NE Hwy 99, 
Plant Svcs Bldg, Vancouver, WA 98663; 360-418-2090

Series/Grade: GS-854-15
Position Title: Computer Engineer, Falls Church, VA (S) (Request vacancy; 
must address ranking factors)
Announcement #: 02-261LT
Closing Date: June 13, 2002
Contact: Defense Information Systems Agency, Civ Pers, Attn 02-261LT, 701 S 
Courthouse Rd, Arlington, VA 22204-2199; Luz D. Turner 703-607-4457

Series/Grade: GS-1550-12
Position Title: Computer Scientist, Norfolk, VA (S) (Request vacancy; must 
address ranking factors)
Announcement #: E1550-MH
Closing Date: July 1, 2002
Contact: Department of Navy, HRSC EAST, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Building 17 
Code 531, Portsmouth, VA 23709-5000; 757-396-7755

Series/Grade: GS-335-7
Position Title: Computer Assistant, Seattle, WA (NS) (Request vacancy; must 
address ranking factors)
Announcement #: 453-DEU-02
Closing Date: June 13, 2002
Contact: Department of Army, WCPOC, Bldg 61801, Box 12926, Ft Huachuca, AZ 
85670-2926; Alice Stull 206-764-6833
********************
BBC
Simple password holds the key

Norwegians may be thankful that a researcher at a museum was less than 
inventive in choosing a password to protect its electronic library.
Reidar Djupedal took to the grave the password he had chosen for the 
electronic archive of books and documents.

But it only took hackers five hours to crack the code and unlock the 
valuable archive.

A 25-year-old Swede is credited as having discovered that the password was 
ladepujd, the researcher's name spelt backwards.

"It sounds simple now that we have the answer, but the database was created 
in an old program that few have now, and the public institutions we asked 
for help didn't manage to crack the code," Ottar Grepstad, director of the 
Ivar Aasen Centre of Language and Culture, told the Aftenposten newspaper.

"It is interesting that this case has sparked a serious debate among 
computer experts about how one should take care of an important password," 
he said.

Simply names

The internet appeal for help by the Aasen Institute provoked a flood of 
e-mail suggestions and discussions on the web.

Within hours, it became clear that the answer was the researcher's name 
backwards. But the institute waited over the weekend to see if that 
information was enough to allow full access to the valuable index.

In fact, this password was only the first step. Accessing the database 
required another password but this one was even simpler - the researcher's 
first name.

Experts recommend you should use a full sentence as a password, and add 
some symbols and numbers at the end of it.

Alternatively, you should pick a cycle of words that mean something to you 
from your past and change one of the letters to a number, like an E to a 3.

The database compiled by Reidar Djupedal indexed over 11,000 titles. It 
would have taken the institute about four years of work to recreate the 
catalogue had they failed to find the password.

The Aasen centre researches Norway's second language Nynorsk, compiled by 
linguist Ivar Aasen from the country's local oral dialects.
*********************
BBC
FBI campaign against Einstein revealed

A new book reveals the 22-year effort by FBI director J Edgar Hoover to get 
Albert Einstein arrested as a political subversive or even a Soviet spy.

Uncovered FBI files are revealed in a book by Fred Jerome who says it was a 
clash of cultures - Einstein's challenge and change with Hoover's order and 
obedience.

From the time Einstein arrived in the US in 1933 to the time of his death, 
in 1955, the FBI files reveal that his phone was tapped, his mail was 
opened and even his trash searched.

Einstein became world famous in 1906 for his Special Theory of Relativity 
that deals with light.

His General Theory of Relativity, published in 1919, deals with gravity and 
has been called mankind's greatest intellectual accomplishment.

Derogatory information

The Einstein File begins with a request by J Edgar Hoover in 1950: "Please 
furnish a report as to the nature of any derogatory information contained 
in any file your bureau may have on the following person."

That person was Albert Einstein, and the request intensified a secret 
campaign to discredit him.

Hoover was worried about Einstein's liberal intellectualism and his 
dabbling in politics, something that has been forgotten today. It has been 
overtaken by Einstein's absent-minded professor image.

But Einstein was outspoken against social injustice and violations of civil 
rights.

The fledgling state of Israel once offered Einstein its presidency. 
Einstein declined.

The broad outline of this story has been known since 1983, when Richard 
Alan Schwartz, a professor of English at Florida International University 
in Miami, obtained a censored version of Einstein's 1,427-page FBI file.

But Jerome uncovers new material.

He sued the US Government with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation 
Group to obtain all the documents in the Einstein file.

Stalin comparison

The new material shows how the bureau spied on Einstein.

"It is like the agents got up in the morning, brushed their teeth, opened 
other people's mail and tapped some phones," he told the BBC.

After he left Germany, appalled by the barbarism of the Nazis, Einstein 
lent his name to a variety of organisations dedicated to peace and 
disarmament.

Because of this, the Woman Patriot Corp wrote a 16-page letter to the State 
Department, the first item in Einstein's file, in 1932, arguing that 
Einstein should not be allowed into the United States.

"Not even Stalin himself" was affiliated with so many anarchic-communist 
groups, the letter said.

Fred Jerome reveals that the 1,800-page document prepared about Einstein by 
the FBI shows that the agency even bugged his secretary's nephew's house.

The files reveal that for five years J Edgar Hoover tried, and failed, to 
link Einstein to a Soviet espionage ring.

The Einstein File by Fred Jerome, St Martin's Press, New York, 272 pages.
******************
Mercury News
Billions in fraudulent jobless benefits paid
By Leigh Strope
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Overpayments or fraudulent claims made up about 8 percent of 
the $30 billion in unemployment benefits paid last year, the government says.

About $2.4 billion in benefits were overpaid to people last year, including 
$560 million stemming from fraud and abuse, Labor Department officials told 
a House Ways and Means subcommittee Tuesday.

An audit conducted in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas revealed 
that nearly 3,000 claims totaling about $3.2 million were paid to people 
using Social Security numbers that did not exist or belonged to dead 
people. Illegal immigrants filed a large portion of those claims.

Another investigation by the General Accounting Office, the investigative 
arm of Congress, found that nine Social Security numbers were being used by 
about 700 people in 29 states to collect benefits. Seven of those numbers 
belonged to dead people.

In another instance, one person used names and Social Security numbers of 
dead people to create 13 fake companies and 36 fake workers to collect more 
than $135,000 from California, $65,000 from Massachusetts, $16,000 from 
Nevada and $15,000 from Texas.

Also, not all employers pay their fair share of unemployment insurance 
taxes. Some intentionally misclassify workers as independent contractors to 
hide wages or create shell companies to pay a lower rate.

Those errors are expected to increase this year as the nation's 
unemployment rate continues to hover close to a nearly eight-year high of 6 
percent with thousands of people still out of work.

``These staggering numbers reflect just the overpayments we know about,'' 
said subcommittee Chairman Wally Herger, R-Calif. ``We can be sure more are 
out there waiting to be uncovered through better oversight.''
*******************
USA Today
Congress calls up Internet domain name company

WASHINGTON (AP)  Congress is taking a look at the California company that 
administers Internet addresses after critics said it is too slow to address 
security holes and should be more closely regulated.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, governs 
the system that translates common Web site addresses into strings of 
numbers understood by computers.

Testimony prepared for a Senate committee hearing Wednesday, and obtained 
by The Associated Press, says the Commerce Department has not taken a 
strong enough role in overseeing the company.

The department's public comments have been "general in nature and 
infrequent," and there were no detailed minutes of meetings between the 
company and federal officials, according to remarks prepared by the General 
Accounting Office, the investigative branch of Congress, for the Senate 
Commerce subcommittee on science and technology.

"ICANN's legitimacy and effectiveness as the private sector manager of the 
domain name system (remains) in question," the GAO said.

Stuart Lynn, who next year plans to step down as the company's president, 
defended his group.

"ICANN has been very successful by any real measure of what success is," he 
said. Lynn said the Commerce Department already has "tremendous oversight" 
over the company's work.

Several months ago, Lynn announced plans for a reorganization that would 
remove the company's elected board members, but it has not been approved.

Assistant Commerce Secretary Nancy Victory is to testify as well. Her 
spokesman declined to answer questions before the hearing.

Criticism of the Internet domain name overseer prompted Sen. Conrad Burns, 
R-Mont., to threaten legislation linking its future to a complete 
reorganization.

"ICANN has clearly exceeded its authority and mutated into a supranational 
regulatory body lacking oversight," said Burns, the panel's top Republican. 
"Clearly, this legislation needs to be happen as soon as possible and 
should be crafted with an eye to giving the U.S. a greater oversight role."

Andy Davis, a spokesman for Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., the Commerce 
Committee chairman, cautioned that Hollings has not taken a position on the 
company's fate and characterized the hearing as "the big first step" in the 
debate.

Congress held a similar hearing last year, but Wednesday's will be the 
first held after Democrats gained control of the Senate.

ICANN gained control of the Internet's domain name system through a 1998 
agreement with the Commerce Department. But the deal was only supposed to 
be a transition, and control was supposed to be ceded to another private 
company or organization in 2000. ICANN has been fraught with infighting and 
delays, and the deal was extended to September of this year.

The company has governed the creation of new domain names, such as .info 
and .name, and created more competition in domain name sales.

It was supposed to develop security policies to protect the 13 "root 
servers" that are the heart of the Internet's domain system. These servers, 
positioned all over the world, serve as central directories so that every 
Web user can find addresses like microsoft.com and whitehouse.gov. If those 
servers were somehow knocked offline or attacked by hackers or terrorists, 
entire swaths of the Internet would be unreachable to most people.

The General Accounting Office noted that the company created a committee to 
enhance root-server security, but a report is overdue. Lynn said the 
root-server system was designed for backup protection.

"Security was important to the root servers long before 9-11," Lynn said.
*******************
Government Executive
OMB praises agencies' guidelines for providing online information

From National Journal's Technology Daily


The Office of Management and Budget on Tuesday sent a memo to the 
President's Management Council praising federal agencies for issuing new 
guidelines designed to improve the quality of information given to citizens 
on the Internet.

OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which sent the 
memo, also proposed strategies to improve the draft guidelines. Agencies' 
final guidelines, which must be approved by OMB, will be available on the 
Internet by Oct. 1.

"The size and scope of the information released by the federal government 
is vast, as is its effect on the lives of many Americans," OMB officials 
said in a statement. "Leveraging the power of the Internet, the government 
regularly provides citizens with population figures, cost-benefit analysis 
reports, and economic indicators. Every statistic that government releases 
could be improved through the implementation of better data quality guidance."

A 2000 law gave OMB the ability to request improved guidelines amid 
concerns about the quality of agency information disseminated through Web 
sites and other means.

In the letter, OIRA Administrator John Graham also noted that the 
government's e-government chief, Mark Forman, is leading work on a content 
model for presenting government information on the Web.

It will include guidelines on how agencies should identify Web-based 
material and what information they should make available on the Internet.
*********************
Nando Times
Romance, risk abound in Russia's e-mail order bride industry

MOSCOW (June 11, 2002 1:40 p.m. EDT) - Alevtina Ivanova and other Russian 
bachelorettes like her are looking for a few good men - abroad.

"Unfortunately, in our collapsed economy, very few men are able to support 
a family properly," she says.

"Russian men lack confidence, they become fatalistic, they drink, they die 
young. It's not surprising that Russian women pin their hopes elsewhere."

Ivanova, a veteran of half-a-dozen serious cyberrelationships with European 
and American men, is among thousands of Russian women turning to the 
Internet to meet Westerners. The potential suitors are equally frustrated 
with the dating prospects in their home countries.

"American women are too independent, too demanding, too critical," says 
Chris, a middle-aged U.S. businessman visiting Moscow to meet "several very 
nice ladies" he contacted over the Web. Chris, who asked that his last name 
not be used, cites a joke often repeated here: "A Russian wife wants to 
keep house for you. An American wife wants to get rid of you, and keep the 
house."

Dozens of Web-based agencies are busy playing matchmaker, for fees paid by 
both the women, who send in their pictures and bios for posting on 
international Web sites, and the men, who can obtain contact information 
for the women who pique their interest.

The agencies claim that romance is blossoming all over, and that thousands 
of happy Russian e-mail order brides head West every year.

"We get about 300 applicants every single day, mostly women," says Anna 
Kuznetsova, manager of Eye-2-Eye, a large, Moscow-based international 
dating agency. "The technology may be modern, but the process of men 
meeting women is as ancient as time."

Though there are no firm statistics, it is estimated that between 4,000 and 
6,000 women from the former Soviet Union marry U.S. citizens each year. One 
agency currently lists 25,000 women from Russia and other former Soviet 
republics seeking Western mates; there are dozens more agencies, each 
offering thousands of would-be brides. Some agencies have branched into 
travel, translation and other services to profit from what they say is an 
exploding traffic.

While some describe these international e-introductions as offering matches 
made in heaven, others see nightmares in cyberspace.

"People bring their illusions as well as their dreams to this market," says 
Tatiana Gurko, head of the independent Center for Gender Studies in Moscow. 
"Like any physical place, the Internet has predators lurking about, and 
sometimes they may be hard to spot."

Western men increasingly report being ripped off by wily Russian women, who 
write sweet e-mails, send sexy digital photos, hit them up for cash, and 
then disappear.

On the other side, tales filtering back to Russia of Internet marriages 
gone sour - including the murder of a Russian mail-order bride in the U.S. 
- have put women on their guard.

But Ivanova, who now works as an adviser to DiOritz, a large Moscow 
matchmaking agency, says that, although none of her cyber-relationships 
have led to marriage, she has had no regrettable experiences.

"You can find out everything you need to know about a man in five e-mails," 
she says breezily. "Men are fairly obvious, you just need to question them 
properly."

To her, the requirements on both sides are clear: "A woman need only be 
attractive and educated, but a man must have property, means, and a good job."

Yelena Khronina, who plans to soon wed "a wonderful Norwegian man" she met 
via the Internet, says her dream has come true.

"It's so hard to be a woman in Russia," Khronina sighs. "But then you visit 
this beautiful, orderly, prosperous country, and spend time with a man who 
treats you with kindness and respect. Why would anyone say no to that?"

The potential dangers of dabbling in cyberromance are dramatized in a 
recent film, "Birthday Girl," in which Nicole Kidman plays a mail order 
bride from Moscow who brings a gang of Russian mafia thugs crashing into 
the life of her English bank-clerk beau. In real life, the sting is usually 
more mundane: An unsuspecting Western man falls in love after a few gushing 
e-mail exchanges with a false identity posted on a Web site - sometimes the 
photos are actually of a Russian actress or fashion model - and is 
persuaded to wire cash for a ticket to visit him, or to meet some personal 
emergency.

"A woman can string a man along, playing on his emotions and sympathy and, 
in doing so, trick him into giving her money or expensive items," says Paul 
O'Brien, a U.S. Web designer who has temporarily given up his search for a 
Russian wife after being burned by two women who just wanted money from him.

O'Brien says he resorted to the Internet because of America's fast-paced, 
impersonal and workaholic culture. "A lot of guys I know work many, many 
hours and do not have time for a social life," he says. "So it seems 
particularly appealing to them when these agencies offer to help them make 
contact with beautiful and single women," he says, but warns: "Prospective 
suitors need to be very wary of the women out there who have no intention 
of developing a relationship with them."

Most of the known scams are now listed on a special Web site supported by 
several matchmaking agencies, Russian-scam.org.

Russian women insist it is they who face the greatest hazards. Many have 
heard about Anastasia Solovyova, a Russian from the former Soviet republic 
of Kyrgyztan, who was murdered by her American husband two years ago. She 
had been his second mail-order bride. Experts say there are many more tales 
of miserable, and sometimes tragic, mismatches.

"You come to a strange country, to meet a man you've only corresponded with 
by e-mail," says Ivanova. "There are issues of language, culture and 
personal morality. It takes a lot of trust, and for some women it goes 
badly wrong."

After her many encounters, Ivanova says she now advises her clients not to 
consider men from the U.S. at all. "American men are not cultured, they 
work too much and think far too much about money," she says. "Western 
European men are different. When they correspond with a prospective bride, 
they look upon it as forming a relationship. American men act as if they're 
buying a wife."

In any case, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which brought the Russian 
and U.S. governments closer together, may, paradoxically, have put at least 
a temporary damper on the love fest.

Tamara Babkina, deputy director of Wedding Palace No. 4, which is the only 
office in Moscow where foreigners can legally marry, says that until last 
year, Americans were the largest group marrying Russian women. "We had 175 
U.S.-Russian weddings in 2001, but since Sept. 11 there has not been a 
single one," Babkina says.

While no one wants to go on the record criticizing love, some experts argue 
that the Westward outflow of Russian women must be viewed as a baneful 
social indicator.

"Russia has become the world's leading exporter of wives, and this is a 
tremendously profitable business," says Gurko.

"It may be a real supply-and-demand situation," she says. "But let's try to 
remember that this vast supply of terrific women is made up of individuals 
whose hopes have been crushed in Russia.

"It's so sad that, in order to seek a better life, a Russian woman has to 
leave."
********************
Nando Times
Africa's digital dreams
NICHOLAS THOMPSON

ACCRA, Ghana (June 11, 2002 11:56 a.m. EDT) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul 
O'Neill and U2's Bono saw plenty of suffering on their 12-day fact-finding 
trip on African aid. Camera crews zoomed in on barefoot children begging by 
an open sewer; pundits noted that the AIDS rate is soaring while per capita 
income stays about the same.

To many Americans, it's just Africa, the place where time has stopped and 
people die young.

The dismal statistics are all true. But a slightly closer look, at least in 
Ghana, will show something else: an extraordinary technology boom. It's not 
quite San Francisco in 1998, but there's something similar going on.

In fact, for every child like Zakaria Turay, a 14-year-old war veteran in 
Sierra Leone recently profiled in Newsweek, there's a young man like Robin 
Kwakofi, a 24-year-old Ghanaian Web programmer with his own aspiring dot-com.

When Turay was abducted by guerrillas five years ago, Kwakofi was taking 
the bus to Accra's one Internet cafe and teaching himself to program. When 
Turay was running drugs and drinking blood, Kwakofi was redesigning the Web 
site for Ghana's Joy FM radio station. As Turay tries to reassemble a life, 
Kwakofi plans for what he calls an African technological revolution.

Young men and women like Kwakofi fill Accra. And although the whiz kids of 
Ghana don't have nearly the technological or educational infrastructure of 
their San Francisco role models, they do have the same ambitions.

Kofi Dadzie, a 25-year-old programmer, runs a software company called 
Rancard in Accra. He has seven employees now, but he talks about having 
10,000 in just a few years. Up the street, Ghanaians pack the downstairs of 
the Busy Internet cafe day and night, using the cafe's 100 flat-screen 
monitors and fast satellite connection. Upstairs, 10 companies use the 
connection for everything from e-commerce to typing up handwritten street 
violations for the New York City Police Department. Directly across the 
street, students at the NIIT computer school gather and talk of their 
dreams of starting software companies.

The story that Americans heard from Ghana during Bono and O'Neill's travels 
matters more than one might think. Africa has lagged in development for 
many reasons, ranging from poor geographic luck (lots of malaria; not many 
good shipping routes) to horrendous political leadership. But the continent 
also suffers because of the perception of Africa as a monolithic sinkhole, 
and thus a place unworthy of investment or attention.

To many Americans, Africa is just Africa - even if Ghana no more resembles 
Sierra Leone than the United States resembles Mexico. Ghana has a truly 
democratically elected government, has been stable for 20 years with 
virtually no ethnic conflict, and there probably isn't a single child with 
a Kalashnikov hiding in the bush.

Moreover, as Asian nations showed in the 1990s, nothing spurs development 
in one country more than development in a neighboring one. People learn new 
skills, access new markets and are competitive. Africa hasn't had a real 
success story yet. But if just a few of the Internet pioneers' dreams come 
true, Ghana could be it.

Asked what he hopes for, one of Turay's fellow fighters told Newsweek that 
he wanted pens and books. That's the classic desperate message from Africa. 
It's real, and it's not that far from what Bono wants. But Kwakofi may have 
a more important African message. Asked what he would say to O'Neill, 
Kwakofi says, "I would tell him to say to American technology companies 
that they can invest in Ghana. ... Conditions are right for a boom."

Nicholas Thompson is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington.
***************
New Zealand Herald
'Big brother' Britain extends its snooping powers

LONDON - Britain is poised to increase dramatically the range of 
authorities who can pry into people's private lives to the fury of civil 
liberties groups who say a "Big Brother" mentality is taking hold.

Under a law passed two years ago, information about private telephone calls 
and e-mails can be demanded by the police, tax authorities and security 
services for reasons such as national security or serious crime prevention.

But according to reports, admitted by government officials on Tuesday, that 
right will be extended to several other government departments, every local 
council in the country and even health service and food safety bodies.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said the new powers, to be 
enshrined in law next week, will be useable only under carefully monitored 
circumstances.

"These powers are not taken lightly," he said, stressing the safeguards 
involved.

He said information could only be sought on grounds of national security, 
crime prevention, Britain's economic wellbeing, public safety or public 
health, tax or duty matters, to prevent death or any damage to a person's 
health.

But pressure groups were furious at the long arm of the law being allowed 
to stretch further.

"I am appalled at this huge increase in the scope of government snooping," 
Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research told 
the Guardian newspaper.

"Two years ago, we were deeply concerned that these powers were to be given 
to the police without any judicial oversight. Now they are handing them out 
to a practically endless queue of bureaucrats in Whitehall and town halls."

The government argues that monitoring e-mail and the internet is vital to 
catch modern, hi-tech criminals.

Campaign groups such as Liberty say the British state is becoming ever-more 
intrusive and fear the climate since the September 11 suicide attacks on 
the United States will accelerate that process.

Britain is estimated to have more than two million closed-circuit 
television cameras scanning streets and public places, far more than 
anywhere else in Europe.

Blair's spokesman said that if the technology -- and legal power for 
authorities to use it -- had been available in the 1970s, serial killers 
such as the Yorkshire Ripper could have been caught much earlier.

The Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was convicted in 1981 of the murder of 13 
women over a number of years.

Sutcliffe, who preyed on lone women some of them prostitutes in a five-year 
reign of terror, cropped up on paper-based police records a number of 
times, years before he was caught.
**********************
Sydney Morning Herald
Teens are keen to pay online
June 11 2002

Today's teenagers who have grown up with the Internet as a fact of life are 
showing an overwhelming enthusiasm for making payments on the Web, 
according to a new report from industry analyst Datamonitor.

In its report Online Teen Payments, Datamonitor says about 80 per cent of 
US and European teenagers said they would shop online if they had the means 
to do so. At present, payment options are severely limited for the teenage 
market, and Datamonitor outlines the opportunities for companies looking to 
take advantage of this market.    www.datamonitor.com

IP VPN services market to boom

The push for office connectivity is fuelling the market for Internet 
Protocol-based virtual private networks (VPNs), according to IDC.

The analysts say businesses can avoid big investment in private network 
infrastructure.

The market for IP-based VPNs is predicted to grow from $500 million last 
year to nearly $1.9 billion by 2005.

Large organisations are using VPNs to connect branches and home-office 
users to the corporate network, while small businesses can use VPNs to 
access resources similar to those of larger organisations, says 
IDC.      www.idc.com.au

GPRS 'will fail' revenue expectations

Telcos are rolling out general packet radio service (GPRS) networks 
worldwide with the promise of significantly boosting average revenue per user.

However, IT analyst the Gartner Group expects that GPRS will fail to meet 
the revenue expectations of mobile operators and that it will prove to be a 
great technological disappointment until capacity, device and application 
challenges are overcome.

According to Gartner, GPRS will not meet original expectations due 
primarily to an application gap that prevents GPRS from being suited to 
mainstream usage. GPRS is suited to business-to-consumer (B2C) applications 
on mobile phones and niche business-to-employee (B2E) applications on PDAs 
and laptops.

Gartner expects the more aggressive rollouts to miss expectations by up to 
50 per cent in Europe - and by up to 40 per cent in other regions - between 
2002 and 2005.    gartner.com
************************
Computerworld
N.D. voters side overwhelmingly with privacy
By PATRICK THIBODEAU

WASHINGTON -- In a vote with potential national implications, North Dakota 
residents overwhelmingly agreed yesterday to bar the sale of personal data 
collected by banks, credit unions and other financial services firms to 
third parties.
This is the first time that voters in a state have had the chance to 
toughen privacy protections set in the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley financial 
modernization law, which allows financial services firms to freely share 
information without consumer consent.

Of the approximately 115,000 votes cast in yesterday's referendum, nearly 
74% voted to require consumer consent before data is shared. The state 
elections board offered vote results online.

"This is the beginning of a consumer backlash against the sharing of 
information," said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

Litan said a "good business strategy is to proactively ask your customers, 
'Do you want to keep your information private, or are we allowed to share 
with other organizations?'" The value in asking that question is customer 
retention, Litan said.

Privacy advocates say the vote reaffirms opinion polls showing that 
customers want stronger privacy protections. "It's no longer speculation -- 
people want opt-in," said Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel at the 
Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The vote comes at the same time Congress is considering legislation by U.S. 
Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-S.C.) that would preempt the ability of 
states to do what North Dakotan voters did yesterday.

"It's becoming clearer that preemption of state law is an attempt to 
prevent strong privacy protections," said Hoofnagle.

Dennis Behrman, a privacy analyst at Meridien Research Inc. in Newton, 
Mass., said the vote "shouldn't be anything that disturbs their true 
revenue potential. This is just another step in the trend toward 
restricting customer data to third parties."

Litan said firms sell data without customer identification to marketing 
companies. But, she said, these firms find it relatively easy through 
data-mining techniques to identify that data. "It's kind of like this 
unspoken dirty secret going around," Litan said.
*****************
Computerworld
Wall Street aims to thwart criminals with database
By LUCAS MEARIAN

More than a dozen Wall Street firms are joining forces to create a company 
that will offer a customer database to the financial services industry for 
screening out suspected criminals. The move is intended to help companies 
comply with new antiterrorist regulations.
The Regulatory DataCorp Int'l LLC is principally the creation of The 
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York, but it's also being financially 
supported by firms such as Merrill Lynch & Co., Citigroup Inc. and UBS 
PaineWebber Inc.

The company is expected to launch in the next couple of weeks, said a 
Goldman Sachs spokeswoman. Other companies involved in the venture didn't 
return phone calls or declined to comment.

According to published reports, Regulatory DataCorp will compile 
information from public resources including international, federal and 
local law enforcement records. It will then sell access to the database to 
other companies so they can screen potential customers. Regulatory DataCorp 
will be a separate company from its founders, said the Goldman Sachs 
spokeswoman, who declined to comment further on the venture.

While not unique, the database would be among only a handful in the world 
performing industrywide customer searches, according to Brian Smith, a 
partner at law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw in Washington, which 
specializes in regulatory issues in the financial services marketplace.

"The big difference here is that it is financial services firms doing this 
and not technology companies," he said.

Since the U.S. Patriot Act was passed by Congress in response to the Sept. 
11 terrorist attacks, banks and brokerages have been scrambling to comply 
with rules that require them to "know their customers" prior to allowing 
them to open accounts.

Richard DeLotto, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said it 
makes sense for the firms to work together. "If there's a bad guy working 
in town, he's going to walk from bank to bank. So it increases the 
likelihood of catching a money launderer or terrorist," he said.

British banking compliance firm World-Check Inc., which is supported by 
Swiss banks, gained notoriety when it was discovered in February that it 
had profiles of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers in its database and had 
listed them as "high risk." World-Check claims to have about 55,000 
individuals listed.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center is a private 
organization in New York that charges companies a minimum $7,000 annual fee 
for alerts and access to information about hacking and cyberterrorism threats.

However, some privacy advocates fear that private industry databases will 
prevent consumers from reviewing information affecting their ability to use 
financial services.

"There have been concerns that [other databases] operate under a cloak of 
secrecy," said Stephen Keating, executive director of The Privacy 
Foundation in Denver. He said Regulatory DataCorp's database could be more 
comprehensive than others because it's expected to retrieve information 
from hundreds of sources worldwide.
*******************
Computerworld
FTC vows to keep closer tabs on privacy breaches

RESTON, Va. -- Companies that release customer data as a result of security 
mistakes could find themselves in the cross hairs of the Federal Trade 
Commission, especially if such a release points to poor security practices.
The agency has brought only one case against a company for releasing 
customer data, but FTC Chairman Timothy Muris said today that he expects 
more action against companies.

The FTC took its first security-related action earlier this year in a 
landmark settlement reached with Eli Lilly and Co. in Indianapolis after it 
released nearly 700 customer addresses collected through its Prozac.com Web 
site. The release of names, which were included in an e-mail, was called 
inadvertent, but the FTC nonetheless faulted the pharmaceutical firm for 
its security and training practices (see story).

"I expect Lilly is not the case we will bring," Muris said today at the 
Networked Economy Summit, sponsored by George Mason University.

Prior to the Lilly case, the FTC's enforcement actions had been focused on 
willful disclosures of information. But in the Lilly case, the FTC held the 
company to its privacy promise that pledged security. If a company makes 
such a promise, it should have reasonable security procedures in place, 
said Muris.

According to Muris, when security breaches occur, the FTC will investigate 
and try to answer two questions: Did the company have a system in place 
that was appropriate for the sensitivity of the information? And did it 
follow its own procedures?

Under the settlement announced in January, Eli Lilly was required to make 
changes to its information security practices as well as conduct an annual 
review.

One motive for the growing FTC interest in security is identity theft.

The FTC averages 3,000 calls per week from people in need of help because 
of such theft. But Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel at the Electronic 
Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, said any emphasis on 
security may do more to legitimize invasive privacy practices by data 
profilers and others.

"A pioneering or more progressive approach is to pursue businesses that are 
collecting data without an individual's consent," he said.

Also at the conference was former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who 
credited the city's Y2k planning with helping it handle the aftermath of 
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last year.

New York spent some $280 million on Y2k repairs, which Giuliani said he 
"used to resent" because of the amount of money needed for what was 
essentially remedial work.

But when the city's emergency command center was destroyed in the collapse 
of one of the adjoining World Trade Center buildings, the city was able to 
quickly rebuild the center, in part, because it had made duplicates of all 
the systems in case of a Y2k-related systems failure.

That, he said, "made me feel better."
*****************

Lillie Coney
Public Policy Coordinator
U.S. Association for Computing Machinery
Suite 510
2120 L Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
202-478-6124
lillie.coney@xxxxxxx