open letter to alt.coven.moderated readers
Mel...@alt.coven.moderated
of apathy and denial of reality:
*
* The people could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
* reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was
* demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public
* events to notice what was happening.
[
By Walter Cronkite: "Orwell's '1984'---Nearing?", NYT, June 5 1983
In our world, where a Vietnam village can be destroyed so it can be
saved; where the President names the latest thing in nuclear missiles
"Peacekeeper"---in such a world, can the Orwellian vision be very far
away?
Big Brother's ears have plugs in them right now (or they are, by law,
supposed to), at least on the domestic telephone and cable traffic.
But the National Security Agency's ability to monitor microwave
transmissions, to scoop out of the air VAST numbers of communications,
including telephone conversations, store them in computers, play them
back later, has a truly frightening potential for abuse.
George Orwell issued a warning.
He told us that freedom is too much taken for granted, that it needs to
be carefully watched and protected. His last word on the subject was a
plea to his readers: "Don't let it hap
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Mar...@alt.coven.moderated
the least: unusual.
*
* It is not. In fact, in the United States today it is increasingly
* common. In 1994, federal courts authorized more wiretaps for
* intelligence-gathering and national security purposes than they
* did to investigate ordinary federal crimes.
*
* The review process to prevent legal and factual errors is virtually
* non-existent.
*
* And the FISA system's courtroom advocacy is monumentally one-sided.
*
* The court has never formally rejected an application. Not once.
*
* For the first time in modern U.S. history, the Congress had
* institutionalized a process for physical searches outside of
* Fourth Amendment standards.
*
* Not even Congress' intelligence oversight committees review these
* special cases on a regular basis.
Mini-recap:
o Congress voted into existence a court that bypasses our normal
Fourth Amendment constitutional rights. Poof they're gone.
o Congressional oversite is weak.
Such a special court should be subject to the
highest standard of continual scrutiny: it is not.
! The New York Times, December 29, 19??, by David Burnham
!
! Because the National Security Agency is actively involved in the
! design [of Key Recovery cryptography], the agency will have the
! technical ability to decipher the messages.
!
! Walter G. Deeley, NSA deputy director for communications security
! said, "Another important safeguard to the privacy of communications
! was the continuous review of NSA's activities by the Senate and House
! intelligenc
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Don...@alt.coven.moderated
I'm announcing the award of five contracts to standards development
* organizations to begin fast tracking the development of those standards.
* They are: AASHTO, IEEE, ITE, ASTM, and SAE. [So the standards of hardware
* and information are interchangeable and global.]
Yep.
# Subject: ---> Big Bro and the Intelligent Transportation System <---
# From: 9...@spies.com (Extremely Right)
# Date: 1997/06/03
#
# If you live in a big city you will find that there is an interesting
# proliferation of cameras pointed at the freeway. Do you know what they
# are, what they can do, and what is their potential for abuse?
#
# The System is called the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and you
# may find it everywhere on the net. The cameras are linked to a city
# control room, who are supposed to use them to improve traffic flow. The
# cameras are "uplinked" to the net, to satellites, and I suppose to the
# United States Transportation Command at Scott AFB or some other
# centralized information storage base. Software i
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Cypr...@alt.coven.moderated
>Subject: Jan 26 1996 REDHOT
>Cc: <others>
Vivian,
On Jan 26 1996:
18,184 lines of C++ source of something called "basis" for FDTS.
Here was the radar hit:
*********************************
Filename: Jan_26_96/dfAA05811 Size: 207496, Dated: Jan 26 08:30
Sender: apoo@snowball (Art Poo)
Recipient: NA...@newscorp.com
**** UUencoding, Filename='b.Z'
Your Excellency,
Make this floopy-bound. Bring it to esi this evening.
Thank you.
begin 600 b.Z
*********************************
Mr. Poo no longer seems to be with us.
His id is gone from his system, and someone else has his phone number.
It's an api that accesses some sort of indexed info, creates some sort
of report, is an X-windows deal.
I found the name of the recipient:
**********************************************************************
NAME XXXXXXXXXXXXXX Oracle / NewsCorp Online Ventures
TITLE XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
abcd...@newscorp.com XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
(212)-nnn-nnnn (nnn)-nnn-nnnn
**********************************************************************
..and the recipient confirmed delivery.
That was kind of him.
#of
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Be...@alt.coven.moderated
and could not be useful
! to transmit offsite for "testing".
! It executes other programs in the YieldBook package tree, and
! needs a full setup of YieldBook to operate.
!
! Shall I do the secondary searches and an incident report?
! ---guy
!
! *********************************
! Filename: Dec_21_95/dfAA19116 Size: 522186, Dated: Dec 21 1995
! Sender: blort@bpann
! Recipient: bl...@cornell.edu
! *********************************
********** end excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' **********
Nothing was done: I had completely overwhelmed Salomon Legal with security
incidents, and many were ignored.
In general, when you catch something in the backups, there are two choices:
o Grin and bear it
o File criminal or civil charges in court
Two of the security incidents found in the backups qualified for criminal
prosecution.
One was a source for the Finance Desk Trading System [FDTS].
********** begin excerpt from 'Corruption at Salomon Brothers' **********
>Date: Tue, 7 May 96 23:38:00 EDT
>From: guy
>To: vivian
>Subject: Jan 26 1996 REDHOT
>Cc: <others>
Vivian,
On Jan 26 1996:
18,184 lines of C++ source of something called "basis" for FDTS.
Here was the radar hit:
*********************************
Filename: Jan_26_96/dfAA05811 Size: 207496, Dated: Jan 26 08:30
Sender: apoo@snowball (Art Poo)
Recipient: NA...@newscorp.com
**** UUencoding, Filename='b.Z'
Your Excellency,
Make this floopy-bound. Bring it to esi this evening.
Thank you.
begin 600 b.Z
*********************************
Mr. Poo no longer seems to be with us.
His id is gone from his system, and someone else has his phone number.
It's an api that accesses some sort of indexed info, creates some sort
of report, is an X-windows deal.
I found the name of the re
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Marg...@alt.coven.moderated
# has been traced directly to marijuana.
* "Phantom Numbers Haunt the War on Drugs"
* By Christopher S. Wren, The New York Times, April 20, 1997
*
* Politicians are said to use statistics the way drunks use lampposts: for
* support rather then illumination. The aphorism seems more apt for the War
* on Drugs, which abounds with statistical lampposts that shed little light
* on the nation's preoccupation with illegal substances.
*
* When sensibly vague estimates based on the little that is known won't
* suffice, law enforcement officials oblige constituents with numbers that
* one police officer characterized as "P.F.A.," or "pulled from the air."
*
* When the State Department's annual survey said Mexico's annual marijuana
* production in 1989 was 30,200 tons, it was PFA.
*
* Assuming half the production makes it into the U.S., half the population
* between 15 and 40 in this country would have had to smoke a joint a day.
*
* By 1996 the State Department's annual survey stabilized at a more realistic
* 3,400 tons a year.
*
* However, the State Department's annual survey for 1996 stated Columbia's
* cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, jumped 32% over 1995.
*
* This was deliberate manipulation of the statistics: unlike previous years,
* the State Department suddenly stopped figuring in the 55,715 acres that
* the Columbian police fumigated with herbicide.
*
* The number had ac
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