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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sportsman who wrote (7848)	9/13/2001 10:34:24 PM
From: RWS	Respond to of 23153

Sport, Did we talk rationally to Bin Laden while we were arming and training him in the methods of mass murder, warfare, and assassination, as we have so many other foreign "assets?" Hell, the School for Assassins at Ft. Benning is still in operation. (HR 1810 introduced in May calls for closure.) If Colin Powell is smart he will use this opportunity to isolate Bin Laden from the Pakistanis and the Taliban and force them to hand him over. Then the CIA can do whatever they do with their rogue agents and their networks. The "Coalition" they're trying to build against terrorism could become a vehicle to find peaceful solutions to the problems in the ME. But the US won't make progress with the Arab states until we pull our Israeli troops out of Palestine and Syria. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has got the pro-US elites of the Arab states in a very unstable position, because their people know the US position. And the Arabs dependent on the US have been very vocal in warning us about the escalation of violence. Bush has just let Israel run wild while focussing energy on building the Star Wars boondoggle for the defense industry. Regards, RWS

To: sportsman who wrote (7848)	9/14/2001 5:38:08 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 23153

Anti-terrorist technology seeks funding Published Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News BY MATT MARSHALL We already have technology that may have helped identify the terrorists who hijacked four planes Tuesday. But so far, airport and government authorities haven't expressed much interest in its use -- this week's events may change their minds. Two public companies and a slew of private companies have developed technology that can match pictures of people taken by security-checkpoint cameras with a database of known criminals. But we're a country vigilant in protecting civil liberties -- which means such cameras aren't used in the relatively light searches at airport security checkpoints. ``There are 30 companies offering this technology,'' says Roger McCarthy, an engineer and chairman of Exponent, a failure-analysis company in Menlo Park. ``And they all need money.'' Start-ups are working on other types of technology, too, but they have drawbacks. Fast Angels Ventures in Los Altos just funded MultiDigit, which has a new fingerprint-identification technology. Iris-scanning technology is also being developed. However, both technologies require time-consuming interaction with passengers, and might prove too burdensome. The FBI's mug-shot database is much more convenient to access. Storing a face in the form of a mathematical string is a cinch, McCarthy says, and it can be searched almost in real time by a good PC. FBI officials haven't bitten yet on pitches from facial-recognition companies like Viisage, a public company in Littleton, Mass., according to CEO Thomas Colatosti. Neither the FBI nor the CIA would comment. Critics have resisted introduction of the technology, calling it ``Orwellian.'' At the Super Bowl in Tampa earlier this year, the police tried out a surveillance system based on Viisage software. Cameras scanned every face in the crowd of 75,000 for those that matched its criminal database. The system identified as many as 19 people wanted for crimes, but no arrests were made. When news leaked, the American Civil Liberties Union and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, led complaints that the ``snooperbowl'' had created a ``virtual lineup'' of innocent Americans. Concerns about liberty should be respected. However, cameras using this technology don't save pictures of people they scan -- and they don't count how many beers you have at the bar, or detect who you're having the drink with. They only hold the graphic if a certain threshold of recognition is reached, executives and police say. In defense of efforts to introduce the technology to scan that the area's Oceanfront, Virginia Beach Police Chief A.M. Jacocks Jr. has said, ``When people say it's Big Brother watching you, I like to say it's Big Brother watching out for you.'' Tuesday's events might merit a change of priorities. The facial-recognition software creates a `map' of the face and identifies 80 distinctive points. Like a fingerprint, a face has unique features and distances between eyes, lips and chin. For a match, 14 of those points must align with a database picture. A face-recognition system in London has reduced crime by 34 percent, and Great Britain is expanding its use, says Visionics, another company developing software. Iceland's international airport is using Visionics software, too. However, Visionics says it will still take 90 to 180 days to develop a full-fledged system adequate for a large airport. Visionics Chief Financial Officer Bob Gallagher says the challenge is to develop hardware that can allow multiple cameras to use software running from one source. Silicon Valley's venture capitalists might consider stepping up to the challenge. Presumably, the perpetrators had been through many airports in preparation for the attacks Tuesday. They may be on CIA or FBI lists. Colatosti asks, with frustration: ``How did they get in the country if they're on the watch list? We have the technology to stop them on the point of entry.''