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To: bonnuss_in_austin who wrote (2501)	9/17/2001 10:36:40 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51713

I am out for the morning. Good luck this morning.

To: bonnuss_in_austin who wrote (2501)	9/17/2001 10:41:23 AM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51713

Interesting stuff in today's NYT: September 17, 2001 THE SURVEILLANCE Scouring the Internet in Search of the Tracks of Terrorists By JOHN SCHWARTZ The online posting on Aug. 30 sounded like the rantings of a crank: The subject was "911," and it warned "Something is going to happen tomorrow . . . REPENT!" On Sept. 4, the author of the first message, "Xinoehpoel," was back: "Wait 7 days," he wrote. The few people reading the obscure Internet discussion over the prophecies of Nostradamus dismissed it. But seven days after the message, on Sept. 11, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. Xinoehpoel quickly returned to the discussion to gloat that he had predicted the disaster. That was when the F.B.I. and antiterrorism investigators in 10 cities started calling the offices of O1.com, a Sacramento company that sells Internet access to smaller Internet service providers. Xinoehpoel's messages could be traced back to one of the company's clients, said Brad Jenkins, the company's president. When the subpoenas came, Mr. Jenkins said that he acted personally to make the process of handing over information go quickly and smoothly: "With this one, we said, `Don't send 'em through the hoops.' " It is no surprise that investigators will look heavily within the online world, said James X. Dempsey, the deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. "All of us live in that world, including the terrorists." Other providers of Internet services, including giants like America Online and EarthLink (news/quote), confirmed that they, too, had been approached with requests to help conduct online wiretaps as part of the investigations after the attacks. The F.B.I. did not respond to a request for comment. Online service providers have grown accustomed to requests for information as part of criminal investigations and civil lawsuits; an AOL spokesman, Nicholas Graham, said the company dealt with hundreds of requests each year. Some online advocates have suggested that law enforcement has gone further in the current investigation, demanding that companies attach the Carnivore Internet wiretap system to their networks. Carnivore has been controversial, in part, because the technology could be used to monitor a multitude of online interactions for words like "hijack" or "bin Laden." But its intended use is to gather only the source and destination of a criminal suspect's e-mail — the online equivalent of the telephone technologies that let investigators track the numbers a suspect dials and the people who call the suspect. Mr. Dempsey said that the use of the broadest capabilities of Carnivore would be illegal. "I would find it hard to believe" that investigators are crossing the line in such an important investigation, since criminal evidence that has been obtained improperly can be thrown out in court. Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said that even though there was no evidence that the technologies were currently being used in a way that oversteps legal protections, "our test for now is whether we can remain a nation of laws even at this time of national crisis." Mr. Jenkins, the Internet entrepreneur, said that his view of government surveillance had shifted. "Certainly it appears that one of the ways these guys communicate is electronically," he said. "I think everybody would say, `Let 'em watch it'. " As for Xinoehpoel, Mr. Jenkins said he believed that was a false lead — a "goofball" who finally got a prediction right. There is evidence that true terrorists are more circumspect. According to security experts, Osama bin Laden and his followers do not trust the Internet, and pass the most important messages face to face.