Computer underground Digest Sun Nov 29, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 57
Computer underground Digest Sun 29 Nov, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 57
ISSN 1004-042X
Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu)
News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu)
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith
Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest
CONTENTS, #10.57 (Sun, 29 Nov, 1998)
File 1--Schools worker arrested in interception of e-mail
File 2--Crypto policy in Finland
File 3--Emoticons (From Netfuture, #77)
File 4--Int'l CyberConference (fwd)
File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. A Dry Run. Nov 14, 1998
File 6--*great* pointer to info re *rampant* U.S. abuses of wiretapping!
File 7--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 1 Dec, 1998)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 14:26:11 -0800
From: Jim Galasyn
Subject: File 1--Schools worker arrested in interception of e-mail
Schools worker arrested in interception of e-mail
November 7, 1998
By Peter Smolowitz
INQUIRER SUBURBAN STAFF
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/98/Nov/07/city/EMAIL07.htm
WEST CHESTER -- A technology coordinator for the West Chester Area
School District was arrested yesterday and accused of intercepting
a top school official's e-mail to discredit her with board
members. Martin Friedman was charged with interception,
disclosure or use of electronic communications, and faces a
maximum punishment of up to seven years in prison and a $15,000
fine.
Friedman surrendered to West Goshen police at about 3:15 p.m. He
was arraigned shortly afterward, released on his own recognizance,
and scheduled to appear in District Court in the Government
Services Center in West Goshen at 10 a.m. Thursday for a
preliminary hearing.
The messages, according to the lawyer who wrote the June report,
covered a range of topics, but "the single unifying theme appears
to be they represent a collection of data which the interceptor
thought would portray Wodarz in an unfavorable light."
Wodarz was hired last year to oversee the implementation of an
extensive new computer system, essentially becoming Friedman's
boss.
"The motive behind Mr. Friedman's act appeared to be a difference
of ideas regarding the future of computer technology within the
school district," said a written statement released by the Chester
County District Attorney's Office. Wodarz and other school
------------------------------
Date: 9 Nov 1998 15:52:00 +0300
From: Jaakkola Joel
Subject: File 2--Crypto policy in Finland
Dear recipient,
The Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland gave
today an international press release which may be of interest to
you. It outlines the national cryptography policy in Finland. As
you have an extensive mailing list of experts in this field, you
might want to consider to share this information with them. I
would be grateful if you did. For further information, please do
not hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely,
Joel Jaakkola
legal adviser
Ministry of Transport and Communications, Finland
t. +358 9 1609151
f. +358 9 1602588
e. joel.jaakkola@lm.vn.fi
****
9.11.1998
Finland Announces a National Cryptography Policy
The Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland published
the national cryptography policy in English on the Internet. The
policy was agreed by the Finnish Government on October 7th, 1998.
The Government was unanimous that nationally there should be no
restrictions on the use of strong encryption for confidentiality
purposes. There should be no mandatory key recovery systems
either, at least not provided for by law. Businesses and private
persons should be encouraged to use voluntary key management
systems. However, they are not obliged to do so by law and there
will be no special privileges or rights offered by public
authorities for that purpose.
With regard to exports and export restrictions, Finland observes
those arrangements to which it is internationally committed.
However, with regard to reform of control lists and procedures
Finland's aims are to examine the restrictions on cryptographic
products so that control lists correspond to technical
development, and to ensure that the necessary restrictions will
not unreasonably impede normal foreign trade of industry and
businesses.
The complete policy can be found on the website
http://www.vn.fi/lm/telecom.htm. The policy guidelines and the
accompanying memorandum were prepared by the Ministry of
Transport and Communications in close consultation with other
ministries and law enforcement authorities. The ministry has also
noted the remarks made by the industry.
Furthermore, a proposal for a new law on privacy in the
telecommunications sector is being studied by the Finnish
Parliament. The law, which is to enter into force in the coming
months, would provide everyone for the right to use any technical
means available to ensure the confidentiality of his or her
telecommunications messages.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 16:14:56 -0400
From: Stephen Talbott
Subject: File 3--Emoticons (From Netfuture, #77)
Source: NETFUTURE - Technology and Human Responsibility
================================================================
Issue #77 Copyright 1998 Bridge Communications October 6, 1998
================================================================
Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)
On the Web: http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Emoticons
---------
Since the early days of the Net, "smiley faces" and their kin --
so-called emoticons, or emotional icons -- have attracted huge
interest. And they still do, if the response to "Can We Sing
through Email?" (NF #76) is any indication. (See Correspondence
below.)
I don't mean to denigrate this interest when I profess my own
long-time difficulty in connecting to the huge mass of commentary
about emoticons and other paralinguistic devices. For example,
when one reader talks about the "revolutionary implications" of
email usages such as this:
don't we wish it were true
I can only wonder what new principle is introduced here. After
all, we always had the option of saying
I feel a bit wistful.
But my high school English teacher's emphatic advice is perhaps
more to the point: a good character sketch doesn't *tell* the
reader what a person is feeling, but rather *shows* the feelings.
That is, the feelings are exhibited at work, coloring the dialog,
action, and imagery. As John Mihelic puts it in his letter:
Does Gore Vidal need smilacons to convey sarcasm? Would the
King James Version have been improved with them? Hemingway?
Orwell? C'mon! Email is a written medium, just like writing
on paper. If something is well-written it will show through.
Not that email conversation has to be high literature. I suppose
my general take on emoticons -- admittedly not the result of a
lot of thought -- is that they readily substitute a reduced,
highly stereotyped vocabulary for the infinite range of
expressive possibilities found in the language as a whole. There
may well be an honored place for such a reduced vocabulary, but
if there is a revolution in communication going on here, I hope
someone will point it out to me.
What really troubles me about many discussions of online
communication is the odd reluctance to grant any differences at
all between modes of expression. Since writing can have its
"imagery" and its "musicality", there must not be any significant
difference between writing on the one hand and a painting or
sonata on the other.
But this just seems obtuse, and prompts me to reiterate the point
of my original article: it is important for us to enter with
great sensitivity into the differing qualities of the various
modes of communication. Otherwise, we cannot know with any
fullness what it is we are saying.
I am not, however, suggesting the existence of absolute barriers
between different types of expression. No expressive medium can
exhibit such barriers. It is the essential nature of meaningful
expressions to shade into each other, to interpenetrate and color
each other in a way that purely logical constructs must not.
You can see this by recognizing the metaphorical potential of all
meaningful language, verbal or otherwise. Metaphor leaps across
barriers, enabling us to grasp what lies beyond the "given"
possibilities of the language. Only a dead, literal language,
stripped of expressive qualities (for example, a computer
language) disallows metaphor. If a medium lends itself to any
expression at all, then there are no intrinsic limits to what one
can express through it.
I always remember in this regard the remarkably significant
communication achieved by some of our Vietnam prisoners of war,
who could engage in nothing more than occasional tapping on the
walls that separated them. And it occurs to me now that, instead
of saying "sonata" above, I could have said "Beethoven's ninth
symphony". Yet Beethoven in his deafness never heard the
symphony. Or did he? How could he have composed it without
hearing it? Was the written notation on the page, for him, the
same as a performance after all?
All one can say, again, is that there are no absolute, inherent
limits upon what we can give or receive through any type of human
expression --even if we are blind and deaf, like Helen Keller.
Yet we shouldn't forget how daunting Helen Keller's struggle was.
Moreover, we *all* face the reality of our own current limits,
and if there are lessons suggested by Beethoven and those
prisoners, we could put them this way:
* It requires a lifetime of incredibly disciplined and
single-minded effort to deepen one's mastery of a particular
field of expression, as Beethoven did.
* There is nothing like being thrown together in a real place,
both incommodious and life-threatening, to encourage the
discipline that leads to deeply felt, profoundly meaningful
expression.
It's a long way, of course, from the prison cell and composer's
study to the routine exchange of emoticon-strewn email. But if,
as a society, we recognized not only the unlimited potential of
the written symbol but also the blood and sweat between us and
the realization of that potential, then I would feel much better
about the prospects for new, electronic forms of communication
whose main advertisement to date has been how "easy" they are.
SLT
Would Hemingway Use Emoticons?
------------------------------
Response to - "Can We Sing through Email?" (NF-76)
From- John Mihelic
Dear Mr. Talbott:
Can we sing through email?!! Am I missing something? Whenever I
hear people noting the lack of verbal inflection or of body
language in email prose, I wonder what happened to good writing.
Writing is writing. Writing that is flat or uninflected or dull
is simply that -- writing that is flat or uninflected or dull.
There's no need to blame personal writing inadequacies on the
computer, any more than you'd blame it on the pencil and the
sheet of paper.
I have noticed a tendency for computer jocks to think they
invented the world, and to mistakenly conclude that because they
never heard of something that it must not exist. It appears
that good writing is one of these things. And those little
smilacons are certainly part of that phenomenon. Does Gore Vidal
need smilacons to convey sarcasm? Would the King James Version
have been improved with them? Hemingway? Orwell? C'mon!
Email is a written medium, just like writing on paper. If
something is well-written it will show through.
John Mihelic, a longtime subscriber.
++++++++++++++++++
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
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------------------------------
From: Aogan Mulcahy
Subject: File 4--Int'l CyberConference (fwd)
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 16:29:32 +0000 (GMT)
--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date--Tue, 17 Nov 1998 11:33:22 +1100
From--John Myrtle
Subject--Int'l CyberConference
"CYBERSPACE 1999: Crime, Criminal Justice and the Internet"
Annual International Conference of the British and Irish Legal
Technology Association (BILETA), York, 29 & 30 March 1999
CALL FOR PAPERS - We invite the submission of abstracts of between 150
and 200 words as soon as possible, but no later than Friday, December
18th 1998. The proceedings of this conference will be published, so
the finished papers should be submitted by March 5th.
CALL FOR STREAM LEADERS - If you would like to organise a stream,
please contact the organisers. N.B. the established streams relating
to Applications, Legal Education, Governance and Regulation will also
run in addition to the special focus upon Crime, Criminal Justice and
the Internet.
SPEAKERS - include Nadine Strossen (President, ACLU) (TBC), Geof Hoon
(Minister in the Lord Chancellor's Department), Lord Mackay (former
Lord Chancellor and President of BILETA) (TBC).
FOCUSED WORKSHOPS - In addition to the plenary speakers, it is planned
that there will be some focused workshops relating to computer crime
policy.
CONFERENCE HOSTS - The conference will be hosted by the Cyberlaw
Research Unit, Department of Law, University of Leeds and held at the
College of Ripon and York, St John, Lord Mayor's Walk, York.
VENUE AND ORGANIZATION - The picturesque conference venue
is situated near the centre of the beautiful, and ancient, City of
York and is only a short walk or taxi ride from York train station.
Parking will also be available at the conference site. Accommodation
is available in college or in one of the many modestly priced hotels
and B&Bs that are situated within the locality. The conference dinner
will be held on the evening of Monday 29th March at St. William's
College, which dates back to the 12th Century and overlooks the York
Minster. It is a short walk from the main conference site.
For further information about this, and previous BILETA conferences,
please see
If you would like to send in an abstract (preferably by email), or be
placed on the conference email list, please contact David Wall,
CYBERSPACE 1999, Department of Law, University of Leeds
Leeds. LS2 9JT
David Wall, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies
TEL: 44 (0)113 233 5023 ; FAX: 44 (0)113 233 5056
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 15:48:08 -0600
From: Richard Thieme
Subject: File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. A Dry Run. Nov 14, 1998
Islands in the Clickstream:
A Dry Run
It depends what email lists you read, what kinds of information
you get.
Doomsayers still fill the Net with cries of alarm over Y2K, but
more missives are arriving that show evidence of nuanced
reflection. There may well be some disruption, they say, but
maybe it's not the end of the world.
When the electricity went down last week, I thought of all the
dire predictions of the imminence of the twilight of the gods.
One minute the lights in my office were bright, the computer
screen luminous with simulated cards. I was winning at solitaire,
too, a necessity before I log off for the night, when - a
crackling of static - the screen flared, the lights died, and the
background noise of the furnace and television downstairs
disappeared.
When warm fronts and cold fronts war in November in the upper
Midwest, it can be exhilarating, just before it gets serious. I
had left a meeting of usability professionals earlier that
evening, the sky low and moving, luminous clouds flowing over the
city. My meeting-mates leaned into the wind as they pushed toward
their parked cars. Garbage cans and traffic cones bounced around
the pavement, signs hung crazily and clanged on their metal poles
like bells. The wind was nearing seventy five miles an hour,
gusting to more, so we had (technically) a hurricane. When I
stopped for red lights going home, the car rocked like a cradle in
the hands of a deranged parent.
But I made it home. That warm well-lighted place, that
lantern-glow in the blowing dark, was an archetypal cave. Coming
inside from the garage, I slammed the door and shut out the threat
of chaos that lives just under the skin of every facsimile of
ordered life.
"That wind is so unsettling," my wife said. We remembered the wind
in Wyoming that never seemed to die. We had no tranquilizer darts
to blow into the heart of the storm. The wind was an emblem of
everything we could not control, joining the images of breakdown,
terrorist attack, and hoards roaming the frozen landscape in
search of food that fuel millennial fever.
I sat in the dark for a moment when the lights went out. My first
thoughts were of data I hadn't saved. The cursor on the screen
vanished into thin air like everything around me. There was
nothing, after all, at which to point. My hand slid from the dead
mouse.
Last summer I wrote a column, "A Silent Retreat," when the lights
went out in a storm. But that was summer. Neighbors gathered
outside in the warm night, and the next day, we ran errands on
foot. Life was time-rich without our usual obligations. This time
it was November, and the only sign of neighbors in the blackness
that stretched as far as we could see were flickering flashlight
beams on drawn curtains.
And this time it went on for several days. A hundred thousand
people in our corner of the state were without heat or light. The
winds continued the next day, and as fast as crews could upright a
pole or raise a downed power line, another fell.
In the morning we realized that our cars were locked in the
garage. My wife took a taxi to work. A pile of printed material
was waiting for just such a break in my seamless wrap-around
world. Stephen Hawking notes that a human being would have to
travel at ninety miles an hour twenty-four hours a day to keep
pace with what's being published, just to stay at the interface.
But it wasn't easy to concentrate.
Instead, I became aware as the day progressed of how unplugged I
felt. The computer was dead, with all my contacts and email. The
television was dead. The car was inaccessible. The temperature
was dropping steadily, and I moved like a cat toward the sunlight
that slid across the sofa through the day. When an early dusk
brought no sign of the restoration of power, we ate bread and
cheese and fruit, then huddled under blankets, a dozen candles
lighting the room. We located a radio with batteries and listened
to love songs, gentled by candlelight flickering in the chilly
dark.
Of course, this was not really a dry run for disaster. It turned
into a lark. We knew they were working sixteen hour shifts. We
figured out how to jimmy the window in the garage and crawl in and
liberate our cars so we could have gone to a friend's house in a
part of town that worked. But still, our sense of disorder was
real. The degree to which we lived in a simulated world, plugged
into interfaces feeding us with images, sounds, and illusions was
revealed by contrast with the silence of the night.
The simple truth is, we drifted into an altered state. We were
more than quiet. The night was more than dark, the candles more
than adequate, because they enabled us to see just enough. The
music on the old portable was beautiful and clear. The warmth of
our bodies under an afghan was more than enough.
That deep quiet joy is accessible always, we have to believe ...
but once the lights were back on and the house too warm, despite
the fact that we lighted candles the next night, the mere
possibility of turning on lights was a barrier between ourselves
and the stillness we had touched.
Community is more than dependence, more than noticing that
different skills keep society alive. Community is the simple truth
we discover when we huddle in the darkness keeping ourselves warm
by the fact of our closeness rather than emblems of connection. It
is beyond electronic symbols, beyond printed images and text,
beyond written words, beyond the capacity of speech to reach.
Those are symbols, and symbols are a menu, while what we had
tasted was a real meal. An affinity for the truth of another, the
fact of pattern in a plausible chaos.
**********************************************************************
Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions
of computer technology. Comments are welcome.
Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this
signature file. If interested in (1) publishing columns
online or in print, (2) giving a free subscription as a gift, or
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To subscribe to Islands in the Clickstream, send email to
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Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer
focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and
organizations.
Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1998. All rights reserved.
ThiemeWorks on the Web: http://www.thiemeworks.com
ThiemeWorks P. O. Box 17737 Milwaukee WI 53217-0737 414.351.2321
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:04:54 -0800
From: Jim Warren
Subject: File 6--Pointer to info re *rampant* U.S. abuses of wiretapping!
[also bcc'ed to various friends and several private lists]
A week or so ago I posted a query to FOI-L (on listserv@listserv.syr.edu)
asking for a pointer to a small article I had read, a few months earlier
(but failed to clip), about rampant abuses of wiretap information by L.A.
law enforcement and prosecutors.
Here is the absolute-best pointer to info and more pointers that I've
reveived -- and furthermore, it's an "establishment," county-government
source.
At 11:45 AM -0800 11/09/98, codehead@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>
>What you want to do is look at the LA Public Defenders page at:
>
>http://pd.co.la.ca.us/index.htm
>
>That includes a list of wiretappees, as well as various legal documents
>filed in the case.
Wow! Click and see *our* future already implemented! See how the
profit motive encourages police to break the law -- unpunished, of course.
Click to be appalled!
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1998 22:51:01 CST
From: CuD Moderators
Subject: File 7--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 1 Dec, 1998)
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End of Computer Underground Digest #10.57
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