[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Dealing With a New Threat

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military.

But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy.

Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention.

Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.

The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.

Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A White House Briefing

After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.

It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.

Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules.

Widespread abuses - including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists - by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law.

Concerns and Revisions

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment.

A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping.

According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information.

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.

Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses.

Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?"

"Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens."

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

The Legal Line Shifts

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer."

Barclay Walsh contributed research for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/po...rtner=homepage





House Ready, Senate Balks on Patriot Act
Jesse J. Holland

The GOP-controlled House plans to quickly renew portions of the USA Patriot Act before they expire at the end of the year. Some Republicans say the nation's safety could be endangered if the Senate doesn't follow suit.

The House on Wednesday was expected to pass a White House- backed bill that would renew more than a dozen provisions of the Act - the government's premier anti-terrorism law - which are due to expire Dec. 31.

But saving those provisions will be more difficult in the Republican-controlled Senate, where some GOP and Democratic senators are unsatisfied with the compromise bill, which was worked out last week between key Republicans in the House and Senate.

At least one senator, Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, is threatening a filibuster.

House leaders and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday warned the bill's opponents that they could be putting the country in danger by holding up the Act's reauthorization.

"The consequence of the Patriot Act expiring on December 31st is going to be putting the American people at greater risk," House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said.

Added Gonzales: "The tools in the reauthorization of the Patriot Act are very important to the success of the Department of Justice in protecting this country."

For the White House and congressional Republicans, renewing the centerpiece of President Bush's war on terror is a top priority with the midterm elections coming up next year.

Bush devoted his Saturday radio address to the subject and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., added his voice Sunday.

Congress overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The law expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers.

The vast majority of the Patriot Act would remain in force even if the House-Senate agreement to renew the expiring provisions fails. The reauthorization language would extend for four years two of the Patriot Act's most controversial provisions - authorizing roving wiretaps and permitting secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries.

Those provisions would expire in four years unless Congress acted on them again.

About a dozen Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are complaining that the Patriot Act gives government too much power to investigate people's private transactions, including bank, library, medical and computer records. They also say it doesn't place enough limits on the FBI's use of National Security Letters, which compel thirds parties to produce those documents during terrorism investigations.

Senate Democrats joined by some libertarian-leaning Republicans want to extend the expiring provisions of the law by three months to give Congress time to add more protections against what they say are excessive police powers.

"There's no reason to compromise right to due process, the right to a judicial review, fair and reasonable standards of evidence in the pursuit of our security," said Sen. John E. Sununu, R-N.H., one of several senators urging Congress to move the expiration date to March 31.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., supports efforts to delay the vote, including a filibuster threatened by Feingold, "so there will be more time to work on a good bipartisan bill," said his spokesman, Jim Manley.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME






EU Approves Data Retention Rules
BBC

The European Parliament has approved rules forcing telephone companies to retain call and internet records for use in anti-terror investigations.

Records will be kept for up to two years under the new measures.

Police will have access to information about calls, text messages and internet data, but not exact call content.

The UK, which pressed European member states to back the rules, said that data was the "golden thread" in terrorist investigations.

The parliament voted by 378 to 197 to approve the bill, which had already been agreed by the assembly's two largest groups, the European People's Party and the Socialists.

Compromises

The measures were proposed by Britain after the bomb attacks in London in July.

They still need to be formally approved by EU member states.

UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke said the approval showed the European institutions - the Parliament, the Council, the Commission - standing firm against terrorism and serious organised crime.

"This sends a powerful message that Europe is united against terrorism and organised crime," he said.

"All three institutions have worked closely together and been willing to compromise in order to reach agreement on this important measure."

The measures will require firms to store:

· data that can trace fixed or mobile telephone calls
· time and duration of calls
· location of the mobile phone being called
· details of connections made to the Internet
· details, but not the content, of internet e-mail and internet telephony services

Details of connected calls that are unanswered, which can be used as signals to accomplices or used to detonate bombs, will also be archived where that data exists.

Costs

But the telecommunications industry has raised some concerns about the measures, which firms say could be expensive to implement.

Thierry Dieu, spokesman for European Telecommunications Networks Operators' Association, said that because the proposed measures go much further than the current practices, especially for the internet data, "it is clear that there will be a lot of investment for the industry to make".

A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) said it remained to be seen how the measures would affect providers once incorporated into UK law.

He said there was already some voluntary co-operation with the authorities, but mandatory data retention would result in significant costs. ISPs would have to create ways of holding the data, managing it and providing access to it for the authorities, he said.

"At the end of the day ISPs are not law enforcement agencies so they should not have to pay for it all," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4527840.stm





Music Industry Seeks Access To Private Data To Fight Piracy

· Plea to Europe to widen scope of anti-terror laws
· Civil rights fears over phone and email records

Bobbie Johnson

The music and film industries are demanding that the European parliament extends the scope of proposed anti-terror laws to help them prosecute illegal downloaders. In an open letter to MEPs, companies including Sony BMG, Disney and EMI have asked to be given access to communications data - records of phone calls, emails and internet surfing - in order to take legal action against pirates and filesharers. Current proposals restrict use of such information to cases of terrorism and organised crime.

"The scope of the proposal should be extended to all criminal offences," says a letter to European representatives from the Creative and Media Business Alliance, an informal lobby group representing media companies. "The possibility for law enforcement authorities to use data in other cases ... is essential." The attempt to pressure MEPs comes as they prepare to vote on an extension to the period for which data must be held by telephone networks and internet service providers. The plans, championed by the British government, would harmonise and extend the broad range of policies across the continent.

The Home Office says such moves are necessary in order to assist proper investigation of suspected terrorist activity. But if successful, it would mean communications companies would be obliged to keep information on phone calls, emails and internet use for as long as three years.

"It is not for us to get involved in the wider issue of national security," said a spokesman for international music industry association IFPI, parent body of the CBMA.

If the demands were met by European legislators, it would open use of such private information across any number of criminal cases. "Even the Bush administration is not proposing such a ludicrous policy, despite lobbying from Hollywood," said Gus Hosein, a senior fellow at Privacy International.

The music industry has already pursued a large number of cases against illegal downloaders, but the letter claims that wider access to private information would be an "effective instrument in the fight against piracy" and help secure more legal actions. Critics say it is simply a case of litigious industries attempting to gain access to protected data by the back door.

The proposals, to be put to the vote on December 13, have already faced censure. More privacy-conscious nations such as Germany have voiced concerns about long-term data retention, and telecoms companies say they cannot afford to keep more information about their customers.

"The passing of the data retention directive would be a disaster not just for civil liberties and human rights in Europe," said Suw Charman, director of digital rights campaigners, Open Rights Group.

The music industry has been waging war against illegal filesharing for some time, with film companies closely behind. An Australian court this week ordered Kazaa, one of the biggest file-swapping services, to filter out copyrighted music from its systems or face closure. Last week the British Phonographic Industry announced its latest batch of cases against illegal downloaders, taking the total number of UK actions to over 150.

Such prosecutions already rely on voluntary data supplied by internet providers, but the music industry would like it made compulsory. At the same time, the legitimate digital download industry continues to grow at a startling pace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmu...651273,00.html





Live Tracking of Mobile Phones Prompts Court Fights on Privacy
Matt Richtel

Most Americans carry cellphones, but many may not know that government agencies can track their movements through the signals emanating from the handset.

In recent years, law enforcement officials have turned to cellular technology as a tool for easily and secretly monitoring the movements of suspects as they occur. But this kind of surveillance - which investigators have been able to conduct with easily obtained court orders - has now come under tougher legal scrutiny.

In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants.

The rulings, issued by magistrate judges in New York, Texas and Maryland, underscore the growing debate over privacy rights and government surveillance in the digital age.

With mobile phones becoming as prevalent as conventional phones (there are 195 million cellular subscribers in this country), wireless companies are starting to exploit the phones' tracking abilities. For example, companies are marketing services that turn phones into even more precise global positioning devices for driving or allowing parents to track the whereabouts of their children through the handsets.

Not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies want to exploit this technology, too - which means more courts are bound to wrestle with what legal standard applies when government agents ask to conduct such surveillance.

Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on. Even if the phone is not in use it is communicating with cellphone tower sites, and the wireless provider keeps track of the phone's position as it travels. The operators have said that they turn over location information when presented with a court order to do so.

The recent rulings by the magistrates, who are appointed by a majority of the federal district judges in a given court, do not bind other courts. But they could significantly curtail access to cell location data if other jurisdictions adopt the same reasoning. (The government's requests in the three cases, with their details, were sealed because they involve investigations still under way.)

"It can have a major negative impact," said Clifford S. Fishman, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office and a professor at the Catholic University of America's law school in Washington. "If I'm on an investigation and I need to know where somebody is located who might be committing a crime, or, worse, might have a hostage, real-time knowledge of where this person is could be a matter of life or death."

Prosecutors argue that having such information is crucial to finding suspects, corroborating their whereabouts with witness accounts, or helping build a case for a wiretap on the phone - especially now that technology gives criminals greater tools for evading law enforcement.

The government has routinely used records of cellphone calls and caller locations to show where a suspect was at a particular time, with access to those records obtainable under a lower legal standard. (Wireless operators keep cellphone location records for varying lengths of time, from several months to years.)

But it is unclear how often prosecutors have asked courts for the right to obtain cell-tracking data as a suspect is moving. And the government is not required to report publicly when it makes such requests.

Legal experts say that such live tracking has tended to happen in drug-trafficking cases. In a 2003 Ohio case, for example, federal drug agents used cell tracking data to arrest and convict two men on drug charges.

Mr. Fishman said he believed that the number of requests had become more prevalent in the last two years - and the requests have often been granted with a stroke of a magistrate's pen.

Prosecutors, while acknowledging that they have to get a court order before obtaining real-time cell-site data, argue that the relevant standard is found in a 1994 amendment to the 1986 Stored Communications Act, a law that governs some aspects of cellphone surveillance.

The standard calls for the government to show "specific and articulable facts" that demonstrate that the records sought are "relevant and material to an ongoing investigation" - a standard lower than the probable-cause hurdle.

The magistrate judges, however, ruled that surveillance by cellphone - because it acts like an electronic tracking device that can follow people into homes and other personal spaces - must meet the same high legal standard required to obtain a search warrant to enter private places.

"Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns, especially when the phone is monitored in the home or other places where privacy is reasonably expected," wrote Stephen W. Smith, a magistrate in Federal District Court in the Southern District of Texas, in his ruling.

"The distinction between cell site data and information gathered by a tracking device has practically vanished," wrote Judge Smith. He added that when a phone is monitored, the process is usually "unknown to the phone users, who may not even be on the phone."

Prosecutors in the recent cases also unsuccessfully argued that the expanded police powers under the USA Patriot Act could be read as allowing cellphone tracking under a standard lower than probable cause.

As Judge Smith noted in his 31-page opinion, the debate goes beyond a question of legal standard. In fact, the nature of digital communications makes it difficult to distinguish between content that is clearly private and information that is public. When information is communicated on paper, for instance, it is relatively clear that information written on an envelope deserves a different kind of protection than the contents of the letter inside.

But in a digital era, the stream of data that carries a telephone conversation or an e-mail message contains a great deal of information - like when and where the communications originated.

In the digital era, what's on the envelope and what's inside of it, "have absolutely blurred," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group.

And that makes it harder for courts to determine whether a certain digital surveillance method invokes Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

In the cellular-tracking cases, some legal experts say that the Store Communications Act refers only to records of where a person has been, i.e. historical location data, but does not address live tracking.

Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group that has filed briefs in the case in the Eastern District of New York, said the law did not speak to that use. James Orenstein, the magistrate in the New York case, reached the same conclusion, as did Judge Smith in Houston and James Bredar, a magistrate judge in the Federal District Court in Maryland.

Orin S. Kerr, a professor at the George Washington School of Law and a former trial attorney in the Justice Department specializing in computer law, said the major problem for prosecutors was Congress did not appear to have directly addressed the question of what standard prosecutors must meet to obtain cell-site information as it occurs.

"There's no easy answer," Mr. Kerr said. "The law is pretty uncertain here."

Absent a Congressional directive, he said, it is reasonable for magistrates to require prosecutors to meet the probable-cause standard.

Mr. Fishman of Catholic University said that such a requirement could hamper law enforcement's ability to act quickly because of the paperwork required to show probable cause. But Mr. Fishman said he also believed that the current law was unclear on the issue.

Judge Smith "has written a very, very persuasive opinion," Mr. Fishman said. "The government's argument has been based on some tenuous premises." He added that he sympathized with prosecutors' fears.

"Something that they've been able to use quite successfully and usefully is being taken away from them or made harder to get," Mr. Fishman said. "I'd be very, very frustrated."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/te...y/10phone.html





Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive
Jeff Gerth

The media center in Fayetteville, N.C., would be the envy of any global communications company.

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for the group's radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences. Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those writers and producers are soldiers. The 1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States government's objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

"We call our stuff information and the enemy's propaganda," said Col. Jack N. Summe, then the commander of the Fourth Psychological Operations Group, during a tour in June. Even in the Pentagon, "some public affairs professionals see us unfavorably," and inaccurately, he said, as "lying, dirty tricksters."

The recent disclosures that a Pentagon contractor in Iraq paid newspapers to print "good news" articles written by American soldiers prompted an outcry in Washington, where members of Congress said the practice undermined American credibility and top military and White House officials disavowed any knowledge of it. President Bush was described by Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, as "very troubled" about the matter. The Pentagon is investigating.

But the work of the contractor, the Lincoln Group, was not a rogue operation. Hoping to counter anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, the Bush administration has been conducting an information war that is extensive, costly and often hidden, according to documents and interviews with contractors, government officials and military personnel.

The campaign was begun by the White House, which set up a secret panel soon after the Sept. 11 attacks to coordinate information operations by the Pentagon, other government agencies and private contractors.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the focus of most of the activities, the military operates radio stations and newspapers, but does not disclose their American ties. Those outlets produce news material that is at times attributed to the "International Information Center," an untraceable organization.

Lincoln says it planted more than 1,000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed editorials on an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded stealth persuasion effort into neighboring countries, Lincoln presented plans, since rejected, for an underground newspaper, television news shows and an anti-terrorist comedy based on "The Three Stooges."

Like the Lincoln Group, Army psychological operations units sometimes pay to deliver their message, offering television stations money to run unattributed segments or contracting with writers of newspaper opinion pieces, military officials said.

"We don't want somebody to look at the product and see the U.S. government and tune out," said Col. James Treadwell, who ran psychological operations support at the Special Operations Command in Tampa.

The United States Agency for International Development also masks its role at times. AID finances about 30 radio stations in Afghanistan, but keeps that from listeners. The agency has distributed tens of thousands of iPod-like audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan that play prepackaged civic messages, but it does so through a contractor that promises "there is no U.S. footprint."

As the Bush administration tries to build democracies overseas and support a free press, getting out its message is critical. But that is enormously difficult, given widespread hostility in the Muslim world over the war in Iraq, deep suspicion of American ambitions and the influence of antagonistic voices. The American message makers who are wary of identifying their role can cite findings by the Pentagon, pollsters and others underscoring the United States' fundamental problems of credibility abroad.

Defenders of influence campaigns argue that they are appropriate. "Psychological operations are an essential part of warfare, more so in the electronic age than ever," said Lt. Col. Charles A. Krohn, a retired Army spokesman and journalism professor. "If you're going to invade a country and eject its government and occupy its territory, you ought to tell people who live there why you've done it. That requires a well-thought-out communications program."

But covert information battles may backfire, others warn, or prove ineffective. The news that the American military was buying influence was met mostly with shrugs in Baghdad, where readers tend to be skeptical about the media. An Iraqi daily newspaper, Azzaman, complained in an editorial that the propaganda campaign was an American effort "to humiliate the independent national press." Many Iraqis say that no amount of money spent on trying to mold public opinion is likely to have much impact, given the harsh conditions under the American military occupation.

While the United States does not ban the distribution of government propaganda overseas, as it does domestically, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report that lack of attribution could undermine the credibility of news videos. In finding that video news releases by the Bush administration that appeared on American television were improper, the G.A.O. said that such articles "are no longer purely factual" because "the essential fact of attribution is missing."

In an article titled "War of the Words," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote about the importance of disclosure in America's communications in The Wall Street Journal in July. "The American system of openness works," he wrote. The United States must find "new and better ways to communicate America's mission abroad," including "a healthy culture of communication and transparency between government and public."

Trying to Make a Case

After the Sept. 11 attacks forced many Americans to recognize the nation's precarious standing in the Arab world, the Bush administration decided to act to improve the country's image and promote its values.

"We've got to do a better job of making our case," President Bush told reporters after the attacks.

Much of the government's information machinery, including the United States Information Agency and some C.I.A. programs, was dismantled after the cold war. In that struggle with the Soviet Union, the information warriors benefited from the perception that the United States was backing victims of tyrannical rule. Many Muslims today view Washington as too close to what they characterize as authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere.

The White House turned to John Rendon, who runs a Washington communications company, to help influence foreign audiences. Before the war in Afghanistan, he helped set up centers in Washington, London and Pakistan so the American government could respond rapidly in the foreign media to Taliban claims. "We were clueless," said Mary Matalin, then the communications aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Rendon's business, the Rendon Group, had a history of government work in trouble spots, In the 1990's, the C.I.A. hired him to secretly help the nascent Iraqi National Congress wage a public relations campaign against Saddam Hussein.

While advising the White House, Mr. Rendon also signed on with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under a $27.6 million contract, to conduct focus groups around the world and media analysis of outlets like Al Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar.

About the same time, the White House recruited Jeffrey B. Jones, a former Army colonel who ran the Fort Bragg psychological operations group, to coordinate the new information war. He led a secret committee, the existence of which has not been previously reported, that dealt with everything from public diplomacy, which includes education, aid and exchange programs, to covert information operations.

The group even examined the president's words. Concerned about alienating Muslims overseas, panel members said, they tried unsuccessfully to stop Mr. Bush from ending speeches with the refrain "God bless America."

The panel, later named the Counter Terrorism Information Strategy Policy Coordinating Committee, included members from the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Mr. Rendon advised a subgroup on counterpropaganda issues.

Mr. Jones's endeavor stalled within months, though, because of furor over a Pentagon initiative. In February 2002, unnamed officials told The New York Times that a new Pentagon operation called the Office of Strategic Influence planned "to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news organizations." Though the report was denied and a subsequent Pentagon review found no evidence of plans to use disinformation, Mr. Rumsfeld shut down the office within days.

The incident weakened Mr. Jones's effort to develop a sweeping strategy to win over the Muslim world. The White House grew skittish, some agencies dropped out, and panel members soon were distracted by the war in Iraq, said Mr. Jones, who left his post this year. The White House did not respond to a request to discuss the committee's work.

What had begun as an ambitious effort to bolster America's image largely devolved into a secret propaganda war to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon, which had money to spend and leaders committed to the cause, took the lead. In late 2002 Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters he gave the press a "corpse" by closing the Office of Strategic Influence, but he intended to "keep doing every single thing that needs to be done."

The Pentagon increased spending on its psychological and influence operations and for the first time outsourced work to contractors. One beneficiary has been the Rendon Group, which won additional multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations center in Baghdad, including "damage control planning." The new Lincoln Group was another winner.

Pentagon Contracts

It is something of a mystery how Lincoln came to land more than $25 million in Pentagon contracts in a war zone.

The two men who ran the small business had no background in public relations or the media, according to associates and a résumé. Before coming to Washington and setting up Lincoln in 2004, Christian Bailey, born in Britain and now 30, had worked briefly in California and New York. Paige Craig, now 31, was a former Marine intelligence officer.

When the company was incorporated last year, using the name Iraqex, its stated purpose was to provide support services for business development, trade and investment in Iraq. The company's earliest ventures there included providing security to the military and renovating buildings. Iraqex also started a short-lived online business publication.

In mid-2004, the company formed a partnership with the Rendon Group and later won a $5 million Pentagon contract for an advertising and public relations campaign to "accurately inform the Iraqi people of the Coalition's goals and gain their support." Soon, the company changed its name to Lincoln Group. It is not clear how the partnership was formed; Rendon dropped out weeks after the contract was awarded.

Within a few months, Lincoln shifted to information operations and psychological operations, two former employees said. The company was awarded three new Pentagon contracts, worth tens of millions of dollars, they added. A Lincoln spokeswoman referred a reporter's inquiry about the contracts to Pentagon officials.

The company's work was part of an effort to counter disinformation in the Iraqi press. With nearly $100 million in United States aid, the Iraqi media has sharply expanded since the fall of Mr. Hussein. About 200 Iraq-owned newspapers and 15 to 17 Iraq-owned television stations operate in the country. Many, though, are affiliated with political parties, and are fiercely partisan, with fixed pro- or anti-American stances, and some publish rumors, half-truths and outright lies.

From quarters at Camp Victory, the American base, the Lincoln Group works to get out the military's message.

Lincoln's employees work virtually side by side with soldiers. Army officers supervise Lincoln's work and demand to see details of article placements and costs, said one of the former employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities.

"Almost nothing we did did not have the command's approval," he said.

The employees would take news dispatches, called storyboards, written by the troops, translate them into Arabic and distribute them to newspapers. Lincoln hired former Arab journalists and paid advertising agencies to place the material.

Typically, Lincoln paid newspapers from $40 to $2,000 to run the articles as news articles or advertisements, documents provided to The New York Times by a former employee show. More than 1,000 articles appeared in 12 to 15 Iraqi and Arab newspapers, according to Pentagon documents. The publications did not disclose that the articles were generated by the military.

A company worker also often visited the Baghdad convention center, where the Iraqi press corps hung out, to recruit journalists who would write and place opinion pieces, paying them $400 to $500 as a monthly stipend, the employees said.

Like the dispatches produced at Fort Bragg, those storyboards were one-sided and upbeat. Each had a target audience, "Iraq General" or "Shi'ia," for example; an underlying theme like "Anti-intimidation" or "Success and Legitimacy of the ISF," or Iraqi Security Forces; and a target newspaper.

Articles written by the soldiers at Camp Victory often assumed the voice of Iraqis. "We, all Iraqis, are the government. It is our country," noted one article. Another said, "The time has come for the ordinary Iraqi, you, me, our neighbors, family and friends to come together."

While some were plodding accounts filled with military jargon and bureaucratese, others favored the language of tabloids: "blood-thirsty apostates," "crawled on their bellies like dogs in the mud," "dim-witted fanatics," and "terror kingpin."

A former Lincoln employee said the ploy of making the articles appear to be written by Iraqis by removing any American fingerprints was not very effective. "Many Iraqis know it's from Americans," he said.

The military has sought to expand its media influence efforts beyond Iraq to neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Pentagon documents say. Lincoln submitted a plan that was subsequently rejected, a Pentagon spokesman said. The company proposed placing editorials in magazines, newspapers and Web sites. In Iraq, the company posted editorials on a Web site, but military commanders stopped the operation for fear that the site's global accessibility might violate the federal ban on distributing propaganda to American audiences, according to Pentagon documents and a former Lincoln employee.

In its rejected plan, the company looked to American popular culture for ways to influence new audiences. Lincoln proposed variations of the satirical paper "The Onion," and an underground paper to be called "The Voice," documents show. And it planned comedies modeled after "Cheers" and the Three Stooges, with the trio as bumbling wannabe terrorists.

The Pentagon's media effort in Afghanistan began soon after the ouster of the Taliban. In what had been a barren media environment, 350 magazines and newspapers and 68 television and radio stations now operate. Most are independent; the rest are run by the government. The United States has provided money to support the media, as well as training for journalists and government spokesmen.

But much of the American role remains hidden from local readers and audiences.

The Pentagon, for example, took over the Taliban's radio station, renamed it Peace radio and began powerful shortwave broadcasts in local dialects, defense officials said. Its programs include music as well as 9 daily news scripts and 16 daily public service messages, according to Col. James Yonts, a United States military spokesman in Afghanistan. Its news accounts, which sometimes are attributed to the International Information Center, often put a positive spin on events or serve government needs.

The United States Army publishes a sister paper in Afghanistan, also called Peace. An examination of issues from last spring found no bad news.

"We have no requirements to adhere to journalistic principles of objectivity," Colonel Summe, the Army psychological operations specialist, said. "We tell the U.S. side of the story to approved targeted audiences" using truthful information. Neither the radio station nor the paper discloses its ties to the American military.

Similarly, AID does not locally disclose that dozens of Afghanistan radio stations get its support, through grants to a London-based nonprofit group, Internews. (AID discloses its support in public documents in Washington, most of which can be found globally on the Internet.)

The AID representative in Afghanistan, in an e-mail message relayed by Peggy O'Ban, an agency spokeswoman, explained the nondisclosure: "We want to maintain the perception (if not the reality) that these radio stations are in fact fully independent."

Recipients are required to adhere to standards. If a news organization produced "a daily drumbeat of criticism of the American military, it would become an issue," said James Kunder, an AID assistant administrator, He added that in combat zones, the issue of disclosure was a balancing act between security and assuring credibility.

The American role is also not revealed by another recipient of AID grants, Voice for Humanity, a nonprofit organization in Lexington, Ky. It supplied tens of thousands of audio devices in Iraq and Afghanistan with messages intended to encourage people to vote. Rick Ifland, the group's director, said the messages were part of the "positive developments in democracy, freedom and human rights in the Middle East."

It is not clear how effective the messages were or what recipients did with iPod-like devices, pink for women and silver for men, that could not be altered to play music or other recordings. Mr. Ifland said they were designed so "only a consistent, secure official message can be disseminated."

To show off the new media in Afghanistan, AID officials invited Ms. Matalin, the former Cheney aide and conservative commentator, and the talk show host Rush Limbaugh to visit in February. Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners that students at a journalism school asked him "some of the best questions about journalism and about America that I've ever been asked."

One of the first queries, Mr. Limbaugh said, was "How do you balance justice and truth and objectivity?"

His reply: report the truth, don't hide any opinions or "interest in the outcome of events." Tell "people who you are," he said, and "they'll respect your credibility."

Carlotta Gall and Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/po...gewanted=print





Air Marshals to Expand Their Mission
Leslie Miller

Federal air marshals are expanding their work beyond airplanes, launching counterterror surveillance at train stations and other mass transit facilities in a three-day test program.

As of Wednesday, the Transportation Security Administration said, teams of undercover air marshals and uniformed law enforcement officers were descending on bus stations, ferries and transit systems across the country to protect them from potential terrorists.

"We just want to develop the capability to enhance security outside of aviation," said air marshal spokesman David Adams.

Air marshals stepped outside of their usual role of flying undercover on airliners after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. They were sent to keep order at Louis Armstrong International Airport, where thousands of evacuees converged after the levees were breached.

The so-called "Visible Intermodal Protection and Response" teams - or VIPER teams - will patrol Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore.

The teams will consist of two air marshals, one TSA bomb-sniffing- canine team, one or two transportation security inspectors and a local law enforcement officer.

Adams said there is no new intelligence indicating that terrorists are interested in targeting transportation modes.

Rather, the TSA is trying to expand the role of air marshals, who have been eager to conduct surveillance activities beyond the aircraft, and tighten security at public transit stations over the holiday.

Some members of the team will be obvious to the traveling public and wear jackets bearing the TSA name on the back. Others will be plainclothes air marshals scanning the crowds for suspicious individuals.

"TSA expects to find new ways to quickly deploy resources, in the event of an actual threat, that adds complexity to security measures outside of the aviation domain," the agency said in a statement.

Thousands of air marshals were rushed into service after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The service has been shunted among different agencies since then, starting out at the Federal Aviation Administration, moving to the TSA, then to Immigration and Custom Enforcement and, recently, back to the TSA.

Though the exact number of air marshals is classified, pilots estimate that they cover only a small percentage of flights. Efforts were made to expand coverage by cross-training other law enforcement officers to perform air marshal duties, but Congress put a stop to it.

Air marshals last week shot and killed a passenger in Miami who they said made a bomb threat.

The Washington Post first reported the deployment of the VIPER teams.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...M&SECTION=HOME





A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank
Katharine Q. Seelye

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.

A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world's biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws. His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.

In a confessional letter to Mr. Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.

"It had the intended effect," Mr. Chase said of his prank in an interview. But Mr. Chase said that once he became aware last week through news accounts of the damage he had done to Mr. Seigenthaler, he was remorseful and also a little scared of what might happen to him.

Mr. Chase also found that he was slowly being cornered in cyberspace, thanks to the sleuthing efforts of Daniel Brandt, 57, of San Antonio, who makes his living as a book indexer. Mr. Brandt has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and started an anti-Wikipedia Web site (www.wikipedia-watch.org) in September after reading what he said was a false entry about himself.

Using information in Mr. Seigenthaler's article and some online tools, Mr. Brandt traced the computer used to make the Wikipedia entry to the delivery company in Nashville. Mr. Brandt called the company and told employees there about the Wikipedia problem but was not able to learn anything definitive.

Mr. Brandt then sent an e-mail message to the company, asking for information about its courier services. A response bore the same Internet Protocol address that was left by the creator of the Wikipedia entry, offering further evidence of a connection.

A call by a New York Times reporter to the delivery company on Thursday made employees nervous, Mr. Chase later told Mr. Seigenthaler. On Friday, Mr. Chase hand- delivered a letter to Mr. Seigenthaler's office, confessing what he had done, and later they talked at length.

Mr. Chase told him that the Seigenthaler name had come up at work and that he had popped it into a search engine and was led to Wikipedia, where, he said, he was surprised that anyone could make an entry.

Mr. Chase wrote: "I am truly sorry to have offended you, sir. Whatever fame comes to me from this will be ill-gotten indeed."

Mr. Seigenthaler said Mr. Brandt was "a genius" for tracking down Mr. Chase. He said he "was not after a pound of flesh" and would not take Mr. Chase to court.

Mr. Chase resigned from his job because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Mr. Seigenthaler urged Mr. Chase's boss to rehire him, but Mr. Chase said that, so far, this had not happened.

Mr. Chase said that as Mr. Brandt and the news media were closing in and he realized how much he had hurt Mr. Seigenthaler, he decided that stepping forward was "the right thing to do."

Mr. Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, said that as a longtime advocate of free speech, he found it awkward to be tracking down someone who had exercised that right.

"I still believe in free expression," he said. "What I want is accountability."

Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, said that the site would make more information about users available to make it easier to lodge complaints. But he portrayed the error as something that fell through the cracks, not a sign of a systemic problem. "We have to continually evaluate whether our controls are enough," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/bu...dia/11web.html





ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

Terror Groups Lack Ability To Mount Serious Cyber Attacks

Louis Reigel III, the FBI's top cyber crime official, says Al-Qaida and other terror groups are more sophisticated in their use of computers but still are unable to mount crippling Internet-based attacks against US power grids, airports, and other targets.
<http://tinyurl.com/7qq4e> [Washington Post]


Secret US ID Law Goes To Court

A three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments yesterday on tech entrepreneur and Internet freedom fighter John Gilmore's challenge to a secret government order forcing airline passengers to show identification or submit to a pat-down search. Gilmore contends that the policy violates his right to travel and that the additional search of those who do not show ID is a form of punishment.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69773,00.html


EFF and CIPPIC Launch New Online Rights Organization

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic have joined forces to create Online Rights Canada, a new grassroots organization focused on technology and information policy issues. ORC is initially focused on Internet surveillance and copyright reform. Release at
<http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_12.php#004244>


BSA Study Targets Infringing Software Worldwide

Research group IDC found in a study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance that the global rate of illegal software is currently around 35 percent, coming down only 1 percent a year. The study, covering 70 countries that represent 99 percent of the world's information technology spending, claimed that a worldwide reduction of infringing software by 10 percentage points to 25 percent could generate 2.4 million jobs and $400 billion of economic growth.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69785,00.html


Tougher Penalties Sought Over Bootleg Movies

As part of its worldwide campaign against infringing copying, the film industry is pushing for tougher penalties for smuggling a camcorder into a cinema in New York. A bill pushed by the MPAA would make operating recording equipment inside a theatre a criminal misdemeanour, raising the maximum punishment to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13357024.htm


FBI And China Discuss Counterfeit Goods

The FBI has initiated talks with senior Chinese officials to develop a closer working relationship to reduce computer-related crime and intellectual-property infringement in China. Louis Reigel III, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, said he had met with his counterparts in China's Ministry of Public Security to discuss a wide range of issues.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113401077660817070.html


Sony Works To Patch Patch For Rootkit Vulnerabilities

Sony BMG is replacing a patch for its CD copy protection software after Princeton University researchers found a security flaw in the update. Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten wrote in his blog on Wednesday that a recent patch could open computers to attack by hackers. Sony executives said yesterday that they were working as closely as possible with security professionals to address the issues identified by Felten, and would have a new patch available by midday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5987776.html


State To Fight Challenge To Utah Porn Law

Utah is fighting a challenge to a new state law that requires ISPs to give customers a way to block porn sites. Attorney General Mark Shurtleff filed a motion in federal court to dismiss a lawsuit submitted on Nov. 17 by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult entertainment industry.
http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_341233425.html





"lol no its not its a virus"

New IM Bug Chats With You
Nancy Gohring

A new breed of malicious instant-message bots is on the loose, according to IMlogic, the developer of enterprise instant messaging security applications.

On Monday, IMlogic first published details of a new threat known as IM.Myspace04.AIM. Once the computer of an AIM (American Online IM) user is infected by the IM.Myspace04.AIM bot, the bot sends messages to people on the infected user's buddy list, making the messages appear to come from the infected user. The infected user isn't aware the messages are being sent. If recipients click on a URL sent with a message, they'll also become infected and start spreading the virus.

A bot is a program that can automatically interact with people or other programs. AOL, for example, has bots that let users ask questions via IM, such as directory queries, and the bot responds.

The unusual part of this bot is that it replies to messages. If a recipient responds after the initial message, the bot replies with messages such as "lol no its not its a virus" and "lol thats cool." Because the bot mimics a live user interaction, it could increase infection rates, IMlogic said.

IMlogic continues to analyse this particular threat but so far it seems not to be affecting users.

Some similar IM worms install spybots or keyloggers onto users' computers, said Sean Doherty, director of services in Europe, Middle East and Africa for IMlogic. Such malicious programs record key strokes or other user activity in an effort to discover user passwords or other information.

"What we're seeing with some of these worms is they vary quickly so the initial one may be a probe to see how well it infected users and then a later variant will be one that may put a spybot out," Doherty said. The initial worm could be essentially a proof of concept coming from the malware writers, he said.
http://www.techworld.com/security/ne...ePos=20&inkc=0





Microsoft Warns Of 'Critical' Windows Security Flaw

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday warned users of its Windows operating system of a "critical" security flaw in its software that could allow attackers to take complete control of a computer.

The world's largest software maker issued a patch to fix the problem as part of its monthly security bulletin. The problem mainly affects the Windows operating system and Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.

Computer security experts and Microsoft urged users to download and install the patch available at www.microsoft.com/security.

Microsoft said the vulnerability exists in its Internet Explorer Web browser, which an attacker could exploit to take over a PC by running software code after luring users to malicious Web pages.

Microsoft also issued one other security warning it rated at its second-highest level of "important."

A vulnerability defined as "important" is one where an outsider could break into a machine and gain access to confidential data but not replicate itself to other computers, Microsoft said.

Microsoft defines a flaw as "critical" when the vulnerability could allow a damaging Internet worm to replicate without the user doing anything to the machine.

The "critical" flaw affects Internet Explorer which is a part of Windows while the "important" flaw is a vulnerability in the fundamental code that the higher level functions of Windows are all based on.

For more than three years, Microsoft has been working to improve the security and reliability of its software as more and more malicious software targets weaknesses in Windows and other Microsoft software.

More than 90 percent of the world's personal computers run on the Windows operating system.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





HarperCollins Will Create a Searchable Digital Library
Edward Wyatt

In the latest move in the battle between publishers and search engines, HarperCollins Publishers said yesterday it would create its own digital library of all of its book and audio content and make it searchable by consumers on the Internet. Web users will be able to search the HarperCollins archive via search engines like Google and Yahoo or the specialized programs of retailers like Amazon.com.

The move is intended to allow HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation, to maintain control over digital content rather than cede that control to other companies, Jane Friedman, chief executive, said.

Rather than give copies of books to search services like Google for those companies to scan as it currently does, HarperCollins would keep the material on its own computers, and users would be pointed there by the search engine, Ms. Friedman said. The company expects to have at least part of the service operating by the middle of next year.

In the end, the development is not likely to make much difference in what consumers see, said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins. Currently, the Google Book Search site returns anywhere from a few lines to a few pages of a particular book's contents, depending on whether the book is under copyright and whether the publisher participates in its program. That's not likely to change.

But, Mr. Murray said, HarperCollins might offer consumers access to more of a book on its own site. HarperCollins, which released its announcement yesterday after it was first reported in The Wall Street Journal, said that all of its publishing companies around the world would participate in the program.

Other large publishers, like Random House Inc., a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, have long been digitizing all of their new content for in-house use, as well as many older books that remain in print.

But the HarperCollins announcement shows that at least one major publisher is seeking ways to work with Google and other Internet companies to make books and other material, like audiobooks, widely searchable.

Some publishers have filed lawsuits against Google for making digital copies of books in major research libraries while that material is still under copyright protection. Google maintains that because its searches return only a few lines of copyrighted material, its actions are allowed by the "fair use" provision of copyright law. The publishers have said that simply by making digital copies, Google is violating copyright law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/books/13harp.html





Companies To Build IPv6 Test Center
Grant Gross

Two companies have announced a partnership to create a large IPv6 test centre.

The goal is to create the world's leading IPv6 testing facility, said Spirent Federal Systems, one of the partners in the project. The centre, which will be used to test networks and products for IPv6 compatibility, will focus on serving US government agencies, said Ellen Hall, president and chief executive officer of Spirent Federal.

Teaming with Spirent Federal will be v6 Transition, the consulting and training arm of IPv6 Summit, which organises IPv6 conferences. IPv6 Summit is led by Alex Lightman, one of the leading advocates of the widespread transition to IPv6.

The test centre, to be located in northern Virginia, will be operational "very soon," Hall said. While details about the size of the centre are still being finalised, it will be large enough to conduct IPv6 tests for "several agencies at one time," she said.

Hall called the partnership with v6 Transition a "significant" pairing, combining v6 Transition's expertise on implementing IPv6 with Spirent Federal's contacts with U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Defense.

"We already have really good relationships with government agencies," Hall said.

The Defense Department has set 2008 as a target for making its computer systems compatible with IPv6. The White House Office of Management and Budget announced in June that US government agencies must be IPv6 compatible by June 2008.

Backers of IPv6 call it a major improvement over IPv4. IPv6 has several advantages, including built-in security, multicasting functionality and better support for mobile devices, backers say. More use of IPv6 could lead to better Internet TV, videoconferencing and military-grade security.

In a separate announcement, the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory, joined by 10 companies and the US military, tested several IPv6 functions on the Moonv6 network, the world's largest multivendor IPv6 network. Testers successfully made international VoIP calls, as well as testing some security and mobility functions. The VOIP calls, between New Hampshire and South Korea, tested IPv4 equivalency using an IPv4/IPv6 tunnel.
http://www.techworld.com/networking/...gePos=7&inkc=0





DirecTV To Pay For Do-Not-Call Violations
Andrew Bridges

DirecTV Inc. will pay $5.35 million to settle charges that its telemarketers called households listed on the national do-not-call registry to pitch satellite TV programming, Federal Trade Commission officials said Tuesday.

The proposed settlement, if approved by a federal judge in Los Angeles, would be the FTC's largest civil penalty in a consumer protection case.

The DirecTV complaint, filed by the Department of Justice at the FTC's request, named the company and five telemarketing firms it hired, as well as six principals of those firms.

"This multimillion-dollar penalty drives home a simple point: Sellers are on the hook for calls placed on their behalf," FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras said in a statement.

DirecTV issued a statement saying it has terminated its relationship with the telemarketing firms that made inappropriate calls and has implemented new procedures to ensure there is no repeat of the violations.

"DirecTV wholly supports the national do-not-call registry and our agreement with the FTC reflects our commitment to prevent unwanted and unlawful telemarketing calls to existing and potential DirecTV customers," said the company, which has 15 million subscribers.

The complaint alleged that DirecTV and the various telemarketing firms violated do- not-call rules beginning in October 2003, the month the registry debuted.

The registry, which contains more than 110 million phone numbers, was designed to prevent consumers from receiving unwanted calls from telemarketers.

Telemarketers must match their contact lists against the registry every 31 days. Companies that have recently done business with households are exempt, as are charities, pollsters and callers on behalf of politicians.

On Monday, in an unrelated case, DirecTV Inc. promised to reimburse unhappy customers and to make its advertised offers clearer, according to a settlement reached with 22 states over deceptive marketing complaints.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





All aboard!

Can This Man Reprogram Microsoft?
Steve Lohr

THINK back to Round 1 of the Internet, when things really got rolling in 1995. The computing landscape was shifting, and a cool, fast-growing young company symbolized the new order: Netscape. At the time, Microsoft looked to be a lumbering old war horse, trapped in the yesteryear of desktop personal computer software, word processors, spreadsheets and operating systems. It seemed, in other words, so 1980's.

But, of course, Microsoft emerged a winner. It embraced the Internet and vanquished the Netscape threat with hard work, ingenuity and strong-arm tactics that a federal court ruled violated the nation's antitrust laws. Microsoft's shares soared to a record high at the end of 1999.

The Internet, Round 2, is now under way. Again, the computing terrain is changing remarkably, helped along by free software like Linux and the spread of high-speed Internet access. Today, all kinds of computing experiences can be delivered as services over the Internet, often free and supported by advertising. Clever Internet software can now turn flat, view-and-read Web pages into snappy services that look and respond to a user's keystrokes much like the big software applications that reside on a PC hard drive. New companies are even sprouting up to offer Web-based word processors and spreadsheets, products long regarded as mature - and long dominated by Microsoft's desktop programs.

Champions of the Internet services model range from I.B.M. to start-ups. But the totemic company in this next big evolutionary step in computing is Google, the Internet search power whose ambitions appear to be growing as fast as its profits.

And Microsoft? It once more finds itself surrounded by doubt and dismissed as a laggard. Some of its own senior engineers have defected to Google and elsewhere, and its stock price has barely budged in three years, despite solid earnings growth, because others appear to be winning the race for the future.

The familiar pattern of a decade ago begs the question that Bill Gates was asked when he met last month with a group of executives and journalists from The New York Times: Will you do to Google what you did to Netscape?

Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and chairman, paused, looked down at his folded hands and smiled broadly, as if enjoying a private joke. "Nah," he replied, "we'll do something different."

The man whom Mr. Gates is counting on to make a difference is Ray Ozzie, a soft-spoken 50-year-old who joined the company just eight months ago. He has the daunting task of galvanizing the troops to address the Internet services challenge, shaking things up and quickening the corporate pulse.

The forces arrayed against Microsoft, analysts say, may well prove more formidable than ever. "The problem Microsoft faces today is that there is a totally different model emerging for how software is created, distributed, used and paid for," said George F. Colony, the chairman of Forrester Research, a technology consultant. "That's why it's going to be so difficult for Microsoft this time."

Yet there are optimists. Big industry shifts, they say, create opportunity. Inevitably, they note, Internet computing erodes Microsoft's power to set technology standards, but the company can still benefit as the overall market expands. That's what happened in the 1990's. They say that if Microsoft shrewdly devises, for example, online versions of its Office products, supported by advertising or subscription fees, it may be a big winner in Internet Round 2.

"There's a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft to expand its business," said Richard Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who has a buy recommendation on the company. "But Microsoft had better be sure it is the one that capitalizes before others cannibalize their business."

AT first blush, Mr. Ozzie, whose title is chief technical officer, seems an unlikely person to meet the threat of Google and its brethren. He has only a small staff and no direct control over Microsoft's vast product groups. "It's soft power," Mr. Ozzie said in an interview here last week, referring to the foreign-policy concept that influence need not be measured in bombs and battleships.

And few doubt Mr. Ozzie's influence. "Ray Ozzie is someone with a tremendous technical reputation and an outsider, who Bill Gates trusts, and he's come in and said things have to change," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Ozzie is a software wizard whose geek gene was evident early. Growing up in suburban Chicago, he had a passion for Heathkits, which were do-it-yourself projects for electronics hobbyists. He was constantly building radios, tape players and other electronics gear, recalled Jack Ozzie, his younger brother. "There was always a smell of solder in the back bedroom," said Jack, who is a software engineer.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1970's, Mr. Ozzie wandered into the building that housed Plato, a computer system with terminals linked to a mainframe in a network that, remarkably for its time, had instant messaging, e-mail and online discussions. Mr. Ozzie became a senior programmer on the Plato system.

Mr. Ozzie recalled that he was "forever changed" by his experience with Plato. It gave him, he said, "a peek at what the Internet would ultimately become. It was a microcosm, an online community in an era when there weren't online communities."

In the 1980's, Mr. Ozzie applied that perspective to the new technology of the day: personal computers. At the time, PC's were mainly stand- alone machines for word processing, spreadsheet calculations and desktop publishing. Mr. Ozzie recognized that PC's could also be powerful tools for communications and collaboration. He led the team that created Lotus Notes, an early program for corporate e-mail and sharing information in digital workspaces, anticipating the kind of computing that would become commonplace only later with the rise of the Internet and the Web. In 1995, I.B.M. paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development Corporation and the prize was Lotus Notes.

In 1997, Mr. Ozzie founded Groove Networks to make advanced collaboration software using Internet peer-to-peer technology, well before the arrival of Napster and peer-to-peer networks for sharing music. Groove was a technological triumph, but not a big commercial success. Microsoft bought Groove this year to pick up its technology - and Mr. Ozzie.

Years ago, when Mr. Ozzie was a Microsoft competitor, Mr. Gates called him one of the world's great programmers. So, in Microsoft's engineering culture, Mr. Ozzie brings a lot of clout to his job.

He hit the ground quickly after he arrived in April. At first, he said, some executives told him that it was a big company and that he should get to know it for a year or so before deciding what to focus on. "That lasted about two weeks," he said.

In meetings of senior executives, the subject of how to cope with the Internet services shift in computing, how to turn it into an opportunity for Microsoft, was a constant theme - and one that deeply interested Mr. Ozzie. "Within a month, Ray was putting his thoughts on software-as- services on paper," noted Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, which includes the Office products and corporate software.

Mr. Ozzie then spent the next few months meeting with people across the company to see what work was being done in product groups. Simultaneously, he was devising a plan to help Microsoft capitalize on Internet services by blending the new technology - and economic models - with Microsoft's traditional software business.

In late October, Mr. Ozzie presented his ideas in a seven-page, 5,000-word memo, "The Internet Services Disruption." At first, it was e-mailed to fewer than 100 senior managers and engineers at Microsoft. But they passed it along to colleagues, and by early November it had leaked out to the press; copies are now posted on the Web. Microsoft has used such memos over the years to educate its corporate troops and to stir them up to combat major competitive challenges.

In a two-page note that accompanied the Ozzie memo, Mr. Gates compared it to one he wrote in 1995, "The Internet Tidal Wave," which assessed the Internet challenge of a decade ago. Microsoft, he wrote in the introduction to the Ozzie memo, was at similar crossroads. "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Mr. Gates wrote, and later emphasized, "The next sea change is upon us."

The Ozzie memo analyzes the Internet services trend, the competition and Microsoft's strengths and shortcomings, and it suggests how the company must change. The document is also a call to action: "It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk," Mr. Ozzie wrote. "We must respond quickly and decisively."

The memo is peppered with technical acronyms, and rivals are named. While Microsoft is progressing on several fronts, Mr. Ozzie wrote, "a set of very strong and determined competitors is laser-focused on Internet services and service-enabled software."

"Google is obviously the most visible here," he added.

There is an implicit critique of Microsoft's software-building practice of relying so much on product cycles measured in years. The last major release of Windows - XP - was in 2001, while the next one, Vista, has been scheduled for next year after repeated delays. The memo chastises no product by name, but it extols the virtues of speed and simplicity in software design.

"Complexity kills," Mr. Ozzie wrote. "It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

HIS comments all but echo those of some estranged engineers who have left Microsoft recently. Mark Lucovsky, a former senior engineer at Microsoft who joined Google, wrote in his blog earlier this year, "Microsoft used to know how to ship software, but the world has changed." The companies to watch, Mr. Lucovsky wrote, have "embraced the network, deeply understand the concept of 'software as a service' and know how to deliver incredible value to their customers efficiently and quickly."

Mr. Ozzie is understandably careful in what he writes and says; his role at Microsoft is mainly to lead and encourage rather than to criticize. He emphasizes the importance of Microsoft's big desktop products like Windows and Office, and he says that Internet services should be seen primarily as a way to continually update and improve its offerings. Those updates and improvements, he said, should make Microsoft software teams happier by moving their work into the marketplace faster.

"People like to have fun doing what they're doing, and people who build software have fun by having people use their stuff," Mr. Ozzie said in the interview.

Yet Microsoft will also selectively offer Web services that do over the Internet some of what Office and Windows do on the desktop. The company took measured steps in that direction last month, when it introduced Windows Live and Office Live. Windows Live lets consumers manage their e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, photos and podcasts in one site. Office Live enables small businesses to set up Web sites and e- mail systems, and to provide collaboration sites for teams. Both will be supported by advertising and perhaps some subscription fees.

In the future, Mr. Ozzie suggests, Microsoft will go further, offering parts of Office - like Word, Excel or PowerPoint - as Web services. "I think there are potentially different or enhanced ways that we can take things that have traditionally been done with the Office suite and offer that to customers," Mr. Ozzie said. "That's absolutely what we're focused on."

The new approach, it seems, is a striking departure from Microsoft's longtime practice of bundling more and more software features into its big integrated products. The bundling has not been merely a design preference, but also a business strategy. With more than 90 percent of the desktop PC market for operating systems and office productivity applications, Microsoft has bundled outstanding programs with mediocre ones, and all of them typically became the industry standards.

But Internet services represent a more open, competitive model. "Software itself is going to be free, and you get paid for services that are supported either by ads or by subscription charges," said Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development who is president of the Open Source Applications Foundation, which develops free software for personal information like calendars and contacts. "For Microsoft, this is a bigger challenge than the rise of the Internet itself in 1995."

RECENT innovations have enabled Web-based software to look and respond more like desktop applications. Offering Internet alternatives to traditional PC programs are a new breed of start-ups, including Writely.com, for word processing; NumSum, for spreadsheets; and Zimbra and Scalix, both e-mail. I.B.M. has Web-based software called WorkPlace that is used by millions of workers. And Salesforce.com has built a fast- growing business by supplying customer relationship management software as an Internet service.

"No piece of software will replace Microsoft's Outlook, Word or Excel, but Web services will eat away at core areas of its Office suite over the next couple of years," said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com.

If that happens, Microsoft's business could be battered. Mr. Colony of Forrester Research predicts that Microsoft's profit margins, under pressure from Internet services, could fall by 40 percent or so over the next four years. A wild card is the hand that Google will play beyond search and how successful it may be. Mr. Colony, for example, says he thinks that Google will make a big difference. "I believe Google will revolutionize the software business," he wrote in a recent report.

Google has desktop search software and a Web-based e-mail service, two offerings aimed at parts of Microsoft's stronghold. How much further it plans to go in providing alternatives to Microsoft's software is uncertain, though it certainly looks interested.

Google was among the companies that attended a meeting last month at I.B.M.'s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., of the Open Document Foundation, a group formed to agree on freely available formats for word processing, spreadsheets and other office documents; the idea is to come up with alternatives to Microsoft's proprietary Office formats. And for the last few months, Google has talked with Wyse Technology, a maker of so-called thin-client computers (without hard drives).

The discussions are focused on a $200 Google-branded machine that would likely be marketed in cooperation with telecommunications companies in markets like China and India, where home PC's are less common, said John Kish, chief executive of Wyse. "Google is on a path to developing a stack of software in competition with the Microsoft desktop, and one that is much more network-centric, more an Internet service," Mr. Kish said. "And this fits right into that."

For his part, Mr. Ozzie is curious about the plans at Google but is by no means obsessed by it. Google, he said, is "obviously a very strong technology company, and we'll see what they do with that."

Yet Mr. Ozzie's view is that Microsoft's fate is in its own hands. If it charts its technology and business plans wisely, harnessing the talents of its army of smart people, he said, it should grow and prosper in this next wave of Internet computing. He speaks of a thriving "ecosystem" of open competition in which developers and customers have many choices and in which Microsoft's future is not in crushing rivals but in becoming an attractive choice.

In the past, Microsoft executives have decried free software, with its collaborative open-source development style, as akin to communism, if not downright evil. Not Mr. Ozzie. "I consider open-source software to be part of the environment, like the Internet," he said. "It's not the enemy and it's not going to go away. It's great for developers.

"And if we don't keep continually updating our offerings and develop better offerings," Mr. Ozzie added, "then shame on us."

The Microsoft strategy, he said, has to be to develop tools and technology that make it easier to build software for the Internet-services era and easier for users to have more productive and enjoyable computing experiences. In a sense, it's a reinvention of old Windows vision of computing, but in a very different competitive context from the desktop world that Microsoft ruled.

The new game plan, Mr. Ozzie said, is "obviously not an altruistic thing, but it doesn't even resemble the environment of old."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/bu...y/11micro.html





Tuning In Satellite-Free Digital Radio

With cheaper receivers, more people may listen to the free broadcasts. But the quality may not be worth the hardware.

You probably don't know it, but 21 radio stations in the Los Angeles area are broadcasting in digital, even though only a handful of listeners have the equipment to hear it.

Digital radio signals, which offer the potential of better sound quality and the elimination of static and interference, are being simulcast along with the traditional analog signals from such well-known stations as all-news KNX-AM, pop KPWR-FM, rock KROQ-FM and classical KUSC-FM.

The technology could allow an old-fashioned medium to better compete with numerous all-digital competitors, such as satellite radio, pod-casting and Internet streaming.

But building an audience for digital radio has been slow going. Although stations began rolling out the simulcasts in 2003, the only home receiver available has been a Yamaha Electronics Corp. unit that costs $1,800.

Asked recently how many people were listening to digital radio, Robert Struble, chief executive of Ibiquity Digital Corp., which developed the technology, had a ready answer: "Dozens," he said with a smile.

Last week, however, the price of a digital receiver dropped drastically. Boston Acoustics Inc., best known for its audio speakers, began shipping a stereo tabletop radio that can receive digital AM and FM, as well as analog signals. Called the Recepter Radio HD, it costs $499.

Two more tabletop models are scheduled to be introduced next year: Radiosophy is bringing one out for $269 and a Polk Audio unit that can also play CDs and MP3s will cost $599.

A car radio that can receive digital AM and FM signals is available from Panasonic for $499 and others are due to debut next year. The Panasonic model also can receive XM satellite radio, but one advantage of digital AM and FM is that the broadcasts are free for consumers. Satellite radio, which also is digital, costs about $13 a month.

The satellite services — XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. — command these fees because each has more than 100 channels, many of which are commercial-free, that can be heard nationwide in digital sound. Earthbound stations have distance limitations, but that's also somewhat to their advantage: They can gear their programming to local audiences.

The arrival of the Recepter raises the question: Is now the time to take the plunge into digital radio?

Based on what I've heard from the Boston Acoustics unit, probably not.

Although AM broadcasts sound dramatically better in digital, the overall experience does not yet justify the outlay of that much money for what is essentially a fancy clock radio — unless you're a hard-core early adopter. (Still have your laser disc collection?)

But the Recepter does offer a tantalizing peek at what could be the future of broadcast radio.

The unit is similar in looks and operation to the company's nondigital, mono Recepter model that goes for $149. The main difference in appearance is that the digital Recepter has a second, detached speaker.

A highly readable screen provides a frequency read-out as the tuning dial is turned. Analog stations come in as usual. If a digital signal is detected, the initials "HD" start flashing at the top of the screen. While flashing, the reception is still analog, and then after several seconds the signal locks in and the reception switches to digital.

With the radio's AM and FM antennas hung out a window of The Times' building in downtown Los Angeles, I was able to receive 17 local digital stations.

How big of a difference did digital make?

A huge one in AM: The switch-over to digital on KNX sounded as if someone who had been talking to me on a cellphone had walked into the room, in mid-sentence. In fact, the first time I heard it, the change was so dramatic I thought I had mistakenly switched the band to FM.

The reason AM sounds so much better, according to Ibiquity, is that analog AM signals carry a myriad of noises and interference picked up along the way from transmitter to receiver. But digital signals carry little or no noise. Also, digital more than doubles the range of audio spectrum that can be carried in AM, resulting in far richer sound.

The sound-quality boost in digital FM is more subtle because analog FM signals carry a lot less noise than analog AM signals do anyway. Also, the FM sound frequency range — already superior to AM — gets only slight improvement with digital.

The sound upgrade is generally most noticeable when listening to classical music. Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor on KUSC sounded luminous in digital. Jazz also sounded better on stations such as KKJZ-FM.

But little, if any, improvement could be detected on pop and rock stations KPWR and KROQ. That's partly because pop and rock recordings are engineered for the current sound parameters of FM.

"When you are working on a record, you always have how it will sound on radio in the back of your mind," said music producer Jimmy Jam, who has worked with Gwen Stefani, Usher, Elton John and Mary J. Blige. With the expanded digital bandwidth, he said, "You don't have to be so aware of the limitations you face with radio."

The major benefits of digital FM probably will go to the broadcasters. It lets them split the spectrum in such a way that it can allow as many as four channels. These additional channels can be added without going through the arduous and expensive process of purchasing more frequencies.

But as the spectrum is sliced up because of multicasting, music quality can suffer. For example, the commercial classical station KMZT-FM is one of two local stations already experimenting with digital multicasting. On its regular channel is the classical service and on KMZT-2, as it shows up on the screen, is KKGO-AM, an easy-listening station that has the same owner.

This made for the odd juxtaposition of Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" on the classical side and Gene Autry singing "Here Comes Santa Claus" on the other during a recent listening test.

The Ponchielli — best known as the music for the hippo dance in the original "Fantasia" — sounded only slightly better in digital. After all, it had only half the digital spectrum with which to work. Ibiquity executives said that stations were still making adjustments to their digital transmission equipment and that they expected quality to increase, even in multicasting channels.

Whatever the technical challenges, the radio industry clearly is serious about digital. So far, 598 stations nationwide are broadcasting in digital, according to Ibiquity, and each paid $80,000 to $100,000 — plus an approximately $7,000 licensing fee — to make the upgrade. In addition, 420 more stations have licensed the technology and probably will activate their digital signals soon.

It's such a heavy investment — and multicasting is so potentially lucrative — that you figure broadcasters are going to work hard to make it a success. With improved sound and the promise of additional channels (and please, take a tip from satellite radio and reduce the commercials), it might very well pay off.

The question is, will the listening experience be good enough to get people to buy new receivers, or will digital radio just be the next laser disc?
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=1&cset=true





Media Frenzy

Satellite Radio: Out of the Car and Under Fire
Richard Siklos

IN the early 1990's, when the pioneers of satellite radio raised the first of the billions they needed to get their ventures aloft, the premise was fairly simple: create services that would be to old-fashioned radio what cable television was to broadcast TV. That meant providing scores of niche radio channels with high-quality signals in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. By blanketing the nation with signals beamed from on high, there would be no need for all those transmitting towers, no utter dependence on advertising and no pesky etiquette rules from the Federal Communications Commission to observe. And, the early prospectuses argued, there was a huge, natural market of people who spend hours in their vehicles, often bored out of their skulls.

Skeptics - let me raise a hand - observed that in most cities, there were many more channels of radio available free over the air than there were TV stations when cable came on the scene. Moreover, if the objective was to provide entertainment choices to the millions of commuters and professional drivers on the open road, there was already a popular alternative to listening to the radio or singing show tunes out loud: playing CD's and cassettes in car stereos.

Today, Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, which went public in 1994 and 1999, respectively, have yet to make a penny in profit but together are approaching 10 million subscribers, most paying nearly $13 a month. Doubters, deal with it: Satellite radio looks as if it is here to stay.

A landmark event in the industry's evolution is approaching in January, when the radio jock Howard Stern moves from his longtime home at Infinity Broadcasting, now part of the Viacom monolith, to Sirius.

But while Mr. Stern's well-compensated antics are sure to gain plenty of attention - and, Sirius expects, a bump in subscribers to gain ground on the larger XM - an equally controversial new act is appearing on satellite radio in the form of portable receivers.

Like Mr. Stern's arrival, these new gadgets from XM and Sirius show how far satellite has come. But they also show how far all media businesses have to go to fulfill their digital potential. The new players, the XM MyFi and Sirius S50, are really the equivalent of what TiVo's and their ilk are to television: digital recorders that let music lovers record any song for future listening.

We'll leave it to the gizmo gurus to compare the virtues of the new gadgets, but they operate off the same idea: both XM and Sirius offer 100-plus channels, so why not let listeners keep their favorite songs or shows handy? Why not enjoy the satellite service if you are in a tunnel or leave your car to go into a basement gym for a workout?

Most conveniently, midway through a song on one of the satellite radio channels, a listener can press a button and record it in its entirety; it is automatically sorted by artist. (The Sirius machine even has a clever little heart graphic that pops up on its screen when you do so, signifying the devotion you have just shown.) And you can even prerecord blocks of programming from your favorite channel - and later fast-forward through the songs and cherry-pick the ones to keep. In the same spirit, you can download MP3 files of songs onto these machines from a computer.

In other words, if the devices work as well as they're supposed to, they represent an intriguing alternative to pay-per-download services like Apple's iTunes and its omnipotent iPod. For executives in the satellite radio industry, of course, this sounds like a no-brainer: they are merely mirroring the evolution of the cable model. To some music industry executives who regard this as yet another way for people to circumvent paying the full price for their songs, it looks like another potential doomsday device.

Not surprisingly, the music industry is starting to make a ruckus - demanding more compensation or contemplating a push to limit some of these features, perhaps by having the recorded songs expire after a set period. The satellite jockeys, on the other hand, say they have not only twisted themselves into pretzels to make these devices legally compliant, but they have also designed them to promote artists and the music.

For instance, both XM and Sirius point out that songs saved on the machines from their services cannot be uploaded to a computer or shared in any way. XM even has a version coming out in a too-clever-by-half partnership with - of all companies - the rehabilitated and revamped Napster, through which any songs saved on the satellite player can be automatically bought through the Web site if the listener wants a more pristine copy or one that can be copied onto a CD or other MP3 player. And XM also maintains that people who use its service buy more CD's than those who don't. Besides, argues Hugh Panero, XM's chief executive, the service falls under fair-use laws.

"What has been disturbing," Mr. Panero said in an interview, "is that the efforts by the music industry of late seem to signal a desire to encroach on a longstanding tradition of consumers to record off the air for their personal use."

At a Merrill Lynch conference in September, his rival Mel Karmazin at Sirius also pointed out that the music industry was already getting a much better licensing fee from satellite than it did from the nation's 10,000 terrestrial radio stations. "When I have lunch with those guys, they're paying for my lunch," Mr. Karmazin said. "I'm not paying for their lunch."

In some ways, the looming debate over satellite radio's new machines is a warm-up for the bigger tussle forming in Washington over whether a coming generation of digital broadcasts from terrestrial radio stations ought to include so-called flags that prohibit or curb the saving and swapping of songs straight off the air.

At a Congressional hearing last month, Mitch Bainwol, the chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, warned that the use of digital radio to create personal jukeboxes "threatens to rival or even surpass" the loss of sales suffered by his industry with the advent of Napster 1.0 and its Internet file-sharing spawn. The message is: It's theft, and that's un-American.

LINED up on the other side are consumer groups and electronics manufacturers who argue this is just the latest rhetoric intended to preserve the status quo and to stifle innovation and choice. Their message: That's even more un-American.

Where satellite radio is concerned, the pressure to come to the table and to resolve the dispute without a big court battle is urgent. Both Mr. Karmazin and Mr. Panero say they want to be good partners and grow old and rich together with the music industry. Mr. Stern's arrival on satellite radio comes at a watershed moment when both the beleaguered music-makers and the satellite jockeys need to prove that the sky is indeed paved with gold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/bu...y/11frenz.html





Online Playlists May Kill Radiostar

Study finds music fans favor setting their own preferences
Lucy M. Caldwell

If “video killed the radio star,” as British band The Buggles famously sang in 1979, then online playlists might put the nail in the coffin for FM disk jockeys.

“Many music fans are not content to simply listen passively to what radio DJs play,” according to Derek A. Slater ’05-’06, co-author of a report that will be released today by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Gartner Group, a research firm.

Slater wrote in an e-mail that listeners “want to be DJs too, sharing their tastes online through playlists and creating their own downloadable radio-style shows. In this way, they might take away the power of radio and other traditional tastemakers in shaping tastes.”

Slater, a government concentrator in Winthrop House who will graduate from the College Phi Beta Kappa in January, has worked at the Berkman Center for the past three and a half years. He is the first undergraduate ever to be named a student fellow at the Berkman Center. Several people, including professors, have even called the law school and asked to speak with “Professor Slater,” according to Berkman Center spokeswoman Amanda R. Michel.

Slater co-authored the report with the Gartner Group’s research director, Michael McGuire. The Gartner Group, based in Stamford, Conn., provides analysis about the information technology industry and counted over $894 million in revenue last year, according to its website.

The report by Slater and McGuire found that playlists yield cultural benefits by exposing listeners to a greater variety of music. Moreover, the lists introduce music fans with similar tastes to one another, reinforcing online communities.

Slater and McGuire recommend that record companies study the dynamics of playlist sites so they can restructure their marketing strategies accordingly. In addition, Slater and McGuire encourage online music services to improve playlist-publishing capabilities and to solidify links to other consumer-to-consumer music-sharing sites in order to attract more traffic to their Web pages.

Slater, an avid music fan who spends much of his free time attending concerts, began studying internet and copyright issues because he has a genuine love for music.

“The struggle over music file sharing has unfortunately turned ‘sharing’ into a bad word,” Slater said in a Berkman Center press release. “Whatever one thinks of illegal downloading, much can be gained from giving music fans a chance to share their musical tastes in a variety of ways.”

The use of consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools such as playlists is becoming increasingly common, the report finds. According to the report, 20 percent of online music listeners use these tools at least five days a week, and more than 25 percent of online listeners use the tools between one and four days a week.

Slater and McGuire predicted that by 2010, 25 percent of online music transactions will be driven directly by consumer-to-consumer sharing applications.
http://thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510544





Stern Fans Enjoy Last Day of Free Speech

The free ride for Howard Stern fans ended Friday.

Stern, a New York radio fixture for 20 years and host of a syndicated show for 12 million daily listeners, bid farewell to his fans with a final show on terrestrial radio. On Jan. 9, Stern makes his move to satellite radio - where his once-free speech will cost listeners $12.95 a month.

"Good morning, and welcome to the last show on terrestrial radio," Stern said to start his grand finale. The sound of taps played in the background.

The show opened with a Stern-centric remake of the classic "What A Wonderful World," and John Lennon's "Imagine."

As the show went on, several thousand people stood in a steady drizzle along 56th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues; many waved signs praising Stern and attacking the Federal Communications Commission. Among those onstage there were Stern regulars "Jeff the Drunk" and "Beetlejuice," who led a sing-along.

"I'm a dedicated listener. I wanted to see this happen," said Chris Casavant, who drove up at 4:30 a.m. from Farmington, N.J.

Asked why she was there, Donna Casavant made a face and pointed at her husband.

After the show wrapped up at 10 a.m. EST, Stern took a "victory lap" through midtown Manhattan, standing on the top level of a double-decker bus as fans screamed and waved.

"What a day, it's crazy," Stern said as the bus rambled through Times Square while an image of the self-described "King of All Media" appeared on a giant television screen above. "You don't get to do something like this too often."

Addressing his fans from a stage before the bus ride, Stern bellowed "Long live the `Howard Stern Show' audience," before departing like a rock star.

Fans screamed for an encore, but they were left to wait until his "reincarnation" next month. The crowd on 56th Street was a circus, with a Stern look-alike standing near the stage. Stern's parents appeared to huge cheers, while the station manager at WXRK-FM - the shock jock's terrestrial home - was booed loudly.

Stern leaves behind a plethora of imitators spawned in the wake of his radio success, when his show enjoyed an unprecedented ratings run to hit No. 1 in New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Los Angeles.

His move from Infinity Broadcasting to Sirius Satellite Radio, while somewhat risky, comes with a huge financial reward: Stern signed a five-year, $500 million contract to jump. He's creating two new channels for Sirius, with the salaries, overhead and other programming costs coming out of his windfall.

Across his career, Stern evolved into the center of attention in First Amendment issues and censorship. Infinity paid $1.7 million in 1995 to settle FCC complaints against Stern. In April 2004, Clear Channel that dumped Stern from six stations in April 2004 over his show's content.

Sirius is depending on Stern to reverse the company's money-losing ways. Since the 51-year-old shock jock announced his move last year, the number of Sirius subscribers jumped from 600,000 to more than 2.2 million - and that figure was expected to hit 3 million by the end of this year.
http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/...ap2397771.html