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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (62390)	12/19/2002 5:37:25 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

North Korea A Bigger Threat Than Iraq - Former Ambassador 19 Dec 07:23 NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Although the U.S. is focused on the nuclear threat from Iraq, Thomas Graham Jr., a former ambassador and current president of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, believes North Korea is more dangerous. In an interview with CNBC Thursday, Graham, who was a special representative to the president for arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament from 1994 to 1997, said North Korea "is a considerably bigger threat." North Korea is further along in developing nuclear weapons and has a history of selling arms to "unsavory parties," Graham said. As for Iraq, Graham said all indications from the White House show that Iraq may have fallen short again in its weapons declaration. Graham doesn't believe Iraq is a direct threat to the U.S. in the short term, but he does believe the country needs to remove its weapons of mass destruction. Graham said he has the highest confidence in the United Nations weapons inspection team. -Roger Cheng, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5393; roger.cheng@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires 12-19-02 0723ET

To: tekboy who wrote (62390)	12/20/2002 1:53:47 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

911 finally gives the anti-privacy types an opportunity to pry into our internet lives. I am afraid we will not be able to get out of some version of it, and once it starts, they will keep spreading the intrusion. If anybody believes they are going to get a court order for a wiretap every time I have a bridge for you. NYT December 20, 2002 White House to Propose System for Wide Monitoring of Internet By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users. The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks. The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the report is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the new Department of Homeland Security. Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge because the Internet has thousands of independent service providers, from garage operations to giant corporations like American Online, AT&T, Microsoft and Worldcom. The report does not detail specific operational requirements, locations for the centralized system or costs, people who were briefed on the document said. While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of the worldwide network, some officials of Internet companies who have been briefed on the proposal say they worry that such a system could be used to cross the indistinct border between broad monitoring and wiretap. Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service providers are concerned about the privacy implications of this as well as liability," since providing access to live feeds of network activity could be interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order. Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the proposal could move forward. Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level. But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson said, because Internet service providers and security companies and other online companies only have a view of the part of the Internet that is under their control. "We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture," she said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening until it's too late." The government report was first released in draft form in September, and described the monitoring center, but it suggested it would likely be controlled by industry. The current draft sets the stage for the government to have a leadership role. The new proposal is labeled in the report as an "early-warning center" that the board says is required to offer early detection of Internet-based attacks as well as defense against viruses and worms. But Internet service providers argue that its data-monitoring functions could be used to track the activities of individuals using the network. An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals. "Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said. The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet." One former federal Internet security official cautioned against drawing conclusions from the information that is available so far about the Securing Cyberspace report's conclusions. Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National Critical Infrastructure Protection Center and now the director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth, said it was common for proposals to be cast in the worst possible light before anything is actually known about the technology that will be used or the legal framework within which it will function. "You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what, concretely, is being proposed," Mr. Vatis said. A technology that is deployed without the proper legal controls "could be used to violate privacy," he said, and should be considered carefully. But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned, "You end up without technology that could be very useful to combat terrorism, information warfare or some other harmful act."

To: tekboy who wrote (62390)	12/20/2002 5:45:43 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

although it should be noted that this was a book review, not an essay proposing a new Pakistan policy I some ways yes, but it almost seemed like an attempt to turn a book review into a policy proposal. It seemed to me, though I didn't count paragraphs, that less than half the essay actually dealt with the books being reviewed, and that Ganguly's own conclusions and analyses received at least as high a priority as those presented in the books. In the last paragraph, which comes quite close to being a policy recommendation, there is no mention at all of the items being reviewed or their contents. the fact that he can't come up with something all that compelling can be taken as a sign not just of his own incompetence, but of the insolubility of the problems involved... It would be unfortunate if experts felt that they had to come up with a neat or compelling solution. I would much rather see them admit outright that a situation is a terribly messy one in which all policy options pose serious risks and disadvantages, and then try to clarify those risks and disadvantages, than try to skate around issues that they can't sew up into neat little packages. It is hard to read the last paragraph of Ganguly's essay without reaching the conclusion that he would like to see US support used as a lever to promote internal reform in Pakistan. It seems unfortunate to me that he presented that paragraph without any reference to the obvious objection to this course of action.