UK ATM System Could Have Ruined Economy ; +MSFT crooks

UK ATM System Could Have Ruined Economy


Wasn't so hot in 1987 either
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21, @01:12PM (#13846276)
I had an account with National Westminster in '87 when I lived in the UK. The ATM's would always let you take cash out no matter how much in the red you already were. (It was my roommate that took advantage of it, not me, honest!)
===


What A Mess
(Score:5, Interesting)
by geomon (78680) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @01:07PM (#13846236)
(http://www.cato.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 17, @01:12AM)
The worst part of the story was that the lawyer couldn't tell anyone about the security problem because he was no longer retained by his original client. I believe that in the US attorneys are obliged to come forward with information related to a criminal nature because they are officers of the court. I don't know if that distiction would have helped in this case, but the fact that the whole system perched precariously on the fact that only a few criminals knew how to bilk the system is disturbing.
--
/. - Faithfully reposting the Best of Technocrat.net articles
////////////////////////////

The Register » Security » Identity »

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/21/phantoms_and_rogues/
How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking
By Charles Arthur (feedback at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 21st October 2005 09:52 GMT

This is the story of how the UK banking system could have collapsed in the early 1990s, but for the forbearance of a junior barrister who also happened to be an expert in computer law - and who discovered that at that time the computing department of one of the banks issuing ATM cards had "gone rogue", cracking PINs and taking money from customers' accounts with abandon.

The reason you're hearing it now is that, with Chip and PIN cards finally in widespread use in the UK, the risk of the ATM network being abused as it was has fallen away. And now that junior barrister, Alistair Kelman, wanted to get paid for thousands of pounds of work that he did under legal aid, when he was running a class action on behalf of more than 2,000 people who had suffered "phantom withdrawals" from their bank accounts. What you're about to read comes from the documents he submitted last week to the High Court, pursuing his claim to payment.

"Phantom withdrawals" were a big mystery when the banks and building societies began to join their ATM networks together in the 1980s. Kelman at that time was a barrister (who argues cases in front of a judge, rather than only slogging away in legal chambers) specialising in intellectual property law. He got interested in computing in the 1980s when the National Computing Centre asked him to advise the Midland Bank on its computer system.

What quickly became clear was that the law needed a system to provide proof that events had happened so that legal cases could be made. You might say that "the computer debited the account", but to a barrister (and more importantly, a judge) that's not enough. Did the computer do it at random? In that case it's like a tree branch falling - an accident. Or did a person program it to do so? In which case the person must be able to testify about the precise circumstances when a debit could happen. Sounds daft, but the law rests on proving each step of an argument irrefutably.

In February 1992 Kelman got a call from Sheila MacKenzie, head of the Consumers' Association (which publishes Which? magazine), who said that members were complaining by the dozen about phantom withdrawals, and was he interested? Kelman was, and met MacKenzie, with two of the association's members, Mr and Mrs McConville from Liverpool, who had had a number of phantom withdrawals from their Barclays account. They already had a solicitor, but needed someone with computer expertise in the law to make their case. Kelman at this time was able to charge £1,750 per hour - each hour being broken into six-minute chunks. Oh, and don't forget VAT too. That's £206.62 per six minutes.

He showed his value pretty quickly, pointing out that banks must have a legal mandate to debit someone's account. If they take it away from a customer without a mandate, they must refund it. So the legal point of phantom withdrawals hinged on the question: if a PIN is typed into an ATM with a card that matches an account number, is that a mandate by the customer for the bank to debit their account?

As long as you didn't breach the terms of the contract by leaving your card lying around (which would give implicit authority for use), then you, as the customer, could simply say that the withdrawal was not mandated, and demand your cash back.

How could the banks respond? They'd have to give all the phantom withdrawal money back where they could not show that the customer had typed in the PIN - unless, that is, they claimed that their systems were infallible. Yes, only by going where no computer system had ever gone before could the banks deny that phantom withdrawals were (1) taking place and (2) their responsibility to refund.

You'd think it would be open and shut. You haven't dealt much with banks, have you? Kelman took the case on legal aid and decided to bundle up more than 2,000 peoples' cases into a single class action against all the high street banks taking part in the ATM network. He trawled newsgroups for information on how crackers might decode ATM cards.

He also met two key people in the course of his research. The first, early on, was Andrew Stone, an ex-con who had been done for fraud, who claimed to had taken £750,000 from ATMs by combining techniques such as shoulder-surfing and grabbing receipts from ATMs (which in those days often had the full account number on them). Stone - who was soon back in prison - was proof in himself that criminals could make "phantom" withdrawals.

Professor Ross Anderson (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/), a cryptography and security expert who was an expert consultant to Kelman on the case, explains: "Stone had been working with building access systems using cards with magnetic stripes, and one day he thought he'd see what it could read of his ATM card. Then he tried it with his wife's." Stone figured that the stream of digits was probably an encrypted PIN.

"Then, because you can change the content of the magnetic strip, he wondered what would happen if he changed the number on his card to match his wife's. He found he could get money out using his old PIN." The high street bank Stone used (The Register knows which one) had not used the account number to encrypt the PIN on the card - meaning that any card for that bank could be changed and used to make withdrawals on any other account in it, providing you knew the right details (such as branch sort code and account number. The name of the card holder of course was unimportant, because it was not on the stripe.)

"After that," says Professor Anderson, "it was just a question for Stone of collecting as many account numbers as he could." Until the police caught up with him, at least.

In September 1992 Kelman met a woman he called the "Lotus Lady", because she worked for Lotus at a time when he was considering buying some groupware to organise the rapidly-growing class action; he had already put the names and other details of all the litigants into a relational database to search for patterns in victims and withdrawals. The Lotus Lady was interesting because her ATM card didn't debit her account. It gave her money, but heaven knew where from.

Kelman thought for a moment and realised that there must be thousands of such cards - and after a little more thought, how it had happened.

How could there be thousands of such cards? Because the chances of any two random people meeting in the UK population at that time were 25 million to 1. For one of them to have the only card in existence that debited other peoples' accounts was absurd. He'd been on the case for six months, met - say - 3,000 people through it - and one of them had such a card. The odds only work if thousands of people are walking around with cards like that, or potentially could be. They had the wrong magnetic stripe on the card: the front was embossed with the holder's details, but the account and PIN encrypted on the stripe pointed somewhere else. How wouldn't that be spotted?

Simple: dummy accounts. To do their testing in an environment where the bank systems had to work all the time, the computing teams set up a parallel universe of dummy banks, dummy branches and dummy accounts. But they generated real ATM cards for them, and could take out real money - authorised by the banks. Some people were getting dummy cards.

But equally, Kelman saw, it would be possible for a "rogue" computing department to start tweaking the cards to take money from innocent customers.

By this time the legal process was underway. Kelman had issued (but not served) a writ on the banks in July 1992. Four days later four men appeared in court following the seizure by police of more than 200 forged ATM cards in Sydenham, south London. Even so, the banks refused to deal.

In August 1992 the writ was served. The banks suggested that the class action shouldn't be a class action, but should be 2,000 small claims actions. Divide and conquer, of course.

Things ground on, until in April 1993 the banks - through the Association of Payment Clearing Services, Apacs - changed their rules. Customers would only be liable for the first £50 of any disputed or "phantom" withdrawals; the sum could be waived completely if the customer had a good enough case that they had not given away their PIN. This effectively killed the ATM class action, because the banks had accepted liability - in a roundabout way.

The Writ that Kelman had served on the banks was then wrapped up in a two-day hearing in May 1993, in which the solicitors for the banks were obliged to stand up and admit one by one that their systems were not, after all, infallible.

On 22 June 1993, Judge Hicks gave judgement, mostly in favour of the motion by Kelman, who expected the banks to simply settle.

But a few days later Kelman heard something that worried him deeply. The computing staff at one bank - the Rogue bank - had discovered through the dummy accounts how to fix the PIN generator so that it would only generate three different PINs in all the PINs issued. By creating a number of dummy accounts and getting new PINs issued for them, they could capture the sequence. Then all that was needed was to recode the cards so they would point to different account numbers, try the three PINs (ATMs gave you three chances) and they were away.

This "gave me major concern," says Kelman. "The security of the entire ATM network upon which the UK banking system was based was predicated on nobody knowing your PIN." He could see that if this reached the media, people would begin comparing PINs, and on finding identical ones would tell others, and the security system used by the banks would collapse overnight. Then there would be a dramatic run on the banks (http://www.globalear.com/index.cfm?sector=news&page=read&newsid=260) as everyone tried to take their money to a safer place, such as under the mattress.

And there wasn't time for the banks to fix the problem if anyone went public with it. Their MTBU was too short. MTBU? That’s “Maximum Time to Belly Up”, as coined by the majestic Donn Parker of Stanford Research Institute. He found that businesses that relied on computers for the control of their cash flow fell into catastrophic collapse if those computers were unavailable or unusable for a period of time. How long? By the late 1980s it had fallen from a month to a few days. That’s not a good thing; it meant that a collapse of the computers that any UK clearing bank relied on would destroy it in less than a week.

After dwelling on the problem for 48 hours, Kelman finally decided there was only one way out: use the Bank of England’s "show and tell" session, held secretly every month, where banks had to own up to their vulnerabilities, so that risks to the British economy could be identified. Kelman suggested the creation of an "Office of ATM Security", which would deal with any complaint of phantom withdrawal, and analyse it on a time-and-geography database, and get the customer to give their PIN, which would be encoded on a one-time cipher and compared with previous records. Details of customers with identical PINs would point the police to further lines of inquiry. Anthony Scrivener – lately appointed defence counsel to Saddam Hussein – was strongly behind this.

But before he could do this, Kelman was dismissed from the case by the solicitor representing the McConvilles, who had originally hired him. They wanted to pursue the case to the bitter end, rather than get the settlement Kelman felt was in the offing.

Kelman was stuck. He couldn’t say what he had learned; it would leak. He couldn’t complain to the Law Society or Bar Council; it would leak. He couldn’t tell the banks, because he had no authority now, having been de-instructed. So he drew up his fee note. It was a lot less than he could have earned in the City, he says.

"Fortunately for the UK banking system and the British people, nobody else did discover what I found about the activities of the Rogue Bank," Kelvin notes. Two years later, though, he had corroboration of what he had learnt: "the computing staff at the [Rogue] bank were completely out of control and engaged in multiple frauds."

He reckons that his fees – just shy of £200,000 over 15 months – probably “saved the UK banking system”, and that by using his database suggestion, the UK banks could have saved £200 million over the past 12 years.

And why is he telling this explosive story now? Because chip and PIN has been deployed across the UK ATM network. "The vulnerability in the UK ATM network was still there to be exploited – if someone had chanced upon it."

Only now, with chip and PIN widely deployed, does Kelman feel that the risk of subversion of the PIN system, "as performed by the computing staff of the Rogue Bank" (his capitals) "been eliminated". (Professor Anderson agrees, but says many other loopholes remain.) Kelman thinks that during the 1990s, “the UK banking system was gravely at risk of collapse at all times because of this substantial security flaw."

Apacs said it was unaware of Kelman's case and so had no comment on Kelman's allegations. Link, which operates the UK's largest ATM network, had no comment ahead of this story.

And the price of silence? He could not take silk – that is, become a QC (Queen’s Counsel, the highest level of barrister) – because he felt he could not talk about the risks to the UK banks.

But the real losers, he suggests, are the McConvilles, "an ordinary working-class couple whose money was stolen from them by criminals at [a high street] Bank." They're now dead. But any time that you, or someone you know, has money siphoned from their account by a cloned card you have the McConvilles to thank when it's repaid.

Other links: Phantom withdrawals page (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mkb23/phantom/) (Prof Ross Anderson)
Related stories

£200K card skimming gang caged (12 August 2005)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/12/atm_scam_gang_jailed/
Too many ATMs are exposed to fraudsters, warns Gartner (5 August 2005)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/05/out-law_at_scams/
Banks warned over m-commerce security peril (22 July 2005)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/22/m-banking_security_risks/
The chip and PIN insecurity card (20 December 2004)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/20/pin_security_warning/
Citibank gags crypto researchers (24 February 2003)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/24/citibank_gags_crypto_researchers/
How to get an ATM PIN in 15 guesses (21 February 2003)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/21/how_to_get_an_atm/
French credit card hacker convicted (26 February 2000)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/02/26/french_credit_card_hacker_convicted/

© Copyright 2005
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=========

Honestly...
(Score:5, Funny)
by Dante Shamest (813622) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @03:53PM (#13847760)
"I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life,"

What he means folks, is that he has thrown a chair dishonestly.
==========

Hmmmm. Would people here trust MSN?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey! (33014) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @04:12PM (#13847989)
(http://kamthaka.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 30, @03:18PM)
I've never tried Microsoft's search engine. This article made me pause a bit and ask why.

The reason may not be entirely rational, but I just don't feel like I can trust MSN. It isn't just a blanket mistrust of Microsoft; writing a memo on Word doesnt' make me uneasy. I think the issue is that Microsoft has such an obvious lust to control the economic and technological ground on which information is created, processed, stored and distributed, my subconscious impression is that I couldn't rely on their search results as not having some kind of strategic agenda embedded in it.

Of course, may not be wise not to trust Google either, but they are in the informaiton as information business, not in the business yet of setting themselves as the ground on which all transactions have to occur. The most important asset they have is user trust. In many ways, Google is the closest thing we have to the old newspaper business model: we give you information, and support that service by advertising around the information. Newspapers these days tend to be part of media empires with financial interests that go beyond the old fashioned cussede political biases.
--
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
=========

Too late for them
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Buran (150348) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @04:20PM (#13848061)
(http://www.buran.org/)
I'm sorry ... but MS has burned us all so many times that no matter what they say, I will never trust them again. I also don't like their attitude and the attitude of their staff (one of their reps described a tech support policy I find abominable, I said I'd never do business with their employer, the rep snottily said 'okay, remove all MS software from your computer', I responded that I long since quit using their crap and that I'm a Mac user... never got a reply. How predictable).

They ignore antitrust rules (most recently, Microsoft Pulls Its Head Out [wired.com]), they make software that ignores standards (IE), they assume their customers are thieves and demand all kinds of crap from us to prove we aren't when no other major OS vendor does that, and they are a convicted abusive monopolist and should have been broken up but are still operating.

Sorry, Ballmer. Sorry, Bill. You lost me a long time ago. You had lots of chances, and that time is way past over. You dug your own hole. Rot in it.
--
i am a soviet space shuttle [astronautix.com].

=============

Joel On Software
(Score:5, Informative)
by camt (162536) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @02:02PM (#13846713)
(http://cameron.thorne.name/)
Joel Spolsky has a few things to say about that. I think the following is prerequisite reading for those on your committee.

* How do You Compensate Programmers? [joelonsoftware.com]
* Feedback on Programmer Compensation [joelonsoftware.com]
* Fog Creek Compensation [joelonsoftware.com]
* Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt [joelonsoftware.com]


Take it with whatever size grain of salt you want, but it is interesting food for thought for those in your position.
============

Insecure Code - Vendors or Developers To Blame?

Insecure Code - Vendors or Developers To Blame?


Kettle = black;
(Score:5, Insightful)
by LaughingCoder (914424) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:49AM (#13845534)
"the former White House cybersecurity adviser, argued at a seminar in London that programmers should be held responsible for flaws in code they write."

OK. And to make it fair, let's let lawmakers be responsible for all the unintended consequences their legislation brings about.
--
If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes.
========

Secure code will never happen
(Score:5, Insightful)
by digidave (259925) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:55AM (#13845585)
(http://www.701.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 08, @09:57PM)
I'm sick and tired of hearing talk about holding vendors or developers legally responsible for writing insecure code. It's impossible to write any complex application and not have security problems.

The software industry operates more like the automobile industry: they know their cars will have problems, so they freely fix those problems for the warranty period. Software's warranty period is as long as the vendor or developer say they'll support that software.

The major difference is with closed source software, after the "warrany" period is up you can't usually pay someone to fix the problems. Open source provides a great car analogy, because after, say, Red Hat stops supporting your OS you can still fix it yourself or hire a developer to fix it for you.

This is why nobody would buy a car with the hood welded shut. For the life of me I can't figure out why anybody would buy software with the "hood" welded shut.
--
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.

==========

The real article by Bruce Schnier is in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69247,00. html [wired.com]

Its more interesting than the sound-bite-full ZD-Net summary.

419 Emails From A Cultural Perspective

419 Emails From A Cultural Perspective


Really?
(Score:5, Funny)
by lucabrasi999 (585141) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:09AM (#13845130)
(Last Journal: Friday September 30, @08:31AM)
They say the American guy has a good life.

Walk a mile in my shoes, buddy. You'll find out it ain't all peachs 'n cream.
--================


Re:Really?
(Score:5, Funny)
by cyber0ne (640846) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:15AM (#13845187)
(http://www.cyber0ne.com/)
Walk a mile in my shoes, buddy. You'll find out it ain't all peachs 'n cream.

A friend of mine from another country once said he felt sorry for me because I have Bush as a president. I responded, "Me? Hell, I feel sorry for you. At least I'm not subject to his foreign policy."

==============

Re:Really?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by RobertB-DC (622190) * Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:18AM (#13845229)
(http://www.dixie-chicks.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 11, @12:20PM)
Foo: They say the American guy has a good life.

Bar: Walk a mile in my shoes, buddy. You'll find out it ain't all peachs 'n cream.

Yeah. You've got it bad, here in America (I assume) with "the run-down, teeming streets, the grimy buildings, the broken refrigerators stacked outside, the strings of wet washing. It's the kind of place where plainclothes police prowl the streets extorting bribes, where mobs burn thieves to death for stealing a cellphone, and where some people paint "This House Is Not For Sale" in big letters on their homes, in case someone posing as the owner tries to put it on the market."

Oh, my bad. That's the description (from the FA) of the conditions of the folks who you're asking to "walk in your shoes". There's no way anyone from the US, Canada, or Europe (including myself) could even concieve of what it's like to live in such conditions with no way out.

Wrong is wrong, and the young man profiled in the article has more guts than most to see that and turn his back on it. But to completely ignore the factors behind the bad behavior is counterproductive at best. "Root causes" (of crime, poverty, terrorism, etc) may be overrated, but it's hard to defeat an enemy if you don't know his motivation.

Or maybe Slashdot dropped the [sarcasm] tag from your post...
--
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
=================

Re:Really?
(Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Meoward (665631) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @12:19PM (#13845815)

Have you ever been to West Virginia?

You mean the state with the motto "Thank God for Mississippi" ?
--
"Persecuted"? No, maybe you're just stupid. [landoverbaptist.org]

==============

Re:Really?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Viper Daimao (911947) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:26AM (#13845305)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 13, @09:42AM)
Walk a mile in my shoes, buddy. You'll find out it ain't all peachs 'n cream.

Doubtful. You most likely have a personal computer that you can call your own, or perhaps your family's. You probably eat well, have a closet full of clothes to choose from, get a free education (high school), or pay(have payed for) for a good quality education if you're in college. Chances are that you own your own car, or can use on of your families cars. Given the current US unemployment percentage (5.1%) you most likely have a job. You spend your free time on niche news websites such as slashdot. I could go on, but the point is, you (and I also fit into all of those above claims), that we have a good life compared to most the rest of the world, regardless of where we fit in on the American class system.

Now, that all being said, it is in no way an excuse for these immoral scams. Stealing is wrong no matter what and these people prey on the old and poor who are ticked into this scam. What they do is unexcusable, and their reasoning offered in the article is just that, excuses for behavoir they know is wrong.
--
Crawling my way up from terrible karma
============




Delusions
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Hrodvitnir (101283) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:11AM (#13845155)
"the American guy has a good life. There's this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way."

This is not a new thinking. Many crooks try to justify what they are doing by making it seem that they are not hurting anyone, at least not as much as they are.
--
This is not the sig you're looking for.
===========
by tekn0lust (725750) * Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:12AM (#13845159)
(http://www.tekn0lust.com/)
I would have to agree that the anonymous American is a greedy fool.

Where else do you see people react to being in an accident like they won the lottery? Be it medical, car, workplace. Get hurt and bingo, how can I get paid.

Tough to admit, but deep down everyone has some greed. Greed is a survival trait. Greed doesn't apply only to money, but to status, acceptance, and a miriad other indicators be them material or immaterial.

Most scams rely heavily on the scamee forgoing rational thought to bite the lure. Nothing clouds judgement like a big payday or a supermodel.

American's are in for a rough ride when China becomes the next superpower and greed is a major reason why.

--signed "A greedy American"
=======
ttp://www.419eater.com/ [419eater.com]

An informational website that helps you scam the scammer
============

The video totally rocks
(Score:5, Interesting)
by RobotWisdom (25776) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:14AM (#13845175)
(http://www.robotwisdom.com/)
Quicktime [antville.org]

The lyrics there are helpful because the accent is hard to understand.
-=================


Cultural Relativism
(Score:5, Insightful)
by dslauson (914147) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:23AM (#13845284)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 19, @03:35PM)
You can only lean on cultural relativism so much.

What I mean is, regardless of the culture you were raised in and the social climate of your environment, at some point, wrong is wrong is wrong.

In this category, I would put anything that infringes on the rights of other human beings, including murder, assault, and, yes, simple theft.

Justify it all you want. Yes, the people who fall for it are often greedy and stupid, but that doesn't make the act of the perpitrators any less wrong.
============


Why wouldn't they think it's OK?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Kohath (38547) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:26AM (#13845301)
Aren't these scams just what "social justice" is supposed to be -- stealing from people because INSERT JUSTIFICATION HERE ?

Justifications:

- It's their fair share.
- They did XYZ THING in the past
- Their ancestors did XYZ THING in the distant past
- They have a different skin color than me
- They have a different religion than me
- They can afford it
- Etc.

The justifications aren't really relevant, BTW. They're just flavor. People steal/tax/defraud/embezzle/con because they want the money and because they c
==============

Let's have some perspective
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Safe Sex Goddess (910415) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @11:47AM (#13845494)
(http://www.safesexzone.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 22, @12:14PM)
It's funny how we seem to get most upset when it's people who have almost nothing doing the scamming. Yet when rich folk do scamming, like the Savings & Loan scandal, Enron, Worldcom, and so on, people don't get so upset.

I can't tell you how many times I hear about welfare fraud where someone might net a few hundred dollars a month, but these same people never once mention the corporate people who steal millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Or corporate bosses who steal the pension plans from people who have worked hard all their careers and are left with nothing. Thank god for social security so they won't starve.

So right now we're worried about some Nigerians stealling tens of millions a year when we've got tens of billions in medical fraud going on in this country.

Get some perspective.
--
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co [safesexzone.com]




============


Still working on it? Yup, and a long way to go.
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Ahnteis (746045) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @05:41PM (#13848757)
Let's see -- I can:

1) Buy music from itunes. It will be in a format that only Apple players can play, will have digital restrictions, and will be at lower bitrate then some competitors. It will cost the nearly the same as the full CD if I buy the album ($14 at Walmart vs $10 on itunes).

2) Buy music from other server. It will be in a format that can play on many players, but not on the popular Apple players. It will have digital restrictions. Quality may be greater then the Apple offering (depending on the store.) It will cost the nearly the same as the full CD if I buy the album ($14 at Walmart vs $10 online).

3) Buy music on CD. I get great quality at a slightly higher cost, but I have to buy all the songs on a CD. I also have to travel to the store instead of sitting at home (or work). I do get artwork and physical media, but have no backup unless I make my own. Increasingly, I may be faced with attempts to block me from making a backup or traveling copy.

4) Buy the music from a Russian site. Incredibly low price, selection of different bitrates. Artists probably won't be paid, but the RIAA won't either. Won't be sued by RIAA for illegally downloading. Morally not quite as "right" as other options.

5) Download the music for FREE through kazaa / etc. Quality ranges, but I will likely have to hunt for a real copy of popular songs. I risk being sued by the RIAA. Morally, one of the least "right" choices.

6) Steal the CD from a store. All the benefits of a CD without the cost. Unless you get caught. Still, you will may very well be penalized less if you get caught then if you had downloaded the song from kazaa. Morally a "wrong" choice.

7) Make a copy from a friend. Quality ranges depending on your friends original source, but it's free and may be legal under home taping laws. Morally questionable.

Of course, the RIAA isn't interested in choices. They're only interested in money and that's why this article is interesting. As far as I know it's not even a dupe! +1 intersting for Slashdot!
[ Reply to This ]
Starting Score: 1 point

PHP Succeeding Where Java Has Failed

PHP Succeeding Where Java Has Failed


Re:Help me out here
(Score:5, Informative)
by TheSpoom (715771) * Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @09:20AM (#13844179)
(http://www.uberm00.net/ | Last Journal: Monday January 19, @09:27PM)
You're pretty much correct. PHP is a lot closer to JSP or ASP than Java, and yes, it can violate separation of logic and presentation. However, you can use the Smarty templating library [php.net] to separate code and presentation (and I recommend this to anyone learning PHP, because embedding PHP in HTML makes for very sloppy and nigh unreadable code).
--

"Cogito me cogitare, ergo cogito me esse (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)"
-A.Bierc
================

Rootkit Creators Turn Professional

Rootkit Creators Turn Professional


Misuse of the term
(Score:5, Insightful)
by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @05:26AM (#13843155)
From TFA:

A rootkit is a tool that helps worm authors to slip past malware detection tools. The rootkit is 'wrapped around' the virus, and hides its payload from detection engines. After the rootkit has penetrated a system's defences, the worm can start doing its work.

Wrong. A "rootkit" is a series of hacks to the underlying operating system, which make a running process harder to detect. In other words, a rootkit will keep your process from turning up in the Windows Task Manager, or a Linux "ps".

Definition from the Jargon File [catb.org].
--
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
==============


I risk being tagged elitist, but...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Snowhare (263311) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @09:47AM (#13844387)
(http://www.nihongo.org/snowhare/)

PHP is and will be continue to be popular with the masses simply because, like HTML, the entry barrier is very low. It will fail to make deep inroads at the high end for the same reason: The entry barrier is very low.

Sounds like a contradiction? Not really. The entry barrier for PHP is so low that we are seeing zillions of poorly written, insecure and unscalable PHP apps written by amateur programmers. Resulting in numerous security scares about PHP and contributing more than slightly to the infamous Slashdot Effect where a site that gets a sudden traffic surge craters as it runs out not of datapipe but simple CPU power. This scares the hell out of anyone who considers using PHP in the enterprise.

Don't get me wrong: It is possible to write good, secure, scalable code in PHP. It just isn't very common.
===============

As a Java developer with PHP experience...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by pico303 (187769) Alter Relationship on Friday October 21, @09:58AM (#13844499)
...I can honestly say I avoid PHP at all costs. PHP feels like it was built by committee: there's no consistency in the language. Even with 5 I still feel like I'm hacking together web pages.

I feel like there's a lack of standardized libraries for PHP. I've used PearDB, but it's sure not ActiveRecord or Hibernate. Smarty's o.k., but I'm already developing in a template language for HTML pages, why do I need another one? It's like working with JSP tag libraries (which I find equally wasteful).

Fundamentally, I think the tight coupling between view, controller, and model that PHP naturally engenders is bad. Practically, I've seen where Ruby on Rails has gone in just a single year, and it's further than PHP's gone in the last 5. Things you can do in Rails in a few days take weeks of coding in PHP, even with the help of third-party libraries.

PHP has a strong foothold with small, inexpensive ISPs, which is the only reason I think that people still use it. Unfortunately, the "war" between 4 and 5 has really hurt the credibility of PHP moving forward. Does any ISP support PHP 5?

If PHP wants to compete against Ruby on the low end and J2EE and .NET on the high end, it's going to need new development tools--both for writing the code and useful libraries, stronger leadership, and a clear plan for the future. I don't see any of this happening in its current state. I consider myself to be a PHP outsider these days, and looking in it doesn't look so fun in the pool.

=============

Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches

Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches


Re:Prediction
(Score:5, Informative)
by jalefkowit (101585) Alter Relationship <`jason' `at' `jasonlefkowitz.net'> on Thursday October 20, @10:39PM (#13842007)
(http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net/)

Giving me quick access to something like a blog or Flickr isn't "innovative". A bookmark/favorite does the same thing with less overhead.

I thought the same thing until I actually tried the Flock Developer Preview that was just released. (I'm posting this from it now.)

I was all set to be unimpressed but I have to tell you, it's pretty impressive if you have a blog how easy they have made posting Web content to it. There's a "shelf" tool, for starters, that you use by just highlighting any text on a page and dragging-and-dropping it into the Shelf. Then, when you want to post about that text, you just click the "Blog this" button on the toolbar; this opens a new post (Flock autodetects the settings for your blog, so there's no configuration if you use most popular packages) in a WYSIWYG editor. Drag the text from the shelf into the editor and it pops the text in, encloses it in BLOCKQUOTE tags, and adds the cite="" attribute with the URL from the original page.

Revolutionary? Maybe not. But it's so damn slick! Currently when I blog something I copy it from Firefox into an HTML editor (Movable Type's built in editor sucks), mark it up there, log into the admin screen for my blog, then paste the marked-up text into a new post. Oh, and then I have to go back and find the original URL, copy it, and paste it in the appropriate pages. That's a lot of back and forth that Flock eliminates.

Some people use a tool like MarsEdit [ranchero.com] or wBloggar [wbloggar.com] to combine the "markup" and "posting" steps together in one place. But Flock puts all the features of those products right in my browser -- no switching between programs, no copy/paste gymnastics. There's a market for those products, so it's not a big leap to imagine a market for Flock, either (albeit a small one).

It'll be interesting to see how well Flock holds up to ongoing use over time. But my first impressions are better than I expected them to be. You might want to try it too before you pass judgement...

(Random other observation: Flock changes the default engine for the Firefox search box from Google to Yahoo! A political statement? Is Yahoo! connected to Flock somehow? Veeery interesting...)
--

Jason Lefkowitz
"A statesman... is a dead politician. Lord knows we need more statesmen." Bloom County


=====================


13 new things in flock
(Score:5, Informative)
by bartdecrem (193647) Alter Relationship on Thursday October 20, @11:50PM (#13842293)
for those of you asking what the hype is all about. here's what we've got so far that's different in Flock:

1. replaces old-school bookmarks with one-click social bookmarking to Del.icio.us
2. tagging is there if you want to do two-click bookmarking and tag
3. a new bookmarks manager with an integrated rss reader
4. built in search engine that indexes every page you visit and has a Spotlight-style as-you-type UI
5. keeps a list of the sites you visit most frequently
6. multiple bookmarks toolbar (one for work, one for play etc.)
7. finds feeds, lets you view them
8. caches the feeds so you can read them on the train
9. aggregated RSS view for all of your bookmarks folders
10. integrated blog editor (support wordpress, movable type, blogger)
11. one click 'blog this' feature (it does the blockquotes, citations and all that stuff for you)
12. Flickr integration (drag and drop pix into blogs)
13. shelf: a web scrapbook that helps you organizae stuff you want to blog

and of course it's open source and cross platform.

details at http://www.flock.com/fiveways/togetstarted/13.php [flock.com]

#6 NIST Conceals the Controlled Demolition of the Twin Towers pt2

NIST Conceals the Controlled Demolition of the Twin Towers

Omissions and Distortions

Omissions and Distortions is the subtitle of David Ray Griffin's book critiquing the 9/11 Commission Report. Given the likelihood that NIST's Report will be greeted by the mainstream media with uncritical acceptance similar to that enjoyed by the 9/11 Commission Report, it deserves a critique as thorough as Griffin's. This essay is much less ambitious, and does not attempt to provide a thorough enumeration of the Report's flaws. In this section I just note some of the more serious omissions and distortions apart from the ones mentioned in the preceding sections.
The Privatization of the World Trade Center

After providing a fairly detailed overview of the history of the World Trade Center, the Report mentions that WTC 7 "was completed in 1987 and was operated by Silverstein Properties, Inc." (p 2/56) However, the Report makes no mention of the fact that a private consortium headed by Silverstein Properties acquired a 99-year lease of the main World Center complex on July 24, 2001. Nor does it mention that the new landlord secured an array of insurance policies that included a special provision for loss due to terrorist attacks, and, subsequent to the attack, successfully sued the insurers to obtain twice the value of the policy based on its being "two occurrences" (two airplane crashes).
Chief Palmer's Radio Call

The Report conceals one of the most vivid accounts of heroism in responding to the attack. Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer had reached the 78th floor of the South Tower by 9:48 -- 11 minutes before the explosive collapse began -- and reported via radio "two isolated pockets of fire." In contrast to Palmer's communication, NIST's Report implies that no firefighters were able to reach the crash zones.

However, there was insufficient time and no path to reach any survivors on the impact floors and above. Any attempts to mitigate the fires would have been fruitless due to the lack of water supply and the difficulty in reaching the fire floors within the time interval before the building collapse. (p 45/99)

It would take hours to accumulate sufficient people and equipment to access the impact zones. (p 163/217)

NIST gets the closest to admitting Palmer's account here:

From radio communications and first-person interviews, it appears that there were responders as high as floors in the 50s in WTC 1 and the 78th floor in WTC 2. (p 166/220)

Here's a transcript of a portion of the radio communication with Chief Palmer:

Battalion 7 Chief: Battalion Seven ... Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-40 Code Ones.
...
Ladder 15: Floor 78?

Battalion 7 Chief: Ten-four, numerous civilians, we gonna need two engines up here.
...
Battalion 7 Chief: I'm going to need two of your firefighters Adam, stairway to knock down two fires. We have house line stretched we could use some water on it, knock it down, kay.

Excuses, Excuses
Light wind from the north bathed the northern portion of the North Tower's roof with cool, fresh air.

Of the 1,344 people estimated to have been on or above the 91st floor of the North Tower when the plane hit, not a single person survived, the crash having blocked all three stairwells. But many might have been rescued from the roof, had not the doors been locked and helicopter rescue barred. Two choppers arrived within 5 minutes of the crash, one of which was a Bell 412 equipped with a 250-foot hoist and capable of carrying as many as 10 survivors at a time, and carrying a three-man crew specially trained for rooftop rescues. One of the choppers was piloted by Greg Semendinger, who had helped to rescue 28 people after the 1993 WTC parking garage bombing. Semendinger and other veteran pilots have stated that rescue from the North Tower roof would have been difficult but possible. But on 9/11/01, no rooftop rescues were allowed.

NIST avoids any mention of the 1993 rooftop rescues and the opinions of pilots that rescue was an option.

Some of the people went toward the roof. However, there was no hope because roof evacuation was neither planned nor practical, and the exit doors to the roof were locked. .. Even had the roof been accessible, the helicopters could not have landed due to the severe heat and smoke. (p 26/80)

NIST excuses the locked doors and lack of notification to the occupants:

The 2003 code does not intend roof access to be used for evacuation and has no prohibition on locking this access. (p 26/80)

NIST excuses the amazing prohibition of rooftop rescue by misrepresenting the condition of the roof, (whose accessibility is documented by photographs and the words of the helicopter pilots) and by falsely implying that a helicopter would have had to land on the roof to effect any rescue.

NYPD helicopters reached the scene by 8:52 to assess the possibility of roof rescue. They were unable to land on the roof due to heavy smoke conditions. During the first hour, FDNY did not consider the option of roof rescue. When the aircraft struck WTC 2, it was clear that this was criminal activity, and the decision regarding roof top operations became the responsibility of NYPD. The NYPD First Deputy Commissioner ordered that no roof rescues were to be attempted, and at 9:43 a.m., this directive was passed to all units. (p 164/218)

This implies that an hour instead of 18 minutes passed between the North Tower strike (8:46) and the South Tower strike (9:03). Also, it was clear almost immediately after the first strike that people could not evacuate downward from above the crash zone. Why then did the unnamed First Deputy Commissioner prohibit rooftop rescue? NIST shows no curiosity at this decision, but makes further excuses, suggesting that a few lives weren't worth the effort:

Even if it had been possible for a helicopter to gain access to the roof, only a very small fraction of the large number of people trapped above the impact zone could have been rescued before the Towers collapsed. (p 169/219)

Given the great lengths and expense to which public officials often go to save a single life, it is striking that the Report's authors suggest that there was nothing wrong with the NYPD decision to prohibit attempts to rescue people from the roof. This, like the Report as a whole, is evidence that the authors would defend the authorities no matter what their conduct.

=====================

Conclusion

Assuming the premise of the official explanation, the total collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 were the largest, most unexpected, and least understood failures of engineered steel structures in the history of the world. NIST's Report, like FEMA's 2002 report, presents the appearance of explaining the collapses of the Twin Towers, but in reality it doesn't explain them at all. Flatly asserting that "global collapse" inevitably follows "collapse initiation," the Report implies that the only issue worthy of study is how the jet impacts and fires led to collapse initiation -- an issue to which it devotes well over one hundred pages. Thus, the Report makes two fundamental claims, the first explicit and the second implicit:

* The impact damage and fires caused the tops of the Towers to lean and then begin to fall (collapse initiation).
* Once initiated, the collapses proceded to total collapses.

NIST goes to great lengths to support the first claim, but commits numerous omissions and distortions in the process. It remains quiet about the second claim, which is indefensible. Accepting that claim requires us to believe:

* That the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 are the only examples of total progressive collapse of steel-framed structures in history.
* That those collapses were gravity-driven despite showing all the common physical features of controlled demolitions. In the cases of the Twin Towers, those features included the following:

* Radial symmetry: The Towers came straight down, blowing debris symmetrically in all directions.
* Rapid descent: The Towers came down just slightly slower than the rate of free-fall in a vacuum.
* Demolition waves: The Towers were consumed by synchronized rows of confluent explosions.
* Demolition squibs: The Towers exhibited high-velocity gas ejections well below the descending rubble.
* Pulverization: The Towers' non-metallic components, such as their concrete floors, were pulverized into fine dust.
* Totality: The Towers were destroyed totally, their steel skeletons shredded into short pieces, most less than 30 feet long.

All of these features are seen in conventional controlled demolitions. None have ever been observed in steel-framed buildings collapsing for any reason other than controlled demolition.

What are the chances that a phenomenon other than controlled demolition would exhibit all six features never observed elsewhere except in controlled demolitions?

NIST avoids asking this and other questions by implying that they don't exist. It uses the false assertion that partial collapse will inevitably lead to total collapse (couched in the ill-defined terms of "column instability," "global instability," "collapse initiation," and "global collapse") to imply that nothing about the actual collapses is worth considering.

============
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/reynolds/index.html

Point 3 understates the near free-fall rapidity of Building 7's collapse. Examination of the CBS video shows that, ignoring the penthouse, the building collapsed entirely in under 7 seconds. An brick dropped from the height of the building's roof through a vacuum would have taken 5.9 seconds to reach the ground. Clearly, the structure of this building had been shattered to remove nearly all the resistance to its collapse.

Point 7 is incorrect, because blast furnaces do use hydrocarbon fires to melt steel. However, blast furnaces are fundamentally different from building fires, because blast furnaces pressurize and/or preheat the air and mix it with fuel in the optimal ratio before combustion. Lacking pre-heating and pressurization, it is difficult to achieve flame temperatures much above 800ºC, far below the over-1500ºC melting points of most steel.

More important, the inability of such fires to melt steel is a red herring, because the officially endorsed explanation of the collapses blames the softening, not the melting, of the structural steel. Scientific American falsely accused 911Research of using the no melted steel ... no collapses straw man argument, when in fact 911Research has long debunked both versions of the offical story:

* The column failure theory
* The truss failure theory

Professional Demolition


=========================

As with the WTC towers' demolition, the points Reynolds makes in favor of the no-jetliner theory are all made by other authors, so the contrast between the soundness of his arguments for the two theories may just reflect the contrast between the strengths of the theories themselves -- a contrast which Reynolds may not appreciate.

Reynolds' article, which combines strong theories with erroneous ones, is a microcosm of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Experience has shown that the mainstream media will amplify the least credible and most offensive theories and misrepresent them as gospel of the "conspiracy theorists." Reynolds' concluding paragraph highlights the importance of getting the science right.

If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an "inside job" and a government attack on America would be compelling. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right, "though heaven should fall."

I couldn't agree more.

#6 Plame Leak Exposed Brewster Jennings Asset on Oil, WMD

Daily Kos: Must-Read Update! Plame Leak Exposed Brewster Jennings Asset on Oil, WMD

Must-Read Update! Plame Leak Exposed Brewster Jennings Asset on Oil, WMD
by Sherlock Google
Sun Jul 03, 2005 at 01:08:38 PM PDT

Not often talked about is how the traitor Robert Novak also exposed Plame's CIA Front Operation that she helped run: Brewster-Jennings & Associates (this phony company has nothing to do with the real Brewster Jennings, a founder of Mobil Oil). OVer decades, the CIA had built up the fake firm and through it insinuated agents to keep an eye on not only WMD, but also ARAMCO, Saudi Arabia and their oil production and politics. Hundreds of agents have worked for Brewster Jennings and Associates. Traitor Novak emperiled all of their lives and the lives of their informants.

Now the US is flying blind--just how Cheney wanted it.

Much more on the flip!

Edited to reflect DeTocqueville's post on making clear the difference between Brewster Jennings the person and his identity theft by the CIA to create a prestigious-sounding name plate for the cover operation.

* Sherlock Google's diary :: ::
*===============================================


Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of her cover company, Brewster, Jennings & Associates. With the public exposure of Plame, intelligence agencies all over the world started searching data bases for any references to her (TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate, as the CIA asserted that her mission had been connected to weapons of mass destruction.

However, it was not long before stories from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal tied Brewster, Jennings & Associates to energy, oil and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. Brewster Jennings had been a founder of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's principal founders.

According to additional sources interviewed by Wayne Madsen, Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was outed.

It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted; they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.

By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet unlike all other NOCs who fear exposure and torture or death from hostile governments and individual targets who have been judged threats to the United States, she got done in by her own President, whom we also judge to be a domestic enemy of the United States.

Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame may have been one of the most important NOCs the CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at just how valuable she was.

ARAMCO

According to an April 29, 2002 report in Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO constitutes 12% of the world's total oil production; a figure which has certainly increased as other countries have progressed deeper into irreversible decline.

ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies. Another one of Aramco's partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush. All of ARAMCO's key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields - 25% of all the oil on the planet.

It gets better.

According to a New York Times report on March 8th of this year, ARAMCO is planning to make a 25% investment in a new and badly needed refinery to produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of the refinery will go to the only nation that is quickly becoming America's major world competitor for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.

Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.

The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.

So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former treasurer and the nation's largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of these allegations. He has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar Binladin Group of companies and he is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by a whole lot of countries.

As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the accounts of the royal family and - no doubt - ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11 victim families against the Saudi government and prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges, were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical connections to the Bush family dating back to the 1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to Mahfouz - the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a cash-starved Harken Energy in 1987 with $25 million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a no-bid oil lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump scheme and made a whole lot of money.

Knowing all of this, there's really no good reason why the CIA should be too upset, is there? It was only a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC - well established and consistently producing "take" from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.

From the CIA's point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.

Third clue: Tenet's resignation, which occurred at night, was the first "evening resignation" of a Cabinet-level official since October 1973 when Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned in protest of Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Many regard this as the watershed moment when the Nixon administration was doomed.

Ruppert Article =====================================js

Here's Madsen on Brewster Jennings, so take with a grain of salt, but very informative and seems to be true.

U.S. intelligence sources have also said that Fitzgerald's investigation has gone far beyond the mere leaking of Plame's name, itself a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but has expanded to look into the exposure of Plame's colleagues who worked under the cover of a CIA firm called Brewster, Jennings & Associates. The "brass plate" CIA proprietary had offices in Boston and Washington, DC. Active since 1994, Brewster-Jennings was instrumental in tracking the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had agents or correspondents in a number of countries including Iraq, North Korea, Belarus, Russia, South Africa, Iran, Israel, China, Pakistan, Congo (Kinshasa), India, Taiwan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, and Malaysia. By releasing Valerie Plame’s name, other agents' non-official covers were blown and the lives of U.S. operatives within foreign governments and businesses may have been placed in danger.

Therefore, Fitzgerald's investigation has reportedly been expanded to include the issue of whether members of the staffs of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Cheney and Bush themselves, the National Security Council, and the Departments of Defense and State, may have violated more serious espionage laws.

In July 2003, the covert operations of Plame and her Brewster-Jennings colleagues were rolled up as a result of the White House leak to columnist Robert Novak and other journalists. Observers believe the White House was retaliating for the report by Wilson that the administration was incorrect when it stated that Iraq was shopping for "yellow cake" uranium in Niger. On behalf of the CIA, Wilson visited Niger prior to the Iraq war and determined that the administration's evidence was based on erroneous information and falsified documents.

The special prosecutor has been focusing on Bush, Cheney, presidential counselor Karl Rove, Cheney's chief of staff Lewis I. ("Scooter") Libby, Cheney assistants David Wurmser and John Hannah, and National Security Council officials Elliott Abrams and Stephen Hadley.

Recently, CIA Director George Tenet and Plame's ultimate boss, Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt, suddenly resigned within hours of one another. Intelligence sources have said the two have been cooperating with Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame/Brewster-Jennings leak and the damage to U.S. clandestine operations which globally track the flow of WMDs.

Sensitive CIA operations that were compromised by the leak included companies, government officials, and individuals associated with the nuclear smuggling network of Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. In addition, the identities of U.S. national and foreign agents working within the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, North Korea's nuclear laboratory in Yongbyon, Pakistan's Kahuta uranium enrichment plant, banks and export companies in Dubai, Islamabad, Moscow, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, and Kiev, and Kuala Lumpur, and government agencies in Libya, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Iran were severely compromised. The CIA has reportedly given Fitzgerald highly classified details on the damage done to the CIA's WMD tracking network.

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#6 How Ruling Powers Distort Morality So that it Does Not Restrain Them-= NONE SO BLIND =-

-= NONE SO BLIND =-

How Ruling Powers Distort Morality So that it Does Not Restrain Them

Introduction

This piece ran during the spring of 2005 in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Albuqerque Tribune. It also ran as a radio commentary on KUNM, the NPR station that covers New Mexico.

How Power Distorts Morality
by
Andrew Bard Schmookler

I’ve been taking a look, lately, at what power can do to morality, and it’s not a pretty sight.

In a wise and fortunate society, ruthless and amoral forces are kept out of power—blocked by good constitutional checks backed up by the moral capital to endow its elites with a genuine love of the greater good.

America, regrettably, is not now in that fortunate position. And nowhere is that clearer than in the way our present rulers are working to bend and distort those “Christian” moral values they love to trumpet.

If one knew nothing of the Gospels, but learned of Christian values only from our current ruling forces, one would think that Jesus’ moral concerns focused on sex. But the red letters in my Bible show that he had almost nothing to say about sex. The moral issue that seems to have concerned him most were not such private matters but how the rich and powerful treat the poor and vulnerable. “The least of these, my brethren.”

A truly Christian morality would be a huge obstacle to the abuse of power. That’s why, ever since Christendom first arose, unprincipled power has worked to pervert Christian morals.

Certainly, sexual issues are relevant to a moral life. Sex is a powerful force, with socially disruptive potential. And the circumstance of life’s creation is serious stuff, with the destiny of the new generation at stake.

But sex is just a piece of a much larger moral terrain. And when it comes to the leader of the world’s greatest power, the destiny of the nation –and indeed of all life on earth– depends a whole lot more on how he uses his power than on when he unzips his pants.

And so it is that our present ruling powers seek to divert the attention of people who care deeply about morality away from the uses and abuses of power onto other areas peripheral to the rulers’ own lusts for riches and domination.

They hoist the banner of morality over the question of whether people of the same sex can marry, so no one will notice how they are plundering the treasury to enrich their friends—all part of an unholy marriage of dominant economic powers and those who govern our supposedly democratic polity. They raise a hue and cry over the exposure of Janet Jackson’s right breast so that no one will notice how they’re removing from Mother Earth the protections which previous American leaders have wrapped around her.

And they whip up hysteria over poor Terri Schiavo in the name of a “culture of life”—a laudable value, but one that again they narrow into a concern only about intimate family matters, as if a sense of the sacredness of life had no bearing on how eager one should be to go to war, or on the morality of gutting the Clean Air Act in a way that will hasten the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

By such old tricks has power freed itself of moral constraints—claiming to “restore integrity to the Oval Office” because there’s no intern with a stained blue dress. But meanwhile, power is systematically subverting the common good.

America’s greatest challenge at this moment in its history is to make sure that it is morality that controls power—and not the other way around.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.