[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Republican Who Oversees N.S.A. Calls for Wiretap Inquiry
Eric Lichtblau

A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.

Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

The congresswoman's discomfort with the operation appears to reflect deepening fissures among Republicans over the program's legal basis and political liabilities. Many Republicans have strongly backed President Bush's power to use every tool at his disposal to fight terrorism, but 4 of the 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voiced concerns about the program at a hearing where Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified on Monday.

A growing number of Republicans have called in recent days for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the N.S.A. operation.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, said he considered some of the administration's legal justifications for the program "dangerous" in their implications, and he told Mr. Gonzales that he wanted to work on new legislation that would help those tracking terrorism "know what they can and can't do."

But the administration has said repeatedly since the program was disclosed in December that it considers further legislation unnecessary, believing that the president already has the legal authority to authorize the operation.

Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted that position Tuesday in an interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

Members of Congress "have the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest" about changing wiretap law, Mr. Cheney said. But "we have all the legal authority we need" already, he said, and a public debate over changes in the law could alert Al Qaeda to tactics used by American intelligence officials.

"It's important for us, if we're going to proceed legislatively, to keep in mind there's a price to be paid for that, and it might well in fact do irreparable damage to our capacity to collect information," Mr. Cheney said.

The administration, backed by Republican leaders in both houses, has also resisted calls for inquiries by either Congress or an independent investigator.

As for the politics, some Republicans say they are concerned that prolonged public scrutiny of the surveillance program could prove a distraction in this year's midterm Congressional elections, and the administration has worked to contain any damage by aggressively defending the legality of the operation. It has also limited its Congressional briefings on the program's operational details to the so-called Gang of Eight — each party's leaders in the Senate and the House and on the two intelligence committees — and has agreed to full committee briefings only on the legal justifications for the operation, without discussing in detail how the N.S.A. conducts it.

Ms. Wilson said in the interview Tuesday that she considered the limited Congressional briefings to be "increasingly untenable" because they left most lawmakers knowing little about the program. She said the House Intelligence Committee needed to conduct a "painstaking" review, including not only classified briefings but also access to internal documents and staff interviews with N.S.A. aides and intelligence officials.

Ms. Wilson, a former Air Force officer who is the only female veteran currently in Congress, has butted up against the administration previously over controversial policy issues, including Medicare and troop strength in Iraq. She said she realized that publicizing her concerns over the surveillance program could harm her relations with the administration. "The president has his duty to do, but I have mine too, and I feel strongly about that," she said.

Asked whether the White House was concerned about support for the program among Republicans, Dana Perino, a presidential spokeswoman, said: "The terrorist surveillance program is critical to the safety and protection of all Americans, and we will continue to work with Congress. The attorney general testified at length yesterday, and he will return to Capitol Hill twice more before the week ends."

Aides to Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who as chairman of the full House Intelligence Committee is one of the eight lawmakers briefed on the operations of the program, said he could not be reached for comment on whether he would be open to a full inquiry.

Mr. Hoekstra has been a strong defender of the program and has expressed no intention thus far to initiate a full review. In two recent letters to the Congressional Research Service, he criticized reports by the agency that raised questions about the legal foundations of the N.S.A. program and the limited briefings given to Congress. He said in one letter that it was "unwise at best and reckless at worst" for the agency to prepare a report on classified matters that it knew little about.

But two leading Democratic members of the intelligence committees, Representative Jane Harman and Senator Dianne Feinstein, both of California, wrote a letter of their own Tuesday defending the nonpartisan research service's reports on the surveillance program and other issues, saying its work had been "very helpful" in view of what they deemed the minimal information provided by the administration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/po... ner=homepage





US Plans Massive Data Sweep

Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, and e-mails
Mark Clayton

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. "I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."
Data-mining is a key technology

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which along with other "visualization" software tools can give human analysts a graphical view of data. Viewing data in this way could reveal patterns not obvious in text or number form. Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places, and things - using social-behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data-mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Dr. Kielman wrote in his November report. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
One data program has foiled terrorists

Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists. "All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, says the 2004 workshop report.
A program in the shadows

Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.

"We just don't know enough about this technology, how it works, or what it is used for," says Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It matters to a lot of people that these programs and software exist. We don't really know to what extent the government is mining personal data."

Even congressmen with direct oversight of DHS, who favor data mining, say they don't know enough about the program.

"I am not fully briefed on ADVISE," wrote Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania, vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in an e-mail. "I'll get briefed this week."

Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.
Echoes of a past controversial plan

ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."

But Mr. Sand, the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. "Before a system leaves the department there's been a privacy review.... That's our focus."

Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.

"This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."

Others are less sure.

"It isn't a bad idea, but you have to do it in a way that demonstrates its utility - and with provable privacy protection," says Latanya Sweeney, founder of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. But since speaking on privacy at the 2004 DHS workshop, she now doubts the department is building privacy into ADVISE. "At this point, ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology."

She cites a recent request for proposal by the Office of Naval Research on behalf of DHS. Although it doesn't mention ADVISE by name, the proposal outlines data-technology research that meshes closely with technology cited in ADVISE documents.

Neither the proposal - nor any other she has seen - provides any funding for provable privacy technology, she adds.
Some in Congress push for more oversight of federal data-mining

Amid the furor over electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, Congress may be poised to expand its scrutiny of government efforts to "mine" public data for hints of terrorist activity.

"One element of the NSA's domestic spying program that has gotten too little attention is the government's reportedly widespread use of data-mining technology to analyze the communications of ordinary Americans," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin in a Jan. 23 statement.

Senator Feingold is among a handful of congressmen who have in the past sponsored legislation - unsuccessfully - to require federal agencies to report on data-mining programs and how they maintain privacy.

Without oversight and accountability, critics say, even well-intentioned counterterrorism programs could experience mission creep, having their purview expanded to include non- terrorists - or even political opponents or groups. "The development of this type of data-mining technology has serious implications for the future of personal privacy," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

Even congressional supporters of the effort want more information about data-mining efforts.

"There has to be more and better congressional oversight," says Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House committee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security. "But there can't be oversight till Congress understands what data-mining is. There needs to be a broad look at this because they [intelligence agencies] are obviously seeing the value of this."

Data-mining - the systematic, often automated gleaning of insights from databases - is seen "increasingly as a useful tool" to help detect terrorist threats, the General Accountability Office reported in 2004. Of the nearly 200 federal data-mining efforts the GAO counted, at least 14 were acknowledged to focus on counterterrorism.

While privacy laws do place some restriction on government use of private data - such as medical records - they don't prevent intelligence agencies from buying information from commercial data collectors. Congress has done little so far to regulate the practice or even require basic notification from agencies, privacy experts say.

Indeed, even data that look anonymous aren't necessarily so. For example: With name and Social Security number stripped from their files, 87 percent of Americans can be identified simply by knowing their date of birth, gender, and five-digit Zip code, according to research by Latanya Sweeney, a data-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a separate 2004 report to Congress, the GAO cited eight issues that need to be addressed to provide adequate privacy barriers amid federal data-mining. Top among them was establishing oversight boards for such programs.
Some antiterror efforts die - others just change names

Defense Department

November 2002 - The New York Times identifies a counterterrorism program called Total Information Awareness.

September 2003 - After terminating TIA on privacy grounds, Congress shuts down its successor, Terrorism Information Awareness, for the same reasons.

Department of Homeland Security

February 2003 - The department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announces it's replacing its 1990s-era Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS I).

July 2004 - TSA cancels CAPPS II because of privacy concerns.

August 2004 - TSA says it will begin testing a similar system - Secure Flight - with built-in privacy features.

July 2005 - Government auditors charge that Secure Flight is violating privacy laws by holding information on 43,000 people not suspected of terrorism.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p...spo.html?s=hns





Some Companies Helped The NSA, But Which?
Declan McCullagh

This is the first in a two-part series. Coming Tuesday, part two: A glimpse at the technical details of how the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance system seems to work.

Even after the recent scrutiny of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance project approved by President Bush, an intriguing question remains unanswered: Which corporations cooperated with the spy agency?

Some reports have identified executives at "major telecommunications companies" who chose to open their networks to the NSA. Because it may be illegal to divulge customer communications, though, not one has chosen to make its cooperation public.

Under federal law, any person or company who helps someone "intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication"--unless specifically authorized by law--could face criminal charges. Even if cooperation is found to be legal, however, it could be embarrassing to acknowledge opening up customers' communications to a spy agency.

A survey by CNET News.com has identified 15 large telecommunications and Internet companies that are willing to say that they have not participated in the NSA program, which intercepts e-mail and telephone calls without a judge's approval.

Twelve other companies that were contacted and asked identical questions chose not to reply, in some cases citing "national security" as the reason.

Those results come amid a push on Capitol Hill for more information about the NSA's wiretapping practices. On Monday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is expected to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, and President Bush and his closest allies have been stepping up their defense of the program in preparation for it.

To be sure, there are a number of possible explanations for the companies' silence. In some cases, a company's media department could have been overworked. Another possibility is the company's lawyers were unavailable or chose not to reply for unknown reasons.

Also, some survey recipients, such as NTT Communications, responded with a general statement expressing compliance "with law enforcement requests as permitted and required by law" rather than addressing the question of NSA surveillance.
Who's helping the NSA?

CNET News.com asked telecommunications and Internet companies about cooperation with the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping scheme. We asked them: "Have you turned over information or opened up your networks to the NSA without being compelled by law?"

Company Response
Adelphia Communications Declined comment
AOL Time Warner No [1]
AT&T Declined comment
BellSouth Communications No
Cable & Wireless* No response
Cablevision Systems No
CenturyTel No
Charter Communications No [1]
Cingular Wireless No [2]
Citizens Communications No response
Cogent Communications* No [1]
Comcast No
Cox Communications No
EarthLink No
Global Crossing* Inconclusive
Google Declined comment
Level 3* No response
Microsoft No [3]
NTT Communications* Inconclusive [4]
Qwest Communications No [2]
SAVVIS Communications* No response
Sprint Nextel No [2]
T-Mobile USA No [2]
United Online No response
Verizon Communications Inconclusive [5]
XO Communications* No [1]
Yahoo Declined comment

* = Not a company contacted by Rep. John Conyers.
[1] The answer did not explicitly address NSA but said that compliance happens only if required by law.
[2] Provided by a source with knowledge of what this company is telling Conyers. In the case of Sprint Nextel, the source was familiar with Nextel's operations.
[3] As part of an answer to a closely related question for a different survey.
[4] The response was "NTT Communications respects the privacy rights of our customers and complies fully with law enforcement requests as permitted and required by law."
[5] The response was "Verizon complies with applicable laws and does not comment on law enforcement or national security matters."


A lawsuit that could yield more details about industry cooperation is winding its way through the federal courts. Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco, sued AT&T after a report that the company had shared its customer records database--though not its network--with the NSA.

AT&T would not respond when asked whether it participated. An AT&T spokesman, Dave Pacholczyk, said: "We don't comment on matters of national security."

The News.com survey, started Jan. 25, found that wireless providers and cable companies were the most likely to distance themselves from the NSA. Cingular Wireless, Comcast, Cox Communications, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile said they had not turned over information or opened their networks to the NSA without being required by law.

Companies that are backbone providers, or which operate undersea cables spanning the ocean, were among the least likely to respond. AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, Level 3, NTT Communications, SAVVIS Communications and Verizon Communications chose not to answer the questions posed to them.

The New York Times reported on Dec. 24 that the NSA has gained access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. But "the identities of the corporations involved could not be determined," the newspaper added.

At the water's edge
Analysts and historians who follow the intelligence community have long said the companies that operate submarine cables--armored sheaths wrapped around bundles of fiber optic lines--surreptitiously provide access to the NSA.

"You go to Global Crossing and say...once your cable comes up for air in New Jersey or on the coast of Virginia, wherever it goes up, we want to put a little splice in, thank you very much, which NSA can do," said Matthew Aid, who recently completed the first volume in a multiple-volume history of the NSA. "The technology of getting access to that stuff is fairly straightforward."

Aid was citing Global Crossing as an example, not singling it out. Global Crossing describes itself as an Internet backbone network that shuttles traffic for about 700 telecommunications carriers, mobile operators and Internet service providers. According to the International Cable Protection Committee, the company has full or partial ownership of several trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cables. Global Crossing spokesman Tom Topalian said "99 percent of wiretapping is done at a local phone company level" instead of at backbone providers. Topalian declined to answer questions about NSA access, and added: "All U.S. carriers have to comply with the CALEA act, and Global Crossing complies with CALEA." (CALEA is a 1994 federal law requiring certain telecommunications providers to make their networks wiretap-friendly for domestic law enforcement, not intelligence agencies.)

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., last month sent a letter (click for PDF) to companies including Google, Yahoo, EarthLink, Verizon and T-Mobile asking them if they cooperated with the NSA. News.com asked similar questions, but expanded the number of companies to include backbone and submarine cable providers.

Among the companies that responded, some offered far more detail than others. Les Seagraves, EarthLink's chief privacy officer, said: "We've never even been asked to give information without the benefit of a subpoena or a court order behind it. And our policy is to require a subpoena or court order, basically to require a court of law behind the inquiry."

"We're very interested in protecting our customers' privacy and balancing that with our duties to comply with the law," Seagraves added. "Our way to balance that is to definitely make sure we have a valid legal request before we release any information."

Comcast spokesman Tim Fitzpatrick said the company "will only provide customer information pursuant to a valid court order and only if Comcast's records contain information sufficient to identify the customer account on the (date or dates) listed in the court order."

A representative of Cox Communications, David Grabert, said: "Cox has never received a request for information or a wiretap that was not accompanied by a warrant."

NSA's history of industry deals
Louis Tordella, the longest-serving deputy director of the NSA, acknowledged to overseeing a similar project to intercept telegrams as recently as the 1970s. It relied on the major telegraph companies including Western Union secretly turning over copies of all messages sent to or from the United States.

"All of the big international carriers were involved, but none of 'em ever got a nickel for what they did," Tordella said before his death in 1996, according to a history written by L. Britt Snider, a Senate aide who became the CIA's inspector general.

The telegraph interception operation was called Project Shamrock. It involved a courier making daily trips from the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., to New York to retrieve digital copies of the telegrams on magnetic tape.

Like today's eavesdropping system authorized by Bush, Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people in the U.S. whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes.

Then-President Richard Nixon, plagued by anti-Vietnam protests and worried about foreign influence, ordered that Project Shamrock's electronic ear be turned inward to eavesdrop on American citizens. In 1969, Nixon met with the heads of the NSA, CIA and FBI and authorized a program to intercept "the communications of U.S. citizens using international facilities," meaning international calls, according to James Bamford's 2001 book titled "Body of Secrets."

Nixon later withdrew the formal authorization, but informally, police and intelligence agencies kept adding names to the watch list. At its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Details about Project Shamrock became public as part of a Senate investigation of the NSA. Telegraph companies participating in the program initially balked when questioned by Senate investigators. But documents turned over by the NSA "cast doubt on the veracity of the companies' claims that they could find no documentation pertaining to Shamrock," wrote Snider. "After all, this had concerned the highest levels of their corporate management for at least four years."

Another apparent example of NSA and industry cooperation became public in 1995. The Baltimore Sun reported that for decades NSA had rigged the encryption products of Crypto AG, a Swiss firm, so U.S. eavesdroppers could easily break their codes.

The six-part story, based on interviews with former employees and company documents, said Crypto AG sold its compromised security products to some 120 countries, including prime U.S. intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia. (Crypto AG disputed the allegations.)

"Only a very few top executives"
The extent of the NSA's surveillance project in operation today remains unclear. Attorney General Gonzales has stressed that the program intercepts e-mail and phone conversations only when "one party to the communication is outside the United States."

In his book titled "State of War," New York Times reporter James Risen wrote: "The NSA has extremely close relationships with both the telecommunications and computer industries, according to several government officials. Only a very few top executives in each corporation are aware of such relationships."

Tapping into undersea copper and fiber-optic cables where they make landfall would be one way to create a virtual web of surveillance that can snare Internet packets or voice communications when they traverse U.S. borders. One benefit for the government is that one participant in the conversation is likely to be overseas--permitting Gonzales and the NSA to stress the interception's international nature.

Another method would be to seek the cooperation of backbone providers with networks entirely within the United States. That could be done with a tap hooked up to the switches at a telephone company or backbone provider, said Phill Shade, a network engineer for WildPackets who is the company's director of international support services. WildPackets sells network analysis software.

"The tap essentially splits off a copy of the traffic--it would literally take a copy of all the traffic as it moves through the wire," Shade said. "Picture a capital letter 'Y' in your head...One copy goes back out the regular wire on the right side of the wire, and the copy you're interested in splitting goes off the left side of the Y to you. These are very common networking devices, used in networks all over the world."

The tap's exact location may matter. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is convening Monday's hearing, has asked Gonzales to respond to a series of questions about the legality of the program. One question Specter is posing: If intercepted calls are "routed through switches which were physically located on U.S. soil, would that constitute a violation of law or regulation restricting NSA from conducting surveillance inside the United States?"
http://news.com.com/Some+companies+h...3-6035305.html





More Surveillance Puts Strain on Carriers

Third parties help telecom, Internet firms fill law enforcement's increasing data requests
Christopher Rhoads

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, retired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Michael Warren saw that many phone and Internet companies would need help meeting an expected jump in law-enforcement requests for customer calling and email information.

His prediction proved correct. Mr. Warren formed a company that won business from telecom, cable and Internet-service providers around the U.S. Last year, he sold the business for an undisclosed amount.

"There's been a significant increase in demand and pressure on companies for providing records, tracing calls and wiretapping," said Mr. Warren, now a vice president for fiduciary services at NeuStar Inc. of Sterling, Va., which bought his company. "That's led to a great deal of strain on carriers."

Often overlooked amid the controversy over the legality of the Bush administration's eavesdropping without warrants is a huge increase in recent years in the number of wiretaps conducted with court approval. Smaller telecom companies in particular have sought help from outsiders in order to comply with the court-ordered subpoenas, touching off a scramble among third parties to meet the demand for assistance.

VeriSign Inc., the communications company in Mountain View, Calif., that manages the Internet's .com and .net domain-name suffixes, entered the assistance business after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. SS8 Networks Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based company, in 2001 morphed its business into one that helps others deal with law-enforcement requests, after starting as an Internet-phone-equipment company a couple of years earlier.

The number of telephone wiretaps from 2000 to 2004 authorized by state and federal judges increased by 44% to 1,710, according to the latest annual report from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The vast bulk of the wiretaps related to drug and racketeering investigations, according to the report. But terrorism and other national-security investigations also helped drive the increase, according to security experts and service providers.

CenturyTel Inc., a fixed-line phone company and Internet-service provider based in Monroe, La., serving 2.5 million customers, received about 1,500 subpoenas and court orders for customer data last year, said Stacey Goff, CenturyTel's chief legal counsel.

Almost 20% of those related to national-security matters, about double the percentage of such requests from a year earlier, he said. The overall number of requests from law enforcement for customer information has nearly doubled from about five years ago, Mr. Goff added.

"A few years ago it was drugs and divorces, that was it," said Mr. Goff. "Now, we're getting requests on more-sensitive matters."

Companies assisting carriers handling the increased law-enforcement demands typically sell software that simplifies the process of reviewing tens of thousands of phone-call records. Some third parties also provide assistance by setting up in-house compliance procedures, interacting with law-enforcement agencies and providing access to networks for wiretaps.

Smaller telecom, cable and Internet companies generally haven't received requests from the National Security Agency, the super-sensitive U.S. intelligence-gathering arm, for customer data without warrants, officials at smaller companies say. Such NSA requests -- which are at the core of the domestic eavesdropping debate -- have been aimed at large international telecom companies, which tend to handle government and law-enforcement matters in-house.

Big telecom companies in the U.S. were required under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to install equipment to help law enforcement keep up with advances in technology, such as the rise of cellular, the switch to digital technology from analog and new features such as call forwarding.

Now, Internet providers must also comply with the act. The Patriot Act, passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, took matters a step further, giving law-enforcement agencies powers to monitor individuals and all the ways they communicate, rather than being limited to a specific communication device.

Government surveillance has intensified even more heavily overseas, particularly in Europe. Some countries, such as Italy, as well as government and law-enforcement agencies, are able to remotely monitor communications traffic without having to go through the individual service providers.

To make it easier for authorities to monitor traffic, some also require registering with identification before buying telephone calling cards or using cybercafes.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Israeli Startup Develops Faster DSP for Multichannel Video Compression
Joel Bainerman

The Israeli startup Lenslet has developed a revolutionary electro-optic processor that hits the unprecedented speed of 8 tera calculation operations/second — one thousand times faster than any known digital signal processor.

The company struck a strategic co-operation agreement with Paltek Corp. of Japan for its Enlight processor in the Japanese market, in November 2003. The company was also included on the Silicon60 list of emerging companies in April and October 2004.

The EnLight processor, will be used for intelligence, analysis of intelligence, weather forecasting, airport security, and for multimedia, cellular and video compression applications. The EnLight256 — the first in a line of ultrafast DSPs — can be used for voice analysis, face recognition, image processing and other applications. The device will improve detection and extraction of image and audio features, as well as such parameters as behavioral analysis. Moreover, it will allow reliable automated screening of a massive amount of data to help identify potential threats.

"This quantum leap in computation performance, enabled by optical processing, opens the door to new capabilities in the battlefield of the future, creating strategic implications,” said Major-General Isaac Ben-Israel, former head of the R&D Directorate of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. “It could revolutionize the nature of warfare with an effect similar to that caused by the appearance of the tank or the airplane."

Some potential benefits include enhanced communications in noisy channels, multichannel interference cancellation, multiprotocol receiver (SDR), improved resolution and image for SAR radars, digital beam-forming, enhanced signal detection in EW/RWR systems, and multichannel video compression and processing at high image resolutions (H.264 compression for multi HDTV channels).

In homeland security, applications include improved throughput and detection accuracy for baggage scanning, as well as multisensor threat analysis.
http://www.digitaltvdesignline.com/n...CKH0CJUMEKJVNb





Holograms Help Protect Super Bowl
Greg Sandoval

The U.S. government will deploy a new "Star Wars-like" hologram technology to help safeguard the Super Bowl on Sunday.

As agents for Homeland Security monitor the dozens of security cameras mounted in Detroit's Ford Field, they'll see the images in three dimensions, according to James Fischbach, CEO of Intrepid Defense & Security Systems, the company that developed the LifeVision3D system.

Holograms help authorities see images more clearly, Fischbach said.

LifeVision will be used to search sidewalks, monitor faces in the enormous Super Bowl crowd and peer under vehicles.

Holograms are favorites of science-fiction filmmakers. Perhaps the best known is the hologram of Princess Leia that the android R2-D2 projected in the film "Star Wars." Today, simple holograms are internal, and are used on credit cards and children's stickers, in numerous industrial applications and sometimes even in the fine arts.

But LifeVision's images are of the more complex "Star Wars" variety, said Fischbach, who founded his company at the request of the Department of Defense. Before moving into holograms, Fischbach was behind the launch of fiber-optics company Intrepid World Communications, in 1992.

LifeVision uses streams from two cameras, which act as the left and right eyes, to project 3D images onto a 20-inch screen. The monitors used are equipped with a depth tube that presents images that appear to rise 30 inches from the screen and sink another 30 inches into the screen, Fischbach said. Real-world volumes and distances are displayed accurately.

No special goggles or glasses are needed.

"For the military, it can offer much better facial recognition," Fischbach said. "Instead of looking at a two-dimensional photo, you're looking at an entire head."

Fischbach says LifeVision can help surgeons peer into the human body with much more accuracy. He's helped hone the talents of Nascar drivers by creating racing simulations and is in talks with an entertainment company to present a hologram of a rock concert inside a department store.

So how long before the public can send holograms like the one sent by Princess Leia?

"If George Lucas had four cameras on her when he shot it, I could take them and present a real-world image of her right now," Fischbach said.
http://news.com.com/Holograms+help+p...3-6035042.html





Increasingly, Internet's Data Trail Leads to Court
Saul Hansell

Who is sending threatening e-mail to a teenager? Who is saying disparaging things about a company on an Internet message board? Who is communicating online with a suspected drug dealer?

These questions, and many more like them, are asked every day of the companies that provide Internet service and run Web sites. And even though these companies promise to protect the privacy of their users, they routinely hand over the most intimate information in response to legal demands from criminal investigators and lawyers fighting civil cases.

Such data led directly to a suspect in a school bombing threat; it has also been used by the authorities to track child pornographers and computer intruders, and has become a tool in civil cases on matters from trade secrets to music piracy. In St. Louis, records of a suspect's online searches for maps proved his undoing in a serial-killing case that had gone unsolved for a decade.

In short, just as technology is prompting Internet companies to collect more information and keep it longer than before, prosecutors and civil lawyers are more readily using that information.

When it comes to e-mail and Internet service records, "the average citizen would be shocked to find out how adept your average law enforcement officer is at finding information," said Paul Ohm, who recently left the Justice Department's computer crime and intellectual property section.

The issue has come to the fore because of a Justice Department request to four major Internet companies for data about their users' search queries. While America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft complied with the request, Google is resisting it. That case does not involve information that can be linked to individuals, but it has cast new light on what privacy, if any, Internet users can expect for the data trail they leave online.

The answer, in many cases, is clouded by ambiguities in the law that governs electronic communication like telephone calls and e-mail. In many cases, the law requires law enforcement officials to meet a higher standard to read a person's e-mail than to get copies of his financial or medical records.

Requests for information have become so common that most big Internet companies, as well as telephone companies, have a formal process for what is often called subpoena management. Most of the information sought about users is basic, but very personal: their names, where they live, when they were last online — and, if a court issues a search warrant, what they are writing and reading in their e-mail. (Not surprisingly, the interpretation of voluminous computer records can be error-prone, and instances of mistaken identity have also come to light.)

AOL, for example, has more than a dozen people, including several former prosecutors, handling the nearly 1,000 requests it receives each month for information in criminal and civil cases. The most common requests in criminal cases relate to children — threats, abductions and pornography. Next come cases of identity theft, then computer hacking. But with more than 20 million customers, AOL has been called on to help in nearly every sort of legal action.

In recent years, "we found ourselves involved in every imaginable classification of traditional crimes, from murder to the whole scope of criminal behavior, because AOL was used to communicate or there is some trace evidence," said Christopher Bubb, assistant general counsel at AOL.

Investigators have found new ways to identify people who visit Web sites anonymously or use a false identity. Many Web sites keep a log of all user activity, and they record the Internet Protocol address of each user. I.P. addresses are assigned in blocks to Internet service providers, who use them to route information to the computers of their users. If an investigator determines the I.P. address used by a suspect, he can subpoena the Internet provider for the identity of the user associated with that address at a particular date and time.

For example, in investigating a bomb threat at a Canadian high school in 2002, Mr. Ohm approached the operator of a message board in California on which the threats were placed. He asked to review the log monitoring each user's activities, which showed the Internet Protocol address of the person who left the threatening message. Mr. Ohm used that address in turn to determine the suspect's Internet service provider, who identified a teenager who had posted the message. (As a minor, he was not prosecuted.)

While Internet evidence has been used to solve some crimes, there have also been examples of mistakes in the process. Last year, Manchester Technologies, a company in Hauppauge, N.Y., sued Ronald Kuhlman Jr. and Kim Loviglio, claiming they had posted messages on a Web site that defamed its chief executive.

Manchester had identified Mr. Kuhlman and Ms. Loviglio based on information provided by Cablevision, their Internet provider, which incorrectly associated their account with the Internet Protocol address used to make the postings. Manchester dropped its suit against Mr. Kuhlman and Ms. Loviglio, who in turn sued Cablevision. That case was settled for undisclosed terms, their lawyer, Mark Murray, said.

The 1996 law that governs privacy for telephones, Internet use and faxes — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — provides varying degrees of protection for online information. It generally requires a court order for investigators to read e-mail, although the law is inconsistent on this, treating unopened items differently from those previously read. The standard to compel an Internet service provider to provide identifying information about an Internet user is lower — in general, an investigator needs a subpoena, which can be signed by a prosecutor, not a judge. (And the USA Patriot Act allows some of these procedures to be waived when lives are at risk.) By comparison, domestic first-class mail requires a search warrant to be opened.

In cases in which investigators want to intercept Internet communication as it occurs, they must get the same authorization needed for a telephone wiretap, which requires continuing court monitoring. In 2004, there were 49 cases of computer or fax transmissions being monitored under these procedures, according to federal statistics (which exclude national security cases).

Mr. Ohm, now an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, said those statistics undercounted the instances of such monitoring, especially cases in which an Internet company was tracing attacks on its own system.

"The Wiretap Act has enough loopholes built into it that you can often do a wiretap without having to get a court order," he said.

The law for civil cases, like divorces or employment disputes, is also a bit unclear. Litigants can generally subpoena the identifying information of a user behind an e-mail account or an I.P. address.

AOL says that only 30 of the 1,000 monthly requests it receives are for civil cases, and that it initially rejects about 90 percent of those, arguing that they are overly broad or that the litigants lack proper jurisdiction. About half of those rejected are resubmitted, on narrower grounds. Generally, AOL gives its members notice when their information is sought in civil cases. If the member objects, the issue is referred back to the court. (In criminal cases, there is often no notice, or notice is given after the information has been given to investigators.)

"Subpoenas come in all the time that ask for everything," said Kelly Skoloda, an AOL lawyer. "We engage in an active dialogue to determine what they want and what we can give in compliance with our privacy policies."

AOL and most other Internet providers take the view that the content of e-mail messages cannot be turned over to lawyers in civil suits. The most significant exception is that e-mail can be turned over with the consent of the account owner, and litigants often persuade judges to order their opponents to authorize the disclosure of e-mail.

A gray area that has recently gained prominence involves the pages that users read online and the terms of their searches.

Yahoo, Google and the new free AOL.com site, for example, maintain records of user surfing behavior. Google also keeps a log file that associates every search made on its site with the I.P. address of the searcher. And Yahoo uses similar information to sell advertising; car companies, for example, place display advertising shown only to people who have entered auto-related terms in Yahoo's search engine.

It is unclear what standard is required to force Internet companies to turn over this search information to criminal investigators and perhaps civil litigants.

"The big story is the privacy law that protects your e-mail does not protect your Google search terms," said Orin S. Kerr, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and a former lawyer in the computer crime section of the Justice Department.

Other lawyers argue that the law that provides protection for e-mail content, or even the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches, could be applied to data about Web searching, but the issue has not been tested in court.

The break in the St. Louis murders came in 2002, when a reporter received an anonymous letter with a map generated by Microsoft's MSN service — marked with the location where a body could be found.

The F.B.I. subpoenaed Microsoft for records of anyone who had searched for maps of that area in the days before the letter was sent. Microsoft discovered that only one user had searched for precisely that area and provided the user's Internet Protocol address. That address, in turn was provided by a unit of WorldCom, which identified the user as Maury Troy Travis, a 36-year-old waiter. (Mr. Travis was arrested and hanged himself in jail without ever admitting guilt.)

While requests for search data have been few, computer experts expect them to increase.

"It is rare that those links will be a slam-dunk that will make a case," said John Curran, a former cybercrime investigator for the F.B.I. "But when you are putting together a larger case, you are trying to connect the dots, and it is the little things that actually help."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/te...04privacy.html





Surveillance Prompts a Suit: Police v. Police
Jim Dwyer

The demonstrators arrived angry, departed furious. The police had herded them into pens. Stopped them from handing out fliers. Threatened them with arrest for standing on public sidewalks. Made notes on which politicians they cheered and which ones they razzed.

Meanwhile, officers from a special unit videotaped their faces, evoking for one demonstrator the unblinking eye of George Orwell's "1984."

"That's Big Brother watching you," the demonstrator, Walter Liddy, said in a deposition.

Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.

Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.

A lawyer for the city said the police union members were treated no differently than hundreds of thousands of people at other gatherings, with public safety and free speech both protected. The department observes all constitutional requirements, the city maintains.

The lawsuit by the police union brings a distinctive voice to the charged debate over how the city has monitored political protest since Sept. 11. The off-duty officers faced a "constant threat of arrest," Officer Liddy testified, all but echoing the complaint by activists for other causes that the city has effectively "criminalized dissent."

The lawsuit is one of three recent legal actions in which the city has been accused of abuses of power that the plaintiffs say crimped free expression, a charge that officials say is belied by the reality of noisy sidewalks and streets, crammed year-round with parades and rallies.

At the core of all three cases are questions about the expanded powers the police were granted after the 2001 attacks, and how much the department needs to know about the politics of people who are expressing their views.

In 2003, a federal judge eased longstanding and strict limits on surveillance of political activity at the request of lawyers from the city's corporation counsel office, who argued that the Police Department needed broader authority to use such tactics to fight terrorism.

Since then, police officers in disguise have taken part in demonstrations, an approach the Police Department says it used before receiving the expanded powers; other officers have made hundreds of hours of videotapes of people involved in protests and rallies, very few of whom were charged with breaking any law. Neither form of surveillance, the city argues, violates the Constitution.

The three pending cases — two of them brought by civil liberties lawyers and the third by the police union — are the first to demand judicial scrutiny of those tactics.

Among those three, the police union was the earliest to challenge the city, and its case has the most striking dynamic: the very people asked to fight terrorism are claiming that the city's new antiterrorism tools have been bluntly and illegally applied to the exercise of their own civil rights.

"It puts the whole issue into stark relief," said Elizabeth McNamara, a lawyer who represents the P.B.A. and other unions in the suit.

In July and August 2004, a few dozen off-duty officers — joined at times by firefighters — popped up at places where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was scheduled to appear, chanting and handing out leaflets about labor negotiations.

The unions maintain that their demonstrations, in the weeks before the 2004 Republican National Convention opened in New York, embarrassed the mayor just as the national press corps was turning its attention to the city, and that the Police Department responded by cracking down. They are seeking a court declaration that their rights have been violated, as well as damages.

Lawyers for the city say that police union members pestered truck drivers making deliveries, obstructed sidewalks near the mayor's home, and taunted the mayor's press secretary by saying they knew where he lived. The Police Department, the city lawyers say, is neutral about political messages and used barricades and other crowd control methods only to protect the rights of the public and to keep order.

However, the police union said it had uncovered evidence that the department took a keen interest in what the demonstrators were saying, not just how they said it.

During a deposition of the chief of department, Joseph Esposito, who is the department's top uniformed official, Ms. McNamara read parts of a report prepared by the department's Internal Affairs Bureau, which noted that the protesters included members of the Police and Fire Department unions.

"In Paragraph 4, it says that members of both departments called out to the mayor for pay raises," Ms. McNamara said, according to the court transcript, "In Paragraph 5, it notes that the protesters clapped and cheered when former Mayor Koch appeared."

She asked, "What would be the basis for them recording the content of the protesters' demonstrations?"

Chief Esposito responded, "Just to record what they observed."

At a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Ms. McNamara said the videotaping was punitive. "There was no basis whatsoever for employing the Internal Affairs Division to videotape the police officers except as a means of political harassment," she said. "There wasn't suspicion of criminal activity."

Mark Muschenheim, a lawyer for the city, said that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly ordered the videotaping for legitimate reasons. "There were threats made to the mayor's press secretary during these demonstrations," Mr. Muschenheim said. "That was a decision made by the police commissioner because the demonstrations were getting out of hand."

At Chief Esposito's deposition, Ms. McNamara asked, "Would there be any reason, to your knowledge, for them to be taping the protest to zoom in and individually photograph each officer at the protest?"

"I don't know," he replied.

"Do you know any legitimate reason for such documentation of individuals at the protest?" Ms. McNamara asked.

The chief replied, "Document presence for further identification in the event there was misconduct."

No criminal activity or misconduct was observed at the union demonstrations, Charles Campisi, the chief of the Internal Affairs Bureau, testified, but the videotapes will remain on file. "The purpose of keeping records is to document the observations, what you've done," he said.

In 2003, a federal judge found that the Police Department had scrutinized the beliefs of antiwar protesters without legitimate reason. After antiwar rallies in February and March 2003, 12 people who were arrested said they were questioned on their political thinking by detectives.

Police officials said basic information was needed for a database that would identify centers of protest organization to help deploy officers at future demonstrations. When the practice was made public, Commissioner Kelly said that while he did not know about it, there was nothing unconstitutional about the questioning. Nevertheless, he said the information was not needed.

The dozen people who submitted affidavits said the interrogations went far beyond basics. Among the questions, they said, was whether the country would be better off if Al Gore had been elected, whether they hated President Bush, whether they belonged to other antiwar groups, what schools they attended, and whether they were politically active. The police denied asking those questions.

The judge, Charles S. Haight of Federal District Court in Manhattan, noting that all the protesters gave roughly the same version of events, said he believed that they were telling the truth, even if Commissioner Kelly and his deputy for intelligence, David Cohen, were not aware of the practice.

In the P.B.A.'s lawsuit, now in pretrial proceedings, Ms. McNamara tried to show that it was unusual for the Internal Affairs Bureau to keep an eye on off-duty police officers. If a group of police officers were going to have "a baseball game, would I.A.B. be called in to monitor to see whether they might engage in illegal activity?" Ms. McNamara asked Chief Esposito.

"Generally speaking, no," he replied.

Asked if Internal Affairs officers with video cameras might intimidate an officer, Chief Esposito said, "I don't think so."

However, Joseph Alejandro, a police officer and union official, testified about the videotaping, "It sends a chill down a police officer's back to think that Internal Affairs would be taping something."

Although city lawyers have not yet addressed the claims in the union's lawsuit at any length, they argued in a related case that the police should be allowed to make and keep videotapes of political gatherings. A group of civil rights lawyers charged that such videotaping violated a standing court order that settled a class action lawsuit, known as Handschu, that put limits on police surveillance. Many of those limits were eased in 2003. The city says that nothing in the United States Constitution forbids police videotaping of people in a public place.

"Even if the N.Y.P.D. were to identify the person whose images were captured on videotape, or disseminated the photographs to other police agencies, a constitutional violation has not occurred," wrote Gail Donoghue, a senior city lawyer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/ny.../03police.html





Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects

NSA's Hunt for Terrorists Scrutinizes Thousands of Americans, but Most Are Later Cleared
Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

The Bush administration refuses to say -- in public or in closed session of Congress -- how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.

The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.

Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, "wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.

Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation's second-ranking intelligence officer, acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers "have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off." Other officials, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the prevalence of false leads is especially pronounced when U.S. citizens or residents are surveilled. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that "terrorist . . . operatives inside our country," as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping.

The Bush administration declined to address the washout rate or answer any other question for this article about the policies and operations of its warrantless eavesdropping.

Vice President Cheney has made the administration's strongest claim about the program's intelligence value, telling CNN in December that eavesdropping without warrants "has saved thousands of lives." Asked about that Thursday, Hayden told senators he "cannot personally estimate" such a figure but that the program supplied information "that would not otherwise have been available." FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at the same hearing that the information helped identify "individuals who were providing material support to terrorists."

Supporters speaking unofficially said the program is designed to warn of unexpected threats, and they argued that success cannot be measured by the number of suspects it confirms. Even unwitting Americans, they said, can take part in communications -- arranging a car rental, for example, without knowing its purpose -- that supply "indications and warnings" of an attack. Contributors to the technology said it is a triumph for artificial intelligence if a fraction of 1 percent of the computer-flagged conversations guide human analysts to meaningful leads.

Those arguments point to a conflict between the program's operational aims and the legal and political limits described by the president and his advisers. For purposes of threat detection, officials said, the analysis of a telephone call is indifferent to whether an American is on the line. Since Sept. 11, 2001, a former CIA official said, "there is a lot of discussion" among analysts "that we shouldn't be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists." But under the Constitution, and in the Bush administration's portrait of its warrantless eavesdropping, the distinction is fundamental.

Valuable information remains valuable even if it comes from one in a thousand intercepts. But government officials and lawyers said the ratio of success to failure matters greatly when eavesdropping subjects are Americans or U.S. visitors with constitutional protection. The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be "right for one out of every two guys at least." Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official said, "knew they could never meet that standard -- that's why they didn't go through" the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI's national security law unit until 2002, said in an e-mail interview that even using the lesser standard of a "reasonable basis" requires evidence "that would lead a prudent, appropriately experienced person" to believe the American is a terrorist agent. If a factor returned "a large number of false positives, I would have to conclude that the factor is not a sufficiently reliable indicator and thus would carry less (or no) weight."

Bush has said his program covers only overseas calls to or from the United States and stated categorically that "we will not listen inside this country" without a warrant. Hayden said the government goes to the intelligence court when an eavesdropping subject becomes important enough to "drill down," as he put it, "to the degree that we need all communications."

Yet a special channel set up for just that purpose four years ago has gone largely unused, according to an authoritative account. Since early 2002, when the presiding judge of the federal intelligence court first learned of Bush's program, he agreed to a system in which prosecutors may apply for a domestic warrant after warrantless eavesdropping on the same person's overseas communications. The annual number of such applications, a source said, has been in the single digits.

Many features of the surveillance program remain unknown, including what becomes of the non-threatening U.S. e-mails and conversations that the NSA intercepts. Participants, according to a national security lawyer who represents one of them privately, are growing "uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate." Spokesmen for the Bush administration declined to say whether any are discarded.

New Imperatives

Recent interviews have described the program's origins after Sept. 11 in what Hayden has called a three-way collision of "operational, technical and legal imperatives."

Intelligence agencies had an urgent mission to find hidden plotters before they could strike again.

About the same time, advances in technology -- involving acoustic engineering, statistical theory and efficient use of computing power to apply them -- offered new hope
of plucking valuable messages from the vast flow of global voice and data traffic. And rapidly changing commercial trends, which had worked against the NSA in the 1990s as traffic shifted from satellites to fiber-optic cable, now presented the eavesdroppers with a gift. Market forces were steering as much as a third of global communications traffic on routes that passed through the United States.

The Bush administration had incentive and capabilities for a new kind of espionage, but 23 years of law and White House policy stood in the way.

FISA, passed in 1978, was ambiguous about some of the president's plans, according to current and retired government national security lawyers. But other features of the eavesdropping program fell outside its boundaries.

One thing the NSA wanted was access to the growing fraction of global telecommunications that passed through junctions on U.S. territory. According to former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Intelligence Committee at the time, briefers told him in Cheney's office in October 2002 that Bush had authorized the agency to tap into those junctions. That decision, Graham said in an interview first reported in The Washington Post on Dec. 18, allowed the NSA to intercept "conversations that . . . went through a transit facility inside the United States."

According to surveys by TeleGeography Inc., nearly all voice and data traffic to and from the United States now travels by fiber-optic cable. About one-third of that volume is in transit from one foreign country to another, traversing U.S. networks along its route. The traffic passes through cable landing stations, where undersea communications lines meet the East and West coasts; warehouse-size gateways where competing international carriers join their networks; and major Internet hubs known as metropolitan area ethernets.

Until Bush secretly changed the rules, the government could not tap into access points on U.S. soil without a warrant to collect the "contents" of any communication "to or from a person in the United States." But the FISA law was silent on calls and e-mails that began and ended abroad.

Even for U.S. communications, the law was less than clear about whether the NSA could harvest information about that communication that was not part of its "contents."

"We debated a lot of issues involving the 'metadata,' " one government lawyer said. Valuable for analyzing calling patterns, the metadata for telephone calls identify their origin, destination, duration and time. E-mail headers carry much the same information, along with the numeric address of each network switch through which a message has passed.

Intelligence lawyers said FISA plainly requires a warrant if the government wants real-time access to that information for any one person at a time. But the FISA court, as some lawyers saw it, had no explicit jurisdiction over wholesale collection of records that do not include the content of communications. One high-ranking intelligence official who argued for a more cautious approach said he found himself pushed aside. Awkward silences began to intrude on meetings that discussed the evolving rules.

"I became aware at some point of things I was not being told about," the intelligence official said.

'Subtly Softer Trigger'

Hayden has described a "subtly softer trigger" for eavesdropping, based on a powerful "line of logic," but no Bush administration official has acknowledged explicitly that automated filters play a role in selecting American targets. But Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, referred in a recent letter to "mechanical surveillance" that is taking place before U.S. citizens and residents are "subject to human surveillance."

Machine selection would be simple if the typical U.S. eavesdropping subject took part in direct calls to or from the "phone numbers of known al Qaeda" terrorists, the only criterion Bush has mentioned.

That is unusual. The NSA more commonly looks for less-obvious clues in the "terabytes of speech, text, and image data" that its global operations collect each day, according to an unclassified report by the National Science Foundation soliciting research on behalf of U.S. intelligence.

NSA Inspector General Joel F. Brenner said in 2004 that the agency's intelligence officers have no choice but to rely on "electronic filtering, sorting and dissemination systems of amazing sophistication but that are imperfect."

One method in use, the NSF report said, is "link analysis." It takes an established starting point -- such as a terrorist just captured or killed -- and looks for associated people, places, things and events. Those links can be far more tenuous than they initially appear.

In an unclassified report for the Pentagon's since-abandoned Total Information Awareness program, consultant Mary DeRosa showed how "degrees of separation" among the Sept. 11 conspirators concealed the significance of clues that linked them.

Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers, was on a government watch list for terrorists and thus a known suspect. Mohamed Atta, another hijacker, was linked to Almihdhar by one degree of separation because he used the same contact address when booking his flight. Wail M. Alshehri, another hijacker, was linked by two degrees of separation because he shared a telephone number with Atta. Satam M.A. Al Suqami, still another hijacker, shared a post office box with Alshehri and, therefore, had three degrees of separation from the original suspect.

'Look for Patterns'

Those links were not obvious before the identity of the hijackers became known. A major problem for analysts is that a given suspect may have hundreds of links to others with one degree of separation, including high school classmates and former neighbors in a high-rise building who never knew his name. Most people are linked to thousands or tens of thousands of people by two degrees of separation, and hundreds of thousands or millions by three degrees.

Published government reports say the NSA and other data miners use mathematical techniques to form hypotheses about which of the countless theoretical ties are likeliest to represent a real-world relationship.

A more fundamental problem, according to a high-ranking former official with firsthand knowledge, is that "the number of identifiable terrorist entities is decreasing." There are fewer starting points, he said, for link analysis.

"At that point, your only recourse is to look for patterns," the official said.

Pattern analysis, also described in the NSF and DeRosa reports, does not depend on ties to a known suspect. It begins with places terrorists go, such as the Pakistani province of Waziristan, and things they do, such as using disposable cell phones and changing them frequently, which U.S. officials have publicly cited as a challenge for counterterrorism.

"These people don't want to be on the phone too long," said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, offering another example.

Analysts build a model of hypothetical terrorist behavior, and computers look for people who fit the model. Among the drawbacks of this method is that nearly all its selection criteria are innocent on their own. There is little precedent, lawyers said, for using such a model as probable cause to get a court-issued warrant for electronic surveillance.

Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data "and says, 'There must be a secret in there.' "

But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that "look at people's behavior to predict terrorist intent," he said, "are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that's necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."

'A Lot Better Than Chance'

Even with 38,000 employees, the NSA is incapable of translating, transcribing and analyzing more than a fraction of the conversations it intercepts. For years, including in public testimony by Hayden, the agency has acknowledged use of automated equipment to analyze the contents and guide analysts to the most important ones.

According to one knowledgeable source, the warrantless program also uses those methods. That is significant to the public debate because this kind of filtering intrudes into content, and machines "listen" to more Americans than humans do. NSA rules since the late 1970s, when machine filtering was far less capable, have said "acquisition" of content does not take place until a conversation is intercepted and processed "into an intelligible form intended for human inspection."

The agency's filters are capable of comparing spoken language to a "dictionary" of key words, but Roger W. Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until late 2002, said terrorists and other surveillance subjects make frequent changes in their code words. He said, " 'Wedding' was martyrdom day and the 'bride' and 'groom' were the martyrs." But al Qaeda has stopped using those codes.

An alternative approach, in which a knowledgeable source said the NSA's work parallels academic and commercial counterparts, relies on "decomposing an audio signal" to find qualities useful to pattern analysis. Among the fields involved are acoustic engineering, behavioral psychology and computational linguistics.

A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and "paralinguistic" features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.

This kind of analysis can predict with results "a hell of a lot better than chance" the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Frankly, we'll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time," he said, "but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...401373_pf.html





Phones of Greek, U.S., Officals Tapped
Nicholas Paphitis

ATHENS, Greece -- Mobile phones belonging to top Greek military and government officials - including the prime minister - and the U.S. embassy were tapped for nearly a year beginning in the weeks before the 2004 Olympic games, the government said Thursday.

It was not known who was responsible for the taps, which numbered about 100 and included Greek Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis and his wife, and the ministers of foreign affairs, defense, public order and justice. Most of Greece's top military and police officers were also targeted, as were foreign ministry officials and a U.S. embassy number. Also tapped were some journalists and human rights activists.

The phone tapping "started before the 2004 Olympic Games and probably continued until March 2005, when it was discovered," government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said at a news conference.

Roussopoulos said it had not been possible to identify who was behind the tapping.

"It was an unknown individual, or individuals, who used high technology," he said.

Roussopoulos said the surveillance was carried out through spy software installed in the central system of Vodafone, the mobile telephony provider that served the targets.

Calls were then diverted to mobile phones using pay-as-you-go services, which are difficult to trace.

An investigation showed that these mobiles had been used in a central Athens area where many foreign embassies are located, though Roussopoulos refused to speculate on whether foreign agencies might be involved.

"I estimate that no harm was caused to our national issues," Roussopoulos said. "The prime minister does not just use one mobile phone."

He said the government first heard of the tapping in March 2005, when it was tipped off by Vodafone Greece CEO Giorgos Koronias.

Vodafone - one of the country's four mobile telephony providers - discovered the tapping after receiving complaints from customers over problems operating their phones.

Koronias issued a statement saying the company removed the spyware immediately after it was located, and informed the competent state authorities.

The identities of the complainants were not immediately known.

The main opposition PASOK party accused the governing conservatives of delaying its response, and called for a full investigation.

"The government knew how serious the case was but failed to inform ... the people who were under observation," party spokesman Nikos Athanassakis said.

A socialist former defense minister was on the list of targets.

Athens prosecutor Dimitris Papangelopoulos brought misdemeanor charges of breaching the privacy of phone calls against "unknown persons" earlier Thursday, the justice minister said.

The prosecutor will also investigate whether there are grounds for bringing criminal charges of espionage, the minister said.

The government pledged the inquiry would be full and fair.

"The executive branch will not interfere in any way with the due process that has been followed by the judiciary from the first moment," said Panos Livadas, general secretary at the ministry of state. "Due process has been and will be followed."

---

Associated Press reporter Fanis Karabatsakis contributed to this story.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/nation...veillance.html





Using Cell Phones To Track Employees

Advances in mobile phone tracking technology are turning British firms into cyber sleuths as they keep a virtual eye on their staff, vehicles and stock.

In the past few years, companies that offer tracking services have seen an explosion in interest from businesses keen to take advantage of technological developments in the name of operational efficiency.

The gains, say the converted, are many, ranging from knowing whether workers have been "held up" in the pub rather than in a traffic jam, to being able to quickly locate staff and reroute them if necessary.

Not everybody is happy about being monitored, however, and civil rights group Liberty says the growth of tracking raises data privacy concerns.

Kevin Brown, operations director of tracking firm Followus, said there was nothing covert about tracking, thanks to strict regulations.

"An employee has to consent to having their mobile tracked. A company can't request to track a phone without the user knowing," he said. "Under government rules we send random alerts to each phone we track, informing the user they are being monitored."

All that is needed to trace a mobile phone is a computer with an Internet connection. Once a phone is activated for tracking, it becomes a mobile electronic tag and its approximate position can be followed using the service provider's Web site.

Although there was a flurry of interest when the service was launched in 2003 from private individuals suspicious about whether their partners really were working late at the office, the would-be sleuths were quickly disappointed.

"You can forget about borrowing your partner's phone and 'consenting' to being tracked because the random alerts will blow that ruse," said Brown.

As well as wanting to make sure staff are working when and where they are supposed to, many firms say they are increasingly concerned about employee safety.

"Some businesses want to keep an eye on their staff. Some feel they have an obligation to know where staff are in case of emergencies," said Brown. He said Followus, launched in 2003, now has 50,000 subscribers and the number was growing by 5,000 a month.

It tracks cell phone SIM cards with accuracy that varies depending on the saturation of SIM masts--in city centers the technology can pinpoint a phone to within a hundred meters, while in rural locations it might be several miles.

The most obvious application of the technology is for freight and delivery firms, but there has also been interest among small businesses that have tradesmen or sales staff on the road.

Andrew Overton at Verilocation said many of his company's 60,000 subscribers, mostly small businesses, wanted to know where their workers were for security reasons and for better asset management.

"There is increasing awareness about the importance of knowing where your staff are in case of incidents like the July London bombings. Knowing where your nearest employee is to a customer is also important. It allows a company to improve efficiency."

Overton said tracking also allowed bosses to check whether workers were taking the quickest route to a job or whether the expenses they submitted matched the miles they had driven.

Civil rights concerns
Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the growth of tracking.

Civil rights group Liberty said there could be privacy and human rights issues surrounding the use of tracking particularly given the unequal relationship between employee and employer.

"There could well be worries that staff feel coerced into agreeing to be monitored. The technology is neutral, it's the way it is used that is the problem," said Liberty's Jen Corlew.

She said the development of tracking was worrying because it was being driven by the marketplace and not by workers' rights.

"We are already seeing an ebbing away of employee rights and we at Liberty will be keeping a close eye on this area to see if companies who do monitor their staff are complying with the regulations," she said.

Logistics expert Richard Wildings said keeping track of staff and equipment could produce significant cost benefits to companies if they used the information effectively.

"There are benefits in service enhancements--providing a better service to customers and all the attendant advantages that can bring, and also operational gains from managing people and assets better," said Wildings, a professor of supply chain risk management.

According to Wildings, a company that knows where its staff are and can work out whether they will make appointment dates and then communicate with customers will win out over those that do not.

"Giving customers transparency of where their delivery or tradesman is in the supply chain enhances the value of what a company can offer customers," said Wildings from Britain's Cranfield University, a post-graduate institution that specializes in business and logistics.

Transparency builds trust which, in turn, saves cost.

"Customers who don't trust their suppliers can over-order, or hold extra inventory, or shop around for alternatives."

Operationally, companies that use tracking can gain by optimizing their staff.

"If you know where vehicle or employee is and a customer calls you, you have the opportunity to reroute."

Wildings said large-scale truckers have been using similar techniques for years, but using expensive satellite navigation equipment.

"Mobile phone tracking is far cheaper and produces similar business benefits," he said.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6035317.html





Hitachi Advances Paper-Thin RFID Chip
Yoshiko Hara

Targeting radio-frequency identification, Hitachi Ltd. has developed what it says is the smallest and thinnest IC in the world for those applications.

Hitachi was due to present details of the 0.15-millimeter by 0.15-millimeter, 7.5-micron-thick chip on Sunday (Feb. 5) at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

Paper is typically 80 microns to 100 microns thick, and the chip substrate has been made small and thinned to 7.5 micron to ease application in paper, where it could be used as an intelligent watermark.

Hitachi has been pursuing such “embedded” applications for its “Mu-chip” for years. The company integrated an antenna on an earlier version of the chip in September 2003. In the latest version, the company has reduced the plan dimensions and the thickness of the chip.

"The smallness is one [important] function for an RF IC chip," said Mitsuo Usami, senior chief researcher of Hitachi's Central Research Laboratory, who invented Hitachi's mu-chip initiative. “We fabricated the prototype using technology widely used for volume production."

This time around, the R&D team used silicon on insulator (SOI) technology to create an even smaller version. "When I presented a 0.3-millimeter by 0.3-millimeter chip at ISSCC in 2003, I was thinking about the use of SOI wafers as the next step," said Usami. The 0.3-mm by 0.3-mm chip was 60 microns thick. Using an SOI wafer, which has a thin silicon layer on top of an insulator layer, the Hitachi team fabricated the four-metal-layer CMOS on the SOI wafer and etched from backside to remove the silicon substrate. Etching stops at the insulator layer, leaving the 7.5-micron-thick chip. If a chip were to be made thin by grinding a wafer from the backside, precise control would be required, and it would be impossible to grind a wafer precisely 7.5 microns thick, said Usami. Even though the chip is thinner, it has increased robustness, he said.

In conventional Mu-chip design, a doped guard ring structure was necessary to separate high-frequency elements in the RF IC chip and to prevent interference, but the elements on the SOI wafer can be separated in dedicated wells bounded at the bottom and on the sides by silicon dioxide, which allowed further size reduction.

"I believe that Mu-chip is about two generations in advance of other prototypes," said Usami. Hitachi started offering a 0.4-mm by 0.4-mm Mu-chip in October 2001. It receives 2.45-GHz microwaves with an external antenna for applications in Japan and transmits back a 128-bit ID number. The ID is written into the chip's read-only memory during fabrication. The newly developed 0.15-mm by 0.15-mm chip has the same function and has been shown to work.

Hitachi's first Mu-chip was used for the admission ticket for the 2005 World Exposition, in Aichi, Japan. Compared with that chip, the latest version is nearly one-fifteenth the size. The prototype used a 180-nm process. But when it reaches volume production, the process will shrink along with the industry's road map, Usami said.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.j...leID=179100286





The New Chip-erati
Susan Kuchinskas

Artists and hackers have begun implanting RFID chips under their skin. It's a cool way to play with technology. Will it lead to a system of universal implanted ID?

Facial piercings and full-body tattoos used to be signifiers for those who saw themselves as social outlaws. Now, bank tellers and high school kids have pierced lips and inked skin. Today a few cutting-edge nerds sport chips under their skin, a melding of technological experimentation and body modification. Will the mainstream follow them?

Annalee Newitz got "chipped" as research for an article she's writing for "Wired" magazine about RFID security. And Jonathan Westhues hacked and copied its code.

Newitz had an RFID tag made by VeriChip implanted under her skin. The chip emits a unique string of numbers when it comes near an RFID reader. RFID chips are used in industry to track pallets and cases of goods, as well as for opening security gates and doors.

Westhues was able to read and copy her chip in around two hours, using a simple reader about the size of an MP3 player, with an antenna about five inches long. Once Westhues cloned the chip, he'd be able to use it for anything Newitz used it for. If she were using the chip to unlock her front door -- or the door to the biohazard lab -- Westhues, if he was a bad guy instead of a hardware and software designer, would be able to do some damage.

Westhues' quick cloning of Newitz's chip gives the lie to sunny views of RFID security.

"What I wanted to do was show that while VeriChip claims that their chips can't be counterfeited, indeed they can be counterfeited as easily as any other chip, particularly ones that have no security at all, which this one doesn't," she said.

The RFID industry points out that the random digits emitted by RFID tags are meaningless unless they're matched to information stored in the encrypted database that's part of industrial systems.

But Liz McIntyre, an anti-RFID activist believes that VeriChip is only an initial step toward universal chipping. In "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID," McIntyre and co-author Katherine Albrecht lay out a scenario in which RFID information from retail systems could be merged with that from identification systems including electronic passports to create a very complete picture of a citizen's habits.

The Department of Homeland Security began a live test of e-passports at San Francisco International Airport on January 15. There were two earlier tests, at Los Angeles International Airport and Sydney Airport.

The Electronic Privacy Information Clearinghouse recommended a ban on chipping people, and, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and other consumer advocacy groups, has urged the U.S. government to halt the development of passports with RFID chips.

But industry is moving faster along a parallel track.

In October 2004, VeriChip got clearance from the FDA for implanting its chip in human beings. VeriChip is a subsidiary of Applied Digital (Quote, Chart). It registered for an initial public offering in December 2005.

Applied Digital spokesman John Proctor said that VeriChip is focusing on medical applications. Some 68 hospitals in the United States have signed onto the VeriMed service, which combines chips, readers and a database. Most still are developing emergency room protocols in which staff scan for chips, but Hackensack University Hospital has the system up and running.

In the VeriMed system, if someone cloned a chip in order to access that individual's medical history, he'd have to get access to the emergency room scanner and be supplied with a password for the system.

"There are similar security measures to those of online banking," Proctor said.

But slamming down the Chivas at Baja Beach Club on somebody else's tab would be a snap.

"[Westhues] had to actually touch my arm in order to do the read," Newitz said. "But the company mandates that the chips will be implanted in exactly the same place, on the back of your right upper arm. Anyone who knows that can easily bump into you in an elevator and get the read. It's as easy as picking someone's pocket: It requires the same amount of proximity for the same amount of time."

Proctor said there are approximately 2,000 people worldwide with implanted VeriChips; in the United States, 68 people have VeriMed chips. In February, internetnews.com interviewed Joseph Krull, a security executive with Virtual Corporation who let VeriChip tag him as a demonstration.

Other high-profile human implants include the attorney general of Mexico Rafael Macedo de la Concha (along with 16 Mexican security officials), and John Halamka, the CIO of Harvard Medical School.

That leaves a lot of people buying mojitos by waving their arms near an RFID reader.

Some experts think there may be an RFID privacy gap developing, as market penetration moves faster than policy.

Newitz said that people in the technology underground have begun implanting themselves in order to appropriate the technology.

" This is one way people can say, 'No you're not going to do this to me, I'll do it for myself and figure out what it does and seize more control over it.'"

While do-it-yourself chippers would probably be the last ones to submit to government-mandated implantation, McIntyre said, they act as a sort of cadre of cool.

"What they're doing is moving that [government] agenda forward in a way," she said. "They're removing the mental barrier of having something foreign implanted in your body that's emitting a unique number. It has this cool factor, especially since they're being installed in tattoo parlors."

Today, a hip chip. Tomorrow, the Mark of the Beast?
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3582971





RFID-Zapper
Public Wiki

What is the RFID-Zapper?

The RFID-Zapper is a gadget to deactivate (i.e. destroy) passive RFID-Tags permanently.
The development-team presently consists of two people (MiniMe and Mahajivana), who had some help from a friend (thank's for that).
Goals are a proof-of-concept and the construction of at least one functioning and appealing prototype, as well as a documentation of the project, so that everyone can build an own RFID-Zapper. Since the project found so much positive resonance, we probably are going to work on some other realizations of the concept, e.g. building an RFID-Zapper from scratch, without a single-use-camera.

Why should I need such a thing?

We have to expect to be surrounded by RFID-Tags almost everywhere within the near future, and they will serve many different purposes. The benefits and risks of this technology and it's use are already being discussed. However, there will be atempts to use RFID-Tags to establish constant surveiliance and to further threaten and compromise the privacy of customers (and citizens and even non-citizens, when gouvernments start to use RFID-Tags like the german gouvernment already did).
To defend yourself against such measures, you might want a small, simple and relatively appealing gadget to permanently deactivate RFID-Tags around you, e.g., to deactivate RFID-Tags in recently bought clothes or books without damaging those.

How does the RFID-Zapper work?

Passive RFID tags have no internal power supply. The minute electrical current induced in the antenna by the incoming radio frequency signal provides just enough power for the CMOS integrated circuit (IC) in the tag to power up and transmit a response.
(Quote from Wikipedia)

There are several ways to deactivate RFID-Tags. One that might be offered by the industries are RFID-deactivators, which will send the RFID-Tag to sleep. A problem with this method is, that it is not permanent, the RFID-Tag can be reactivated (probably without your knowledge). Several ways of permanently deactivating RFID-Tags are know, e.g., cutting off the antenna from the actual microchip or overloading and literally frying the RFID-Tag in a common microwave-oven, which needs to be turned on only for a short period of time. Unfortunately both methods aren't suitable for the destruction of RFID-Tags in clothes: cutting off the antenna would require to damage the piece of cloth, while frying the chips is likely to cause a small but potent flame, which would damage most textiles or even set them on fire.

One of our cameras, 2for1 only 7 € in some drugstores

The RFID-Zapper solves this dilemma. Basically it copies the microwave-oven-method, but in a much smaller scale. It generates a strong electromagnetic field with a coil, which should be placed as near to the target RFID-Tag as possible. The RFID-Tag then will receive a strong shock of energy comparable with an EMP and some part of it will blow, thus deactivating the chip forever.
To keep the costs of the RFID-Zapper as low as possible, we decided to modify the electric component of a singe-use-camera with flash, as can be found almost everywhere. The coil is made from coated copper wire and placed inside the camera exactly where the film has been. Then one end of the coil is soldered to the camera's capacitor, from which we earlier disconnected the flash. The other end of the coil is soldered to a switch, which itself is connected to the capacitor's other terminal. Once everything is tested, the camera can be closed again and henceforth will serve as a RFID-Zapper, destroying RFID-Tags with the power of ordinary batteries.

State of the project

A bit of paper might help

The original project was finished successfully and introduced at 22C3. Several RFID-Zappers were built at 22C3 in a workshop.
Modification of a single-use-camera with flash has proven to be relatively easy, the capacitor is able to supply enough electrical current.
An old, slightly damaged Camera could also be modified into a RFID-Zapper during the workhop at 22C3.
As far as we know, about 20 working RFID-Zappers were built so far. In only one case we encountered serious problems, the capacitor seemed to be broken.
By the way: It is possible to carefully (don't expose it to any light) extract the photographic film from the camera for further use. (Most films from single-use-camera's seem to have no DX encoding, so they might be useful for push processing or even pull processing ;-) But don't expect to much from such films, single-use-cameras usually don't come with a high-quality film.

Proof-of-Concept

Before we first tried to modify a single-use-camera, we tested the concept on a passive 13,56-MHz-RFID-Tag:
We took an old external flash apart, which had a guide number of 24. The capacitor of the flash had 330 μF and 300 V. selfwound coil, measures 4,5 x 8 cm, coated copper wire, 1mm thick, 5 windings
We then de-soldered the actual flash from the capacitor and then soldered the coil to it, but placed a switch between one of the capacitor's terminals and the coil, which later would close the curcuit. The capacitor now could be loaded like before and even made the usual high-pitched sound.
To see wether the RFID-Tag was functioning or not, we had a RFID-Finder, a gadget to find RFID-Tags.
Then we ran several tests, each time loading the capacitor to a higher level, before closing the curcuit.
When loaded to about 100 V, the RFID-Zapper was able to destroy the RFID-Tags placed right next to it. No visible damage was done to the paper, in which the tag was wrapped. Since the strength of the electrical field decreases with the square of the distance, the final RFID-Zapper will definetly need a capacitor that can supply more than 100 V. Since we didn't have enough RFID-Tags we couldn't test the range of the RFID-Zapper with more current, e.g. 200 V or even 300 V.

Further Plans

* We are completing the documentation on our project these days. This documentation will contain a construction-manual for the RFID-Zapper and will be published both in german and english. You should be able to find it on this wiki within the next two weeks, we will also place it on several other homepages, including mahajivana's, which hopefully will go online soon and will contain more about this project.
Until now we only had access to 13,56-MHz-RFID-Tags, but there are other tags running on different frequencies. We hope to be able to test the RFID-Zapper on such tags soon. If you can help us getting our hands on such tags, please contact us, we will be forever thankful.
If we have enough 13,56-MHz-RFID-Tags, we will further test the range of the RFID-Zapper.


Caution

(This part of this article probably will be longer than the equivalent part in the german article, since english-speaking peoble seem to be more concerned with safety matters and less careful with electric devices ;-)

Ø Poldi kindly informed us, that having a RFID-Zapper with you when checking in to a plane might cause trouble or even get you arrested (he almost was). RFID-Zappers are basically some kind of pocket-EMP. Although we doubt that it has the capacity to cause any trouble aboard an airplane, we seriously recommend against testing it, for reasons of your own health as well as that of others.

Ø RFID-Zappers don't comply with the FCC-rules.

Ø Modifying a single-use-camera into a RFID-Zapper isn't completely free of risks. If the capacitor is still charged fully or partly, you might catch yourself an electric shock. If you are a healthy, young person, this is probably only going to hurt a lot, but if you should have any kind of problems with your heart and/or circulation, you definetly want to properly decharge the capacitor first. If you use a bigger capacitor, the risk increases.

Ø Soldering irons are known to be unpleasantly hot at the tip.

Ø We also recommend against using the RFID-Zapper on RFID-Tags found within electrical devices, for these are likely to suffer damage too. You also shouldn't use RFID-Zappers too near to electric devices, especially if they are expensive. You also shouldn't use it near any magnetic data storage, like floppy disc, MCs, hard discs, credit cards, streamer-cartridges and so on. And don't try it near your grandpa's pacemaker or other sensitive medical equipment either!

Ø We don't think that the RFID-Zapper is a strong source of what is known in Germany as Elektrosmog, which means some kind of smog caused by electromagnetic fields. But if you are concerned about it, you might want to be careful. Unfortunately we can't tell you wether wearing a hat of aluminium helps or not.

Ø The RFID-Zapper might cause you to feel armed against companies or governments trying to compromise your privacy. You might even experience euphoria, especially when destroying RFID-Tags. This could lead to dangerous behavior, like speaking your mind, using freedom of speech, fighting for your rights, all of which are bound to ultimately lead to the communist world revolution ;-)

Ø In America the RFID-Zapper could be considered a "burglar tool" since it could be used to disable RFID tags being used by merchants to prevent theft. Merely having it in your possession could lead to your arrest.
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(EN)





Study: 80 Percent Of Voters To Be Using E-Voting Equipment In 2006

Fewer voters will cast their ballots by punching a card or pulling a lever in this November's elections as the country continues to turn to newer, electronic machines, according to a study released Monday.

While the study says old systems that were prone to error are on their way out, experts also note that means many Americans will be voting on unfamiliar equipment this fall.

At least four out of five registered voters will use the newer generation of machines -- either ATM-style touchscreen machines or ones that ask voters to fill in the blanks, a vast change from the contested 2000 presidential election that spurred states and Congress to push for improved equipment.

Back in 2000, just over half the voters had access to the latest technology.

By this fall, however, only one out of 33 voters will be asked to use the system that raised the most objections in Florida -- punch cards -- and just one in 10 will use a lever machine, according to a survey by Election Data Services, a political consulting firm that tracks election equipment. Six years ago, one in six voters used punch cards and one in five used levers.

The changes are bound to create their own glitches as voters and administrators learn how to use equipment they haven't voted on before, said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data. Just over 30 million voters will be casting ballots on unfamiliar equipment, he said.

``You throw that many people in on something new, you're always bound to see something go wrong,'' he said.

The changes have created new controversies, especially with accusations that touchscreen-style machines are vulnerable to manipulation. In response, 25 states have passed laws requiring election administrators to use machines that allow voters to verify their vote has been accurately counted, and that create paper receipts for a recount.

Those paper trails -- called voter-verified paper audit trails -- are creating their own challenges, as manufacturers try to respond to lawmakers' demands for the equipment, Brace said.

Some of the survey results may change by the time the fall election arrives, the study said, because some states are still trying to change over from older equipment as encouraged by the federal Help America Vote Act, which was passed after the contested 2000 election.

The widespread push to modernize means that, in the six years between November 2000 and this fall's elections, nearly 82 million people in a nation of 170 million registered voters will have cast ballots on new equipment, the study concludes.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13806202.htm





Diebold Chief Says Fate Of e-Voting Unit Under Review
AP

Diebold Inc.'s new chief executive, determined to cut $100 million in costs over three years, said he is reviewing whether the company should continue investing in its embattled electronic voting business.

CEO Thomas Swidarski insisted in an Associated Press interview that he feels good about the performance of the e-voting operations, even as some shareholders and computer experts complain that Diebold touch-screen voting machines have had a history of hardware and software woes.

``There's pieces and aspects of each of our businesses that I'm going to be looking at with a very critical eye in terms of what the future holds for us,'' Swidarski said in his first media interview since taking over in December the company best known for its automatic teller machines and security systems.

Risk within any of Diebold's businesses will be weighed against profit potential, Swidarski said. ``If any of the pieces don't fit or any of the pieces don't add the value we think is associated with that risk, then we'll make appropriate decisions at that point,'' he said.

Diebold's former chairman and CEO, Walden O'Dell, resigned Dec. 12 after several years of controversy surrounding Diebold's touch-screen voting machines and O'Dell's financial contributions to President Bush's campaign.

O'Dell gained notoriety in 2003 when he invited people to a fundraiser for Bush with a letter stating he planned to help ``Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.''

Within two days of O'Dell's departure, investors sued Diebold, claiming it made misleading comments about its e-voting business.

Swidarski said Diebold Election Systems, the company's smallest business segment, now offers machines and computer software he feels confident will satisfy certification demands.

``The thing I look at is what customers say,'' he said. ``I can't comment on any kind of lawsuit that's pending, but I'm very confident in terms of the capabilities we have actually delivered.''

Swidarski said he has no political connections, and the company has a policy in place for its high-level executives and the Diebold Election Systems subsidiary concerning political contributions.

``Any painful experience you learn from,'' Swidarski said. ``It's not always about technology. There are other aspects of this business.

``I'm very confident that the states that have run this (electronic voting) the longest and have been involved with it the most are the most satisfied,'' he said. ``Much like bank customers have to make decisions, elections officials make decisions. Those folks have a very difficult job, with big responsibilities.''

A study on voting systems nationally released Monday by Washington-based Electronic Data Services Inc. said that in this year's November election 66.6 million voters are expected to cast ballots using electronic equipment, or about 39 percent of all the votes cast.

Kimball Brace, president of Electronic Data Services, said that by November about 25 states could have some degree of electronic voting.

Diebold has sold its touch-screen machines to Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Mississippi and portions of Ohio, California, Alaska, Colorado and Florida. Brace said

the company is the biggest vendor of electronic voting machines, and Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems are its primary competition.

Diebold tapped into the congressional funding for voting updates after the disputed 2000 presidential election, when punch-card ballots in Florida were still being examined weeks after Election Day.

But Diebold touch-screen voting machines became subject to scrutiny, when questions arose as to the security of the software and whether results could be manipulated. There were also several widely reported glitches, especially in some of California's elections.

The company a week ago reported its earnings slumped 76 percent to $14.6 million in the quarter ended Dec. 31 even as sales rose 15 percent. The earnings dropped mainly because of companywide restructuring and other charges.

Diebold shares rose 9 cents to $39.26 in trading Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares have traded within a 52-week range of $33.10 and $57.81.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/13814703.htm





Local news

Teens Reveal Too Much Online

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut -- On websites such as MySpace, teenagers can find people around the world who share their love of sports, their passion for photography or their crush on the latest Hollywood star. But authorities say teens are increasingly finding trouble in an online environment where millions of people can, in seconds, find out where they go to school, learn their interests, download their pictures and instantly send them messages.

Police in the central Connecticut city of Middletown suspect that as many as seven girls were recently assaulted by men they met on MySpace. The FBI says it regularly receives calls from police trying to figure out how to stay ahead of popular technology that puts children a mouse click away from millions of strangers.

MySpace, one of several popular social networking sites, is a free service that allows people to create websites that can be personalized with information, pictures and movies. Searching for someone is as easy as typing the name of a high school and the photographic results are instantaneous.

"They're licking their lips and arching their back for the camera because they can, and they have no idea of the consequences," said Parry Aftab, an attorney and child advocate who runs WiredSafety, a site that helps inform parents and site managers about online predators.

MySpace said in a statement that it includes safety tips and prohibits children under 14 from using the site. Aftab said MySpace, a subsidiary of News Corp., has a great reputation for trying to keep the site safe.

Some teens keep their personal profiles scant, aimed only at their friends. Others describe their likes and dislikes, from the mundane to the profane, and encourage people to send them messages.

"That is a perpetrator's dream come true," said Middletown Police Sgt. Bill McKenna.

McKenna said several Middletown girls, between 12 and 16, told police they met men on the MySpace who claimed to be teenagers. When they met in person, he said, the girls were fondled or had consensual sex with men who turned out to be older than they claimed.

In at least one case, McKenna believes the assault happened at the girl's home while her parents were there.

Last month, 14-year-old Judy Cajuste was found strangled and naked in a Newark, New Jersey, garbage bin and 15-year-old Kayla Reed was found dead in a canal not far from her Livermore, California, home. Both deaths remain unsolved and the use of MySpace.com has surfaced in both investigations.

As recently as a few years ago, Aftab said the profile of an online victim was a young woman who felt alone, didn't have many friends and craved attention.

Then, in 2002, 13-year-old Christina Long of Danbury was strangled in a Danbury mall parking lot by a 26-year-old man she met on the internet. Long was a popular cheerleader, a good student and an altar girl. The profile went out the window.

Now, Aftab said, it's no surprise that a wealthy state such as Connecticut is seeing a spate of problems. "This is a rich and upper-middle- class problem," Aftab said. "They have too much time, too much technology and their parents aren't around to keep an eye on them."

Connecticut's FBI office was the first in New England to launch an online, undercover program to catch sexual predators. Timothy Egan, the squad's supervisor, said parents often don't know their children are using these websites or what information is being released. The FBI hopes to train more local officers about these sites in coming months.

Chief State's Attorney Christopher Morano, who has strictly limited the information his 10- and 12-year-old children put on the internet, said he was surprised to learn that they had been contacted by strangers they believed were pedophiles. His kids ignored it, Morano said, but parents need to closely monitor internet activity.

"You wouldn't leave your kid on the side of the highway without supervision," Morano said. "You shouldn't put them on the internet highway without the same type of supervision."
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70163-0.html





The iPod Ecosystem
Damon Darlin

In the weeks leading up to last month's Macworld conference, few people knew what the notoriously secretive Steven P. Jobs was going to announce.

Gavin Downey, the director of product management at the Belkin Corporation, listened to all the rumors leading up to the everything-Apple conference in San Francisco, from the outlandish to the logical. He had to. His job is making sure there are cases, rechargers and other accessories that add features to all the variations of iPods that Apple Computer makes. Any change in direction by Apple means his company has to scramble.

Last September, for instance, on the eve of an Apple announcement, Belkin's lead designer was dispatched to China. There he waited for word of the rumored replacement to the iPod Mini, which turned out to be the slim Nano.

Despite the radical redesign, different from any previous iPod, the Belkin designer was able to mock up prototype cases within two weeks. Models were in the stores well before Christmas. "There is no room in this industry for lack of execution," Mr. Downey said.

Not when making add-ons for the iPod is a $1 billion business. Does that sound like hyperbole? Consider this. Last year, Apple sold 32 million iPods, or one every second. But for every $3 spent on an iPod, at least $1 is spent on an accessory, estimates Steve Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group, a research firm. That works out to three or four additional purchases per iPod.

That obviously makes accessory makers happy. It thrills retailers, whose profit margin on the accessories is much higher than on an iPod. And it delights Apple because the racks of add-ons made just for the iPod — 2,000 different items at last count — send a strong statement to consumers that the Apple player is far cooler than a Creative or Toshiba player, for which there are few accessories.

Sales of all those cases, car rechargers and docking stations totaled $850 million last year, Mr. Baker said, and that is not even counting Internet sales. Sales will easily soar well beyond $1 billion this year.

"Most of us were caught a little bit by surprise by the growth trajectory," admitted Rob Humphrey, director of marketing for Kensington, a maker of computer peripherals and now one of the biggest makers of iPod accessories. The accessories now account for about 20 percent of Kensington's total sales.

An entire ecosystem has emerged around the music player, introduced by Apple in October 2001. Other manufacturers had produced MP3 players earlier. But the simple design of the iPod, plus Apple's iTunes store, quickly helped Apple to dominate the market. And that simple design — some might even call it bland — encouraged people to personalize the machine.

There are now more than twice as many iPod accessories as there were just last summer, according to Apple. And that number does not include the docking stations that will be available in 40 percent of cars sold in the United States this year.

About 28 percent of all accessories are cases. You can find microfiber sleeves or neoprene iPod cases made by dozens of start-ups for $10 or $20 or a $200 python- skin case made by Coach, the maker of stylish leather handbags. About 30 percent of sales are for car chargers or transmitters and the remainder are speakers and docking stations.

But the forest of products includes a baby stroller from Kolcraft with a slot for an iPod, and a belt called the TuneBuckle with an iPod holder as the buckle. For sheer extravagance, Hammacher Schlemmer lives up to its reputation for selling the ridiculously expensive in its catalogs with the $4,000 Triode-Tube iPod speakers with old- fashioned vacuum tubes that glow through see-through panels. The Sharper Image catalog has a $700 iJoy massage chair with an iPod holder in the armrest.

The iBoom is a white boom box that Digital Lifestyle Outfitters is selling for $150. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas, a company showed a prototype of a black and yellow boom box, the size of a work site gasoline-powered generator, for the tiny iPod.

Apple could not be happier about this exploding iPod economy. "For us it's great because the decision to buy an iPod is reinforced when consumers see all the accessories," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president for worldwide iPod marketing.

Mr. Humphrey of Kensington, which makes about a dozen iPod accessories, called the accessory market "a real phenomenon," adding, "I've never seen anything like it in my career."

Few have. Rarely does one product foster such a sizable industry around it. Many of the iPod accessory makers, like Belkin, Kensington or Logitech, cut their teeth making accessories for personal computers. But no one product, not even the Macintosh, created the kind of accessory mania that the iPod has.

Some creations, like Mickey Mouse for Disney or Barbie dolls for Mattel, created an enormous market for accessories, but most of those items, like the Mickey Mouse watch or the Barbie Dream House, were licensed or made by the same company that created the original product. In contrast, Apple has encouraged a free-for-all, and its own share of the accessories market remains small.

That will change. Apple is aware of the power of this market and is getting more active. Indeed, at the recent Macworld conference, Apple demonstrated that it wanted more of this lucrative field. It made a splash with an attachment, the $50 Radio Remote, that plays FM radio through the iPod. Meanwhile, Kensington, with a new device that transmitted music from an iPod to an FM radio and also received FM broadcasts, was overshadowed.

Until recently, Apple's add-ons have been low-impact items like colorful cloth sleeves, which it calls socks, for the iPods. "We've chosen to participate in the market, not overwhelm it," Mr. Joswiak said.

By standardizing the 30-pin electronic connection on all of its models, Apple allows companies that stick with its standards the right to use an official "Made for iPod" logo. In return, Apple gets a royalty for the logo's use.

However, Apple, always tight-lipped, does not give much else to the accessory makers. "We may get a day's notice even with our strong relationship with Apple," Mr. Humphrey said. "In a meeting you might get a hint that something is gong to happen, but you don't know what. You occasionally get a, 'I don't think you want to go in that direction,' but you never know why they say that."

It could be because Apple will introduce a new size, as it did with the Nano, or because it is moving its connector from the top of the unit to the bottom, or because Apple has plans to introduce a competing product.

Undaunted, the big makers like Logitech, Griffin, Targus and Xtreme Accessories keep working on electronics that add functions and battery power to the iPod. Devices that turn the iPod into a home media center, allowing consumers to shuttle music from one room to another wirelessly, have become popular.

One big reason for the size of the iPod economy is that retailers love the accessories business. "Retailers have a love-hate relationship with iPod," Mr. Humphrey said. They must compete against Apple's own retail outlets for sales and the gross profit margins are slim, less than 15 percent.

Retailers' margins for the iPod accessories are much higher. Mr. Baker of NPD estimates that margins for the electronics are around 25 percent, while cases offer 50 percent margins. "They make money on that and they make no money on the iPod," he said.

While there is shelf-space competition among the hundreds of vendors, there has not been a lot of price competition, so profit margins hold. The iPod economy is also wide because the accessories are not limited to retailers like Best Buy or Circuit City as they were with personal computers. IPod accessories are showing up in Urban Outfitters stores and auto dealerships.

If at times the iPod economy seems packed with iThis and iThat, it is because manufacturers have recognized the selling power of the iPod. Take clock radios, which have been a sleepy category for more than a decade. SDI Technologies turned that around by creating the iHome clock radio, which Apple says was the strongest selling accessory last year. (You dock the iPod in the machine.) The speaker maker JBL has jumped in with the $300 JBL On Time clock radio/iPod dock.

"You throw an iPod in there and you have a growth category again," said Mr. Baker of NPD. Likewise, the headphone and earphone business also took off last year, growing about 25 percent in volume and 10 percent in average price, said Robert Heiblim, senior vice president for sales and marketing at Altec Lansing, a speaker maker.

No one is predicting that the iPod economy will be slowing soon. Mr. Baker said: "We've barely scratched the surface with the video iPod."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/te...=1&oref=slogin





Networks' iTunes Gamble Paying Off
The Hollywood Reporter

Television networks took a leap into the unknown when they started selling their shows on Apple Computer's iTunes online store, but even in these early days, it's starting to look as if that faith in digital downloads was well-placed.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs welcomed Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios content to the service in October. Now there are 40 different series, each episode of which costs a standardized $1.99 to purchase, and more are on the way.

Nobody will disclose numbers for these television downloads. It's easy, however, to keep an eye on the iTunes download chart, which usually shows NBC's "The Office" as the top full-length program, followed by ABC's "Lost" and Comedy Central's "South Park."

Ben Silverman, an executive producer of "The Office," whose ratings have not quite matched the critical acclaim, praised NBC for its willingness to "dive into the iTunes relationship quickly." He credited the download capability with boosting broadcast viewership.

Silverman noted that "The Office," which went into reruns just before the video iPod's first Christmas, was boosted by people who discovered the show when they were browsing to find something to put on their new device.

"That confluence brought us a sampling of a new audience, which also is not an audience that watches TV by sitting down at the time the broadcaster wants to show it," he said.

Then NBC moved the show to Thursday nights. "That's like the network telling people it's important to them and part of the whole history of comedy," Silverman said.

He was confident that the downloads were not eroding audience or invading any of the existing windows, due primarily to their portable and on-demand nature.

"The DVD potentially will get affected, but the revenue as it relates to the studio is higher because of the cost being so much lower and the price points being the same while you're getting a larger percentage of the revenue," Silverman said.

NBC on Jan. 10 added more programs to iTunes, making a total of 13 NBC Universal-produced shows available, including NBC's "Law & Order," USA Network's "Monk" and Sci-Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica."

MTV Networks disclosed its iTunes slate Jan. 26, with 14 shows from MTV, MTV2, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and the N, including "Punk'd," "South Park," "Dora the Explorer," "SpongeBob SquarePants," and "Laguna Beach."

Jason Hirschhorn, chief digital officer at MTV Networks, said the preliminary numbers looked good but that the final numbers weren't in yet.

"The nets are doing as well as they've ever done, and the Web sites are upping traffic," he said. "We believe this is additive--the best way to watch long form is on your couch."

Hirschhorn also was working on models for sharing these new potential benefits with the cable affiliates.

On Jan. 26, ESPN and ABC Sports added programming from their Winter X Games 10 coverage, along with shows like the "SportsCentury" biography series.

iTunes users previously could purchase condensed versions of ABC Sports' Bowl Championship Series college football games, the first sports content on iTunes.

Other programs from the Disney companies include ABC's "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "Commander in Chief"; ABC Family's "Wildfire"; and Disney Channel's "That's So Raven" and "Kim Possible."

"Overall, we've seen our ratings increase for the shows we have on iTunes, and it continues to pick up momentum," said Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media at Disney-ABC Television Group.

He said "Lost" was doing "extraordinarily well" on iTunes, a fact he attributed primarily to the overlap in demographics between the broadcast viewers and iPod users.

"We wanted to put our best shows on the platform, but you never really know what you're going to get," Cheng said. "Video has surpassed everyone's expectations, but I do believe iPod is basically a music device, and video is an additional benefit to having one."
http://news.com.com/Networks+iTunes+...3-6035376.html





Those Cables Behind the Television May Become Obsolete
John Markoff

A team of I.B.M. researchers plans to report this week that they have used standard chip-making materials to develop a high-speed wireless technology that could do away with the bulky cables that now connect electronic devices in the living room.

In the past, high-frequency wireless technology has generally required exotic semiconductor materials like gallium arsenide that are costly to work with and difficult to miniaturize.

On Tuesday, at an annual semiconductor industry design meeting here, the researchers are expected to describe a design that is capable of transmitting more than 10 times the data of today's Wi-Fi using lower-cost silicon germanium material.

The researchers said the new technology would be ideal for moving HDTV video signals around the home wirelessly in the unlicensed 60-gigahertz portion of the radio frequency spectrum.

This is referred to as the "millimeter wave band," and it has long held out the promise of carrying far more data than other portions of the spectrum.

Moreover, because the high-frequency portion of the radio spectrum generally does not penetrate walls, it may be more palatable to Hollywood and the cable and D.S.L. telecommunications firms, which have been concerned about the risks of piracy posed by some wireless technologies, said Richard Doherty, a computer industry consultant at Envisioneering Inc., based in Seaford, N.Y.

"It might appease Hollywood, but Monster Cable would lose out," he said.

The use of silicon germanium is significant because it exploits standard equipment that is readily available in I.B.M. chip-making plants, according to Modest Oprysko, a manager in communication technology at I.B.M.'s Yorktown Heights research laboratories.

That means that there is potentially a relatively quick path from research to commercialization.

"This is Bluetooth on steroids," he said, referring to the current industry standard that has been used as a wireless cable replacement.

The I.B.M. researchers said that despite the fact that the millimeter wave technology would have a short range in the home, it might have significant applications as a low-cost alternative in point-to-point communications systems that are popular as data links on corporate campuses.

One of the advantages of the shorter wavelength systems is that the antenna can be assembled as part of the chipset, further lowering the cost of the technology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/te...gy/06chip.html





Makeover of the Year


The Reclusive One at Wednesday’s Grammys



Sly Stone Surprises Grammys
Jake Coyle

Wednesday night in Los Angeles, the reclusive pioneer of a hugely influential soul-rock-funk fusion made his first major public appearance since Jan. 12, 1993, when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Sporting a giant blond Mohawk, dark shades and a silver, purple-lined robe, Stone took the stage after a five-song medley tribute that included John Legend, Joss Stone, Maroon 5, Will.i.am from The Black Eyed Peas and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith.

Stone played "I Want to Take You Higher" behind a set of keyboards with his old band, the Family Stone, appearing uncertain and unaccustomed to the bright lights of the big event. He kept his head bowed, declining to address the audience or acknowledge the occasion.

He departed after just a few verses _ leaving befuddlement in his wake. Perhaps Dave Chappelle, who introduced Stone, had an inkling of the task facing the legend.

"The only thing harder than leaving show business is coming back," said Chappelle, who famously abandoned his hit Comedy Central show.

Though the Sly and the Family Stone tribute had been planned for weeks, Stone's presence had been a giant question mark in the days leading up to the show. Even Grammy producers _ speaking hopefully but cautiously in the days before the Grammys _ seemed uncertain he would be there.

The 61-year-old Stone, whose real name is Sylvester Stewart, hadn't performed live since 1987. He did, however, make a cameo appearance last year at a concert with his sister, Vaetta, who plays in a Family Stone tribute band. He has reportedly renamed Vaetta's band "The Family Stone," and is writing and producing for them.

But in the late '60s and early '70s, Stone was ubiquitous, an icon of the Woodstock era. His performance with the Family Stone on the second day of that fabled festival was one of its most acclaimed.

Stone's band began in 1967 with its debut, "Whole New Thing." It then delved deeper into exuberant funk on the album "Dance to the Music," which featured the title track. Its third album, "Life," followed just months later.

But the band's 1969 release, "Stand!" was its masterpiece. Songs like "I Want to Take You Higher," "Everyday People" and "Stand!" were instant classics that rewrote pop music, mixing Motown with pop melodies and `60s hopefulness.

By 1971, Stone had grown more disenchanted, releasing "There's a Riot Goin' On." 1973's "Fresh" continued that trend, but still had funk gems like "If You Want Me to Stay."

By '75, the Family Stone was no more, breaking up largely because of Stone's increasing drug problems, which led to canceled concerts. Stone would later release several solo albums of little note and poor sales. He was arrested several times in the `80s for cocaine possession.

He collaborated with Funkadelic in 1981, but increasingly shunned the spotlight _ though the spotlight also shied away from Stone.

His brother Freddie told Spin magazine in the early `80s that Stone "didn't want to be out in front anymore. The glamour didn't mean anything anymore. He wanted to be normal."

As the years went by, Stone's absence from the public eye became a thing of legend, leading to a documentary, currently in the works, titled, "On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone."

His appearance Wednesday, bizarre as it was, was still defended by some _ including Adam Levine of Maroon 5.

"Can you really argue with an unbelievable looking mohawk and a silver jacket?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020802510.html





Springsteen, Sting Honor James Taylor
Beth Harris

From Bruce Springsteen's mournful harmonica on "Millworker" to Sting's acoustic guitar on "Close Your Eyes," a generation of singer-songwriters influenced by James Taylor paid tribute to him with their versions of his hits.

Stories abounded when a powerhouse lineup of Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, the Dixie Chicks, Dr. John and Taj Mahal kicked off Grammy week by honoring the 57-year-old Taylor as MusiCares Person of the Year on Monday night.

Crow was 12 when she saw Taylor at her first concert.

"It was the first time ever I heard 16,000 people sing in unison," she told 2,200 people at the Los Angeles Convention Center. "It was the first time I ever smelled pot and I knew I wanted to be a musician. This is for you, James. You changed my life."

Then she, Browne and Crosby launched into "Mexico," highlighted by a standout horn section.

Sting first saw Taylor as a 19-year-old in Newcastle, England, in 1971.

"I'm a budding songwriter. At least I think I am," the former Police frontman recalled. "I want to see what all the fuss is about. Within four bars, I realize he's a virtuoso of the guitar. He starts to sing in this soft, rich baritone. I think, `I have to change my career. I'll become a bass player in a punk band.'"

Springsteen walked out with no introduction, hailing the North Carolina-raised Taylor as "an authentic Southern voice."

India.Arie showed off her fondness for Taylor by carrying onstage a purse with his black-and-white picture on it. Alison Krauss sang "Carolina in My Mind," the Dixie Chicks harmonized on "Shower the People," and Simon opened the show with an acoustic version of "Sweet Baby James."

Raitt recalled being a college student in Massachusetts and playing shows with Taylor.

"He used to let me open for him and he tuned my guitar," she said before singing "Rainy Day Man."

With companion Nicole Kidman keeping time in the audience, Keith Urban played a driving guitar version of "Country Road."

"Everyone has been telling these great James Taylor stories, and nothing for me says it better than this song," Carole King said, launching into "You've Got a Friend."

Taylor joined her at the piano and they dueted on the final chorus of the song that was an individual hit for both of them.

"I can't thank you enough for showing up. It's not the same without you," Taylor said. "It's strange to be at an event like this and still be alive. It's very moving, very terrifying and very wonderful to hear these songs done live."

It was a working evening for Taylor, who joined his band for "Copperline" and "Shed a Little Light."

Taylor's brother, Livingston, sang backup on "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" while Taylor's twin 4-year-old sons, Rufus and Henry, jumped up and down to the music and the crowd clapped along.

Taylor returned for an encore of his classic "Fire and Rain."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





The Science of Hit Songs
Bjorn Carey

When Ashlee Simpson tops the charts while a critically acclaimed ex-Beatle's album fails to crack the top 200, eyebrows go up in the marketing world.

So what makes a hit?

A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.

Popularity contest

Researchers created an artificial "music market" of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. Upon entering the study's Internet market, the participants were randomly, and unknowingly, assigned to either an "independent" group or a "social influence" group.

Participants could then browse through a collection of unknown songs by unknown bands.

In the independent condition, participants chose which songs to listen to based solely on the names of the bands and their songs. While listening to the song, they were asked to rate it from one star ("I hate it") to five stars ("I love it"). They were also given the option of downloading the song for keeps.

"This condition measured the quality of the songs and allowed us to see what outcome would result in the absence of social influence," said study co-author Matthew Salganik, a sociologist at Columbia University.

In the social influence group, participants were provided with the same song list, but could also see how many times each song had been downloaded.

Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group. They also found that as a particular songs' popularity increased, participants selected it more often.

The upshot for markerters: social influence affects decision-making in a market.

This research is detailed in the Feb. 10 issue of the journal Science.

The Britney effect

The social-influence group was further divided into eight separate, non-interactive "worlds." Members of each world could not see the decisions of the other seven. The idea behind this was to observe multiple outcomes for the same songs and bands.

"If you look at Britney Spears, some people say she is really good. Others say she isn't good, she's just lucky," Salganik told LiveScience. "But by having just one argument, it's impossible to distinguish. However, if you have 10 worlds, and she's popular in all 10, then you can say she's actually good. But if she's only good in one, then you could say it was due to luck."

Although different songs were hits in each world, popularity was still the deciding factor, although the "best" songs never did very badly and the "worst" songs never did very well.

So what drives participants to choose low-quality songs over high-quality ones?

"People are faced with too many options, in this case 48 songs. Since you can't listen to all of them, a natural shortcut is to listen to what other people are listening to," Salganik said. "I think that's what happens in the real world where there's a tremendous overload of songs."

Alternatively, Salganik said, a desire for compatibility with others could drive the choice, since much of the pleasure from listening to music and reading books stems from discussing them with friends.

"If everybody is talking about 'Harry Potter,' you want to read it too," Salganik said.
http://www.livescience.com/forcesofn...ing_dunes.html





A Vivid Potpourri With Carnage at Its Core
Ken Johnson

Love it, hate it or grudgingly respect it, Thomas Hirschhorn's politically punishing horror show, "Superficial Engagement," at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea is hands down the most disturbing and provocative art exhibition in town right now.

Mr. Hirschhorn is a Swiss artist based in Paris who has lately been much in demand by ambitious museum curators and international art expo organizers. He is known for sprawling, messy, aggressively didactic installations made from great quantities of cardboard, tape, aluminum foil, photocopies and found objects. For his last show at Gladstone, he created within the gallery a transporting network of cardboard caves. It included a lot of photocopied political literature, but visitors could ignore the social studies and just enjoy the funhouse-like experience and the fantasy of an underground counterculture.

With this show Mr. Hirschhorn evidently decided to take off the gloves. He has crammed into the gallery a series of sculptural tableaus that resemble parade floats constructed by a gang of neo-punk high school anarchists. With mannequins studded with screws like African fetishes, fake coffins, video monitors, photocopied newspaper headlines and articles, Oriental carpets, hand-painted banners and photocopies of geometric artworks, the installation is almost overwhelmingly congested.

But one element stands out clearly: thrusting at you from every direction are images copied from the Internet and other international news sources showing human bodies mangled, burned and dismembered by bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and other theaters of war and terror.

Another dimension runs parallel to the atrocity photographs: throughout the show Mr. Hirschhorn has placed blurry and washed-out photocopies of drawings by Emma Kunz, the Swiss artist and mystic who created beautiful mandala-like compositions, which she used in her practice as a healer. Taped to cardboard and plywood panels of various sizes, many of which are suspended and angled toward the viewer, the drawings set up a tension between creative transcendentalism and earthbound carnage.

But the poor-quality photocopies of the Kunz drawings do little to mitigate the general feeling of chaos. In this context, they look more like kitschy designs than spiritually resonant artworks. The question remains: to what end has Mr. Hirschhorn orchestrated this assaultive mix of horrifying imagery, ugly materials and crude agitprop? Is he being sincerely expressive or, considering a dark and possibly nihilistic comedic strand running through the show, might he be mocking a kind of sophomoric populist politics? Or is he just trying to make the sort of people who visit Chelsea art galleries feel bad about their comfort and privilege?

For people who get their news only from American sources, which rarely show such grisly documents, the show may be an eye-opener. And that would be consistent with the purposes expressed by the title "Superficial Engagement" and by the artist's own written statement about the show.

Mr. Hirschhorn thinks we need to pay more attention to the surfaces of things. "Superficial engagement is not nonengagement!" he writes. "Let's keep things on the surface, let's take the surface seriously!" It is a persuasive argument. All too often, ideologies, metaphysics and religions that find truths above, below or beyond observable surface realities cause trouble and pain because they so easily justify bad behavior toward nonbelievers and other inconvenient populations.

But what about the high-low tension between the ethereal Kunz drawings and the horrifying photographs? The juxtaposition does not seem to stick to surface realities, and it is not clear what Mr. Hirschhorn means by it. Is he saying we need more beneficent transcendentalism to heal ourselves and our world? Or does he think that rationalism is useless in the face of real-world violence? And doesn't the sight of mangled corpses tend to inflame cycles of revenge, rather than put people off violence?

For all its brutal obviousness and faux-populism, there is something deeply confused and confusing about Mr. Hirschhorn's project. You may suspect that he is unconsciously masking a deeper sense of uncertainty and helplessness by putting on such a vigorously distracting show.

This is the third major exhibition this season by a male artist throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the gallery without regard for aesthetic niceties. Mike Kelley recently filled Gagosian Gallery with a similarly immersive, albeit conceptually obscure series of theatrical tableaus imitating high school theater productions. And at P.S. 1, John Kessler presented an entertaining, enveloping installation of motorized contraptions and videos focused on protesting the United States involvement in Iraq.

All three shows seem at least partly animated by desperation, as though the artists had been driven into arm-waving frenzies of impotent rage by the inability of traditional art forms to address adequately the terrible and infuriating things that are going on in the world.

Mr. Kelley and Mr. Kessler, at least, appear to have had some fun. In Mr. Hirschhorn's show, a puritanical fervor rules out fun and pleasure. He bullies the viewer and induces a vague, free-floating guilt; he's the art world's Lars von Trier. Few artists have taken so seriously Theodor Adorno's famous admonition that creating poetry should be impossible after the Holocaust. It is scary to think what Mr. Hirschhorn might do next.

Thomas Hirschhorn's "Superficial Engagement" continues through Saturday at Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9300.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/ar...han.html?8hpib





Singing Sand Dunes: The Mystery of Desert Music
Michael Schirber

If you've never heard a sand dune rumble, listen up. Marco Polo in the 13th Century said the singing sands -- which he ascribed to evil desert spirits -- "at times fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms."

Yes, certain sand dunes will occasionally let out a loud, low-pitch rumble that lasts up to 15 minutes and can be heard up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. Some dunes are known to do it regularly, even daily. But why?

To try and uncover the underlying nature of these mysterious sounds, Bruno Andreotti from the University of Paris-7 took equipment out to the Atlantic Sahara in Morocco, one of only 35 known places where the mysterious natural music can be heard.

"Singing dunes constitute one of the most puzzling and impressive natural phenomenon I have ever encountered," Andreotti said.

Setting the stage

Andreotti and his team studied one of the large crescent-shaped dunes, or barchans, which spontaneously sings all year long – sometimes two or three times an afternoon, if windy enough.

Wind forces sand to accumulate at the top of the dune until the angle of the slope reaches a tipping point of about 35 degrees. The eventual avalanche of sand produces the bellowing noise. The sand must be sufficiently dry for the singing to occur. For smaller barchans, the sand must also be hot and the wind still.

"A small dune sings only the few days in which there is no wind and no clouds so that the Sun can dry efficiently the slip face," Andreotti told LiveScience.

Although sand avalanches were known to be the cause of the singing, the exact mechanism was still unclear. Not wanting to wait for a spontaneous episode, Andreotti and his team induced avalanches in the field by sliding down the dunes.

Nature's boom box

By measuring vibrations in the sand and air, Andreotti was able to detect surface waves on the sand that emanated from the avalanche at a relatively slow speed of about 130 feet per second (40 meters per second). In this way, the face of the dune acts like a huge loudspeaker – with the waves on the surface producing the sound in the air.

Andreotti explained these sand waves as resulting from collisions that occur between grains at about 100 times per second, as measured in the lab. In a kind of feedback loop, the waves synchronize the collisions, so they are all on basically the same beat.

This model explains the low pitch – between 95 and 105 Hertz – of the sand song, which, according to Andreotti, resembles a drum or a low-flying propeller aircraft.

The feedback mechanism, as outlined by the researchers in the Dec. 1 issue of Physical Review Letters, also correctly predicts the maximum loudness of the singing to be 105 decibels, at which point the sand grains vibrate off the surface. This level of sound is comparable to a snow blower or a Walkman at full volume.

The mystery is not completely solved. Recent research has centered on a seemingly magical musical property of the singing grains. It is not known, for instance, why the sliding of glass beads is silent, while some rougher sand grains belt out a tune.
http://www.livescience.com/forcesofn...ing_dunes.html





Yakety yak

Peer-to-Peer Service Selects Voiceover Talent

Wurld Media, the developers of a peer-to-peer, digital entertainment network called Peer Impact, has named Randi Miller to be the voice of the service.

Miller is also the voice of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Washington Metro selected Miller from 1,259 official entries its "Doors Closing Voice 2006" contest, said Wurld Media, which had been following the contest closely. Miller is a leasing specialist at a Virginia Lexus dealership.

"Peer Impact has been looking for their unique signature voice as well and we believe we have found it in Randi Miller," said Gregory Kerber, Wurld Media chairman and CEO. "After hearing Randi's distinctive voice, we knew that we had to offer her this unique opportunity."

Taunia Kipp, Wurld Media vice president of business strategy, said Miller's voice will be used to walk online users through Wurld Media's tutorial segments and as well as provide sound bite prompts.

As Peer Impact continues to roll out new content offerings, features and capabilities, Miller will cheerfully and warmly introduce those services, the Saratoga Springs company said.
http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany...ml?jst=b_ln_hl





When Intel Calls, Skype Listens
Tom Krazit

The latest version of Skype's Internet-calling software can host up to 10 users on a conference call, but only if your PC has a dual- core processor from Intel, Skype and Intel announced Wednesday.

Intel's Core Duo and Pentium D processors have been designated the mass conference-calling processor of choice for Skype 2.0, launched last month. The limit will remain at five callers for PCs using single-core chips and Advanced Micro Devices' dual-core Athlon 64 chip, which some tests have shown outperforms Intel's dual-core chip.

Skype's software allows PC users to make free voice calls to other Skype users over the Internet and to call cell phones and landlines for a fee.

Dual-core processors are basically two processing engines crammed onto a single piece of silicon. The individual processor cores tend to run slower than the clock speeds achieved by single-core chips, but a dual-core chip excels when confronted with two demanding tasks at once, such as scanning a PC for viruses while decoding a video stream.

Despite both AMD and Intel releasing dual-core chips to the market last May, Skype 2.0 software will allow 10-way conference calls only if it detects code specific to Intel's chips when the PC boots, said Rob Crooke, vice president of Intel's Business Client Group.

Intel approached Skype with its plan to optimize code on its chips for Skype's software so users would have a good experience while hosting a multiperson conference call, Crooke said. In recent years, Intel has increasingly touted its software development resources as a competitive advantage over AMD, which also trails Intel in the marketing budget category.

Other processors based on the x86 instruction set, such as AMD's chips or Via's, obviously will not come with the same optimized code found on Intel's chips. Intel and Skype announced a partnership at the Fall Intel Developer Forum last August to make sure Skype's products would run well on Intel's chips.

VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) conference calls are a compute-intensive undertaking. Skype's minimum system requirement of a 400MHz processor applies only to a single person-to-person VoIP call. Adding multiple users to that connection requires the PC to simultaneously host multiple sessions with those new users, which strains the processor, a Skype representative said.

By choosing to work exclusively with Intel, Skype is excluding technology that is arguably more powerful than Intel's. A series of benchmark tests conducted last year by Tom's Hardware gave an overall performance edge to AMD's dual-core chips but rated Intel's dual-core chips better in some multitasking situations.

AMD is gaining some market share at Intel's expense. Intel still dominates the market for desktop and notebook processors, but AMD took several points of market share from Intel in the fourth quarter, according to Mercury Research and Current Analysis.

Skype did extensive performance testing before releasing this feature for Intel's chips, said Henry Gomez, general manager of Skype's North American operations. He declined to comment on whether the company tested Intel's dual-core chips against AMD's dual-core chips, but said Skype was very satisfied with the performance of the Intel chips.

The 10-way calling feature will be exclusive to Intel's chips for a limited time, Gomez said. Skype is not releasing the time frame for the expiration of the exclusive agreement, he said.

An AMD representative did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
http://news.com.com/When+Intel+calls...3-6036896.html





Sony Sets Price For Blu-Ray Discs
Thomas K. Arnold

Sony Pictures on Tuesday became the first major studio to put a price tag on Blu-ray discs when they become available in U.S. stores this year.

At the same time, the studio unveiled what many observers believe will be a key component of the next-generation, high-definition optical disc's marketing strategy: bundling various formats together to give consumers more flexibility and mobility.

Catalog Blu-ray disc titles will wholesale for $17.95, about the same as DVDs when that format hit the market in 1997. New-release Blu-ray discs will wholesale for $23.45, a premium of 15%-20% over what suppliers were charging for new theatrical DVDs.

The higher pricing structure for new releases is meant to accommodate the sell-through and rental markets, said Benjamin Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. He noted that in at the dawn of DVD in 1997, most movies initially were released on rental-priced videocassettes.

"The premium is for a way better format and to remind retailers that at the time we launched DVD, VHS was selling for $55 wholesale in the first window," Feingold said.

He added that Sony will not attach any suggested list prices to its Blu-ray discs, at least not at this time.

"From the retail perspective, this is going to be a hot product, and retailers will no doubt determine their own margin structure," he said. "We believe in a free market."

Blu-ray discs likely will start showing up in stores by early summer, sources say. In advance of that, Sony is bowing a bundling concept to DVD and the Universal Media Disc (UMD) that it may migrate to Blu-ray.

Starting March 28, consumers can buy DVD-UMD combo packs of "The Grudge," "Resident Evil," "Underworld," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and MGM's "The Terminator" for just pennies more than Sony typically charges for a new DVD.

A second batch of DVD-UMD combos -- "Ghostbusters," "Mad Max," "The Fifth Element" and "Snatch" -- arrives April 25, with a third wave is slated to come on the market in May.

Each combo is priced at $28.95. Sony typically charges $24.96-$26.96 for new DVD releases, while titles new to UMD generally list for $19.95.

Feingold said that is a taste of what consumers can expect when Blu-ray discs appear in stores.

"With the launch of Blu-ray, we're going to try to introduce the managed-copy concept, where if you buy Blu-ray you'll be able to get additional versions (of the same title) to use in your home," Feingold said. "Ultimately, we might even get to the point where we'll offer consumers the ability to have different versions of the same movie on different devices in the home -- that's something we're working on."

For now, Feingold said, "we're experimenting with UMD," the tiny optical-disc format playable only on Sony's handheld PlayStation Portable (PSP).

"A lot of people have DVD players and also have PSPs, and this way for one price they can get one movie and play it back on both formats," Feingold said.

Feingold would not specify whether future Blu-ray bundling would be electronic or physical, as is the case with the DVD-UMD combo packs.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...S&srch=blu-ray





I.B.M. Unveils Server Line That Uses Game Chips
Steve Lohr

I.B.M. is betting on video game technology to bring supercomputer-caliber visualization tools to its mainstream corporate market and to reduce the computing costs of daunting tasks like hunting for oil, discovering new drugs and exploring the human body.

I.B.M. announced server computers powered by microprocessors yesterday, using an innovative design called Cell, which was created first for video games.

A Cell chip is the processing engine for Sony's new PlayStation 3 video game console, expected to go on sale later this year. I.B.M., Sony and Toshiba jointly developed the Cell technology.

The move by I.B.M. is an example of a reversal of the traditional trend of technology adoption. In the past, advanced technology was used first by large corporations and the Pentagon. Today, the consumer market often leads as the cost of computing continues to drop sharply.

The I.B.M. Cell server, analysts say, will probably be used first to reduce the cost of applications that now require processing huge amounts of data and presenting the results visually on a screen.

Those applications include converting seismic data into simulated underground images to help petroleum companies look for oil and gas deposits, biological simulations to aid in understanding disease and suggest therapies, and fluid dynamics simulations to improve the aerodynamic design and reduce fuel consumption of jetliners.

The Cell technology, at least initially, is mostly suited for a fairly tailored set of tasks, unlike the broadly general-purpose microprocessors that power personal computers. The Cell chip will be best at what might be thought of as "multimedia physics," computing chores that depend on processing huge volumes of mathematical calculations, known as floating point operations, at lightning speed.

I.B.M. demonstrated two such applications at a gathering in New York yesterday. One was to blend satellite photographs with geological data on landscape contours and elevation data. The result was a simulated flyover of Mount Rainier in Washington State, shifting the perspective by moving a joystick.

Another was to assemble multiple scans inside the body. Three-dimensional images that would have taken minutes or longer to render, even at the most advanced medical centers today, were presented almost instantly.

Analysts said the Cell systems open the door to real-time imaging technology during patient consultations or surgery.

The Cell-based server computers will be available this summer. The machines will be priced at $25,000 to $35,000, an I.B.M. official said, while full-fledged supercomputers can cost millions of dollars.

The Cell servers will run mostly on the Linux operating system, which is popular in high-performance computing.

I.B.M. plans to make the Cell technology widely available to universities and software companies interested in developing applications that will run on Cell chips.

"We want to see how far we can take Cell technology beyond games, and the biggest challenge to making that work is the software tools for building new applications," said William M. Zeitler, senior vice president for I.B.M.'s systems and technology group.


Visualization can provide a picture of a gigantic amount of information, often enabling a human user to absorb and understand more information rapidly.

That is the practical reason for applications from medical imaging for physicians to terrain mapping for fighter pilots.

Video games work on much the same principle. More and more of computing, according to I.B.M. researchers, may be presented visually to users in the future.

"We're hoping that this gaming stuff will get us to the next level of user interfaces," said James A. Kahle, the chief technologist for Cell systems and an I.B.M. research fellow.

That may be only a hope today, but industry analysts say the Cell approach looks promising.

"If you see the future of computing as 'give me the answer now,' it favors something like Cell, a computer platform designed for photorealistic modeling," said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a technology research firm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/te...gy/09blue.html





U.K. Tackles 'Trivial Patents' Issue
Ingrid Marson

The U.K. Patent Office is seeking public comment as part of its examination of how well the current system works and whether too many trivial patents are being granted.

One of the main criteria of patentability under U.K. law is that inventions must "not be obvious to someone with a good knowledge and experience of the subject," according to the U.K. agency. But now it wants to find out whether this requirement meets the needs of inventors, the public at large and the U.K. economy. So late last week, the office launched its request for public comment.

"Are too many 'trivial patents' being granted? Or are innovation and competitiveness best served by easy patenting with low hurdles?" asks the patent agency.

Ron Marchant, chief executive of the U.K. Patent Office, said it is important to strike the right balance with the criterion of inventiveness.

"An inventive step requirement which is too difficult for applicants to achieve could result in inventions that might deserve a patent not receiving protection, thus hindering the applicant in research and investment. Alternatively, the danger of an inventive step which is too easy to meet is that patents could be obtained for small changes or improvements that hamper the legitimate activities of third parties. It is important that they help us to find the best solution," he said in a statement.

Over the last few years, there has been increasing criticism of patent offices around the world for granting trivial patents. Last year, a study found that a quarter of U.S. patent holders thought the quality of patents was "somewhat worse" than three years ago, with the quality of patents granted in the technology industry thought to be worse than in any other major sector.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, an intellectual property campaign group based in Munich, Germany, provides information on a number of software patents granted by the European Patent Office that it considers trivial, including a patent for a progress bar and a menu tab.

In an interview last year, a software manager at a small technology company told ZDNet UK that large companies tend to swamp patent offices with well-worded patent applications for trivial technologies with the knowledge that a certain proportion of them will be passed.

The U.K. Patent Office is accepting public comment until May 31.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+tackles+tri...3-6035997.html





TorrentSpy's Quest for Legitimacy
Thomas Mennecke

The transition or implementation of authorized file-sharing networks is not a new concept. Altnet was among the first, as it helped distribute authorized content along side the FastTrack network. PeerImpact followed suit as it released its fully secure P2P network to the public in 2005. iMesh transitioned from a free P2P network to a pay community last year. While authorized P2P models are fairly common, is the world quite ready for an authorized BitTorrent indexer?

That's the question TorrentSpy is ready to confront head on. Throughout TorrentSpy's history, it has frequently adhered to the many cease and desist notices provided by content owners. However in an effort to confront the constant barrage of take down notices, TorrentSpy is attempting a novel approach. Already indexing a limited number of authorized content, TorrentSpy is looking to take this perspective to the next level. Justin, the owner and administrator of TorrentSpy, discusses with Slyck.com his quest for legitimacy.

Slyck.com: What exactly and specifically is TorrentSpy trying to do?

TorrentSpy: Our primary goal is to be the most comprehensive file search website on the Internet. Torrents will remain our area of focus but we want to expand to include files such as: game patches, mods, shareware, trialware, driver updates, etc.

The secondary goal is get involved in the distribution of authorized, licensed content such as music, television, and video.

Slyck.com: What is your motivation for providing authorized content?

TorrentSpy: Our goal is help bring TV and Movie distribution into the 21st century.

Surprisingly enough, they are still running around with physical film reels! I want to allow people to download an individual TV show or movie and pay a reasonable price. It is no different than as Tivo & other DVRs, but it is done over the Internet instead. That would be very cool and I want to help make that happen.

Slyck.com: What is your philosophy on the proliferation of copyrighted material and how does that tie into your business model?

TorrentSpy: I believe that rights holders should be able to make money on their work. That is why we respond to DMCA takedown requests. I have a family, a car payment, etc. So if I make something I deserve the right to make money from it and TorrentSpy supports others doing the same.

Slyck.com: Let' say TorrentSpy reaches an agreement with a movie studio. What will that mean to the end user? How much will their current experience change?

TorrentSpy: The plan is for the user experience to remain the same - there will simply be authorized downloads in the search results. So far the studios have been resistant to this idea...which is unfortunate. However, they resisted the VHS tape if you remember and that has been a massive success for them. Heck, they even resisted the DVD too if I recall. Eventually they will realize the huge opportunity they are missing out on and hopefully we will be there to make great things happen.

Slyck.com: In response to legal threats, TorrentSpy has been filtering results for nearly a year now. How has this affected your daily traffic?

TorrentSpy: Actually we have always filtered by following the procedures of the DMCA. We may not have grown as fast as some of the sites that don't filter, but that is OK with me.

Slyck.com: Is it the duty of torrent search site owners to police the torrents their search engine finds?

TorrentSpy: It is not the responsibility of a search engine to monitor content indexed and I am not sure how such a thing would be possible in the first place. The system simply searches the web and lists the torrent files it finds. We make it pretty easy for rights holders to remove torrents of their content and many companies (such as Microsoft) use it all the time.

Slyck.com: Is there a danger legitimate content, such as parodies and spoofs of copyright woks, could get caught up in a filter?

TorrentSpy: No filter is perfect and most are very, very far from it. Napster was never able to develop a good filter and I don't believe anyone else has either. Here is a good example of the danger with inadequate filtering: At one time AOL tried to filter websites for parental controls or something. A girl knew someone had breast cancer so she tried to learn more about it on the web.

Unfortunately AOL said naughty, naughty, "breast" is porn so you cannot learn about this horrible disease your friend has. These examples happen all the time, and while parental controls can error on the side of being too restrictive, the Internet at large cannot subject itself to inaccuracies of this nature.

Then there are things like "Star Wars: Revelations" which is a fan film that is allowed by Lucas. What is the automated filter to keep that in but other stuff out? I have no idea and neither do my developers. It is a giant mess that nobody has figured out how to do well yet.

Slyck.com: Is the plan to filter out all unauthorized copyright material over night, or is this going to be a gradual process?

TorrentSpy: We have had a filtering policy in place since the site began and it seems to be working well for both rights holders and our users, so we have no plans to change it.

Slyck.com: Have you begun talks with content owners/providers yet? How receptive have owners/providers been? What types of media will you index, music, movies, and games?

Our goal is to index all media types, movies, music, games, and software. We have talked with a number of movie companies, music labels, and individuals to figure out something that can work for everyone. The reactions range from "get out now" to "love it! I want your baby" so there is still a lot of work to be done. We believe what we want to accomplish will benefit everyone so remain hopeful it will all come together.

Slyck.com: TorrentSpy has aggravated users by including adware in "free" screensavers. Is this any way for an internet business to behave? For example, sites like iTunes or CinemaNow would never be caught distributing ad/spyware. It is a very "warez" thing to do. Can you be taken seriously with this history?

TorrentSpy: Haha, well that is not exactly a fair comparison since iTunes and CinemaNow charge for their downloads.

Those screensavers were a giant pain since we had to license all the pics - The company wanted money, then the girls wanted money, then the photographers wanted money. So how do you pay for that? Besides, we were careful to pick a product that allowed an easy uninstall. Don't like it? Fine, uninstall it with a few clicks. I guess I don't see what everyone is so upset about when it is that easy. Of course I am sure to get flamed for that opinion :-D

Slyck.com: If you could look into the crystal ball for a moment, when do you foresee the first authorized content appearing on Torrent Spy?

TorrentSpy: There already is authorized content on TorrentSpy. Some people have uploaded torrents of their own stuff to get it distributed. We do intend to include additional material as well though. As for movie and recorded music content, I hope we'll have something up in the next 30 days.

Slyck.com: What are your thoughts on DRM and how will such technology play a role on the future Torrent Spy?

TorrentSpy: Right or wrong, people are used to the concept that buying something means they own it and can do whatever they want with it. DRM gets in the way of that perception so people don't like it very much.

The thing I hate about DRM is that if you upgrade your computer, have a hard drive crash, get your MP3 player stolen, etc. all the purchased DRM protected media you have is gone with it. I don't know about you, but that kind of stuff happens to me all the time so losing all my DRM content is not good.

So DRM has both technical and social barriers to adoption and has a long way to go before people accept it, especially with the restrictions the media companies want to implement with it.

Slyck.com: Given the low cost of bandwidth compared to the cost of downloads, how can P2P play a serious role in the distribution of video content? If people want to go through the hassle of getting to grips with P2P, would they not just pirate the content?

TorrentSpy: iTunes has shown that people are willing to pay a reasonable price for music and now TV. They have done hundreds of millions of downloads. Music has been easily obtainable on p2p networks for years and if everyone was obsessed with piracy, iTunes would not be the success it is today.

There are some compelling reasons for authorized content. The first is download speed. BT is great, but it is still slower than a direct download. Another is assurance that the media is not some sort of virus or trojan (that recent Microsoft exploit with image files was scary!) Another is to support the artist who made the work. There are a few more, but those are the big ones.

Slyck.com: Any other thoughts, comments, observations?

TorrentSpy: I believe the efforts of the MPAA and especially RIAA to date have been shortsighted and that fanatical filtering (and lawsuits) of everything in sight has not been a success for them in the 6+ years they have been doing it (and I don't see that it ever will). They are blinding themselves to the larger opportunity of providing viable alternatives to illegal downloading by end users. We can help if they will only allow us the opportunity.

-- As TorrentSpy moves forward with its plans, it will try to force the reconciliation of two ideals. One, content owners must accept that the Internet, for all its short comings, will be the distribution medium of the future. Second, those who have refused to accept the viability of paid content must now find a way to live along side it.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1086





How to Get Your Missed TV Shows with Azureus and Bittorrent
WhoopJack

I'll start by saying that I am a paying cable subscriber. Often times there are multiple shows on at the same time that I would like to watch and I wanted a way to be able to watch those other shows.

I have a 37 inch Dell LCD TV and enjoy watching as much HD content on it as I can. Hooked up to it via one of the HDMI ports I have a PC which I am using as a media center. It currently has two hard drives in it, a 120GB and a 250GB along with an ATI Theater 550 TV card. I use the TV card to record shows that are not generally in HD content or we don't care that they are in SD, like soaps for my wife. The rest of the shows that we'd like to watch in HD or missed recording we download from the internet using a Bittorrent client as I'll describe now.

My client of choice is Azureus, simply for its ease of use plus I like all the features it has along with the plugins available for it. I also have done quite a bit of Java development in the past which steers me more towards this client since I know I could write my own plugins or make modifications to it if I wanted.

The client alone will get you the ability to download torrents either by clicking on the torrent link in a browser or by copying a torrent download link and opening it within Azureus. My goal was to get an automated package set up where I don't need to manually go and download the shows we enjoy. To do this I took advantage of some plugins for the Azureus client.

The first plugin I got was the RSSFeed plugin. This plugin will watch a set of user defined RSS feeds, from the torrent sites that make them available, and download files based on user defined filters. The filters can be specified as regular expressions. For the basic user that may not understand regular expressions it is probably easiest to first find the RSS feeds you want and then after setting up the feed you can right-click on a torrent in the feed listing and choose "Create Filter" to create a filter based on that torrent. The plugin does a pretty good job at coming up with a regular expression that should pick up future occurrences of that show. Another nice feature of the plugin is the "Smart History" option which will help to keep duplicate episodes from being downloaded. You can also specify season and episode ranges for a filter. A good place to start for a torrent site RSS feeed is www.tvtorrent.info. This is the first step in automating your TV show capturing experience.

I found the easiest way to look for shows to download is to just browse the data returned from your RSS feeds for the first week or so and create filters when you find something you like. Another step I took, so as not to miss new shows, was to set up a filter that will download all first season, first episodes of a any show. This way we can watch a new show when it comes out and decide if we want to get future episodes if we liked it.

I have my filters setup to download to the same directory that my TV shows are recorded to via my TV card. This makes it easier on my wife when she wants to look for something to watch. As a side note, I am using GB-PVR as our media center software. I am also using a task bar tray icon plugin with it which makes it easier for my wife to get to all the shows. It also displays what is currently recording or is scheduled to record without opening the full blown interface. I found the full blown interface to still be a bit buggy in parts which is why I like the little icon better.

My next dilemma came from the fact that I don't use the media center PC as my main workstation. I found that I sometimes would be surfing the web on my laptop, which is in a different level and room of our house, and I would come across a torrent that I wanted to download, but not on my laptop. To solve this problem I am making use of another Azureus plugin, the HTML Web UI plugin. I should note that my house is wired with a network connection in every room, so every system in my home is connected to each other and the internet. With the web ui plugin you can upload torrent links to Azureus through a web page served up by the plugin. This also works great for checking the status of Azureus through a browser on any system in my house. I submitted torrent urls via this interface a few times when I came across torrents while on my laptop. It works, but I'm lazy and thought there were still too many steps to get a torrent download link from a page to Azureus through the web ui.

I noticed that the upload form in the web UI is quite simple, only consisting of two fields that need to be sent to the plugin for it to accept a download request. This is the link itself and an action parameter. What I really wanted was to be able to right click a torrent download link in my browser on my laptop, which is Mozilla Firefox, and have an option to send the link to my Azureus client on my media center PC. After some testing with different Mozilla extensions I finally found the one that works easiest. I installed the ConQuery extension. This extension allows you to submit different data found on the currently viewed web page to another page. It was mainly created for selecting terms on a page and submitting those terms to a search engine like Google. I had a different plan in mind. I am using it to right-click a torrent download link and submit it to my media center PC to begin downloading the file. To do this I created a simple search plugin file that you place into your "\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins" directory. Here is the code for that file. Simply copy and paste the code and save to the previously specified directory in a file called something like Azureus.cqr, making sure to replace the [azureuspc] with the name or IP of your PC that is running Azureus with the HTML web UI plugin installed:


# Status: Working Full
# ConQuery plugin
# by WhoopJack
#
# Language: en
#
# Created: Feb 8, 2006
# Last updated: Feb 8, 2006
#
# Known issues:
# works from 0.8 and higher

<SEARCH
name="Send to Azureus"
description="Send a torrent link to an Azureus server"
action="http://[azureuspc]:6886/index.tmpl"
category="net services"
method="GET"
>

<input name="d" value="u" label="Upload">
<input name="upurl" value="[:linkurl]" label="Torrent URL">

</search>


Now after restarting Firefox you should be able to go to a page that contains a torrent download link and right-click the link and choose "Query to..." --> "Send to Azureus".

Ah, I love being lazy

http://ipbs.blogspot.com/2006/02/how...hows-with.html















Until next week,

- js.


















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