Thursday, May 01, 2003

Coded Messages Add to Mystery Of a Failed Spy, by Jerry Markon, Washington Post. Deputies sweeping through the Alexandria jail last fall came across an odd-looking collection of papers held together by two toilet paper tubes and a pen. They appeared to be written in code. When the deputies confronted the prisoner in the cell -- Brian P. Regan, a former Air Force intelligence analyst with the highest security clearance -- he flushed the papers down the toilet. Less than a month later, the jailers discovered more items Regan wasn't supposed to have: a map of a park indicating where items were buried and letters to his wife and family accompanied by a page of coded numbers and letters interspersed with superscripts. Regan wrote those letters -- which also were encrypted -- at the federal courthouse in Alexandria while preparing to go on trial for espionage. In fact, they were written on a computer paid for by the same U.S. attorney's office that was prosecuting him. Some of the FBI's best encryption experts are just now cracking the code on those documents and that computer. "There is probable cause to believe that the documents may contain coded messages, which have not yet been decoded," an alarmed federal judge said last month in issuing an order sealing those documents forever. The documents, the judge said, "may reveal the location of classified national security information, which if they reached the intended recipients may harm" the country. The bizarre series of jailhouse incidents, revealed in newly unsealed court records, is unexplained and adds to the enduring mystery of convicted spy Brian Patrick Regan. . . . At the NRO, which oversees operation and construction of the nation's reconnaissance satellites, Regan's specialty was signals intelligence -- analyzing radio frequencies and other signals emitted from enemy radar or surface-to-air missiles and helping U.S. forces evade them. With the highest security clearance -- top secret plus an additional level of clearance known as Sensitive Compartmented Information -- Regan had access to details about everything from nuclear weapons and early warning systems to chemical and biological weapons facilities. In his letter to Hussein, Regan bragged that he could see documents from every U.S. intelligence agency, which was confirmed by law enforcement sources. After his retirement from the Air Force, Regan was hired by defense contractor TRW Inc. and resumed work for it at the reconnaissance office July 30, 2001. By that time, the FBI had started daily surveillance, according to trial testimony. Regan drew the attention of investigators after the United States learned that an unnamed country had obtained classified U.S. documents and that officials from that country had received encrypted messages telling them to contact a free e-mail account under the name "Steve Jacobs." FBI agents determined that the Jacobs account had been accessed from public libraries in Crofton, Falls Church and Prince George's County. The two Maryland libraries are within five miles of Regan's home; the Falls Church library was on his commuting route. In August 2001, Regan was arrested at Dulles International Airport as he boarded a plane to Switzerland. He was carrying the encrypted coordinates for a Chinese missile site and an Iraqi surface-to-air missile site, along with the phone numbers of Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. 1:34:33 PM    comment []

Air Force wins cyberexercise, by Dan Caterinicchia, Federal Computer Week. In addition to requiring each school to host a "rogue" computer that was controlled by the red forces, this year's exercise differed from the previous two years in many ways. The networks at each academy represented a collection of coalition partners deployed as regional commands, said Army Lt. Col. Daniel Ragsdale, director of the information technology and operations center in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the U.S. Military Academy. These commands are required to provide services to one another and receive direction from a centrally located command forces headquarters, Ragsdale said. Sharing services adds a realistic element to the exercise and introduces the threat of 'insiders.' The focus is on keeping services available while maintaining the integrity of information. These partners are not allowed to have full, unfettered access to all of the systems or services. Other changes to make the exercise more realistic included: leaving the design of the network topology up to the students; making the students select the operating systems that would run on the more than 20 servers available to them; and requiring students to identify software and applications to address 10 major system requirements including local and remotely accessible e-mail, Web service, database services, video conferencing services, and secure communications capability. 1:34:27 PM    comment []

Well, this was just a savvy thing to do: ask residents of Peoria, Illinois, to comment on the President's massive tax cut plan. Guess what? The Bush economy doesn't play in Peoria: The president says a big tax cut for the rich will create jobs for the hard-hit middle class. In this city of faded glory, few believe him. By Patrick Arden, in Salon. 10:33:51 AM    comment []

Leading academics decry fcc methodology for lifting ownership safeguards (press release) Letter and list of signatories (.doc file) 10:33:48 AM    comment []

Stoughton hackers far from geeks, by Lee Sensenbrenner. The grades that they were changing were a lot of D's and F's," said a Stoughton High School freshman, who was eating his lunch at Subway Tuesday. They just got a software program to break in. His older brother is one of the students identified in a potential felony investigation that police expect to continue into next week. For now, his brother and several others have been suspended from school and are awaiting an expulsion hearing, district officials confirmed. There are a lot of students gone, said Jessica Waters, a junior who was eating with a separate group of friends. Four students in my fourth-hour class started their suspension Monday. Stoughton Police Chief Pat O'Connor puts the number of students under investigation at 15 to 20, or possibly more. Students gave varying answers, but in most cases said between 30 and 40 of their peers were involved. (thanks, ISN!) 9:33:39 AM    comment []

Dollar Songs: Bargain or Rip-Off?. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made headlines this week when he unveiled a sleek music download service that charges users 99 cents a song. But some experts say that's just not cheap enough to lure away users from free peer-to-peer file-trading networks. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] 6:47:33 AM    comment []

Marie suggests another technique for messing up online tracking. 6:45:39 AM    comment []

In TIA news, here's Putting Controls On Fed's Automated Intelligence Gathering: Xerox PARC is working with Darpa to create a privacy-protection system as part of the government's controversial Total Information Awareness program. By John Foley, in InformationWeek. 6:42:45 AM    comment []

Dan Chan tells me that the Daypop ''filtering'' effect reported yesterday is, instead, the result of a recent database purge that resulted in Blogger and the rest being counted as ''new'' and consequently inflating their scores. 6:41:24 AM    comment []

Doc sez Happy May Day. I know it's not hip to dig what workers have done for work, but screw that. A post of appreciation: "Labor" Thanks to Steve for the reminder. Hitherto, philosophers have only described the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. -- Karl Marx 6:38:41 AM    comment []

This afternoon (May 1), P2P streaming video of "Work in Progress by Neal Stephenson" from CMU, 4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Neal Stephenson is the author of several books including Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon. His next work, a series of historical novels entitled The Baroque Cycle, will begin publication in October with the first volume, Quicksilver. The talk is part of the SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES, and (for those in Pittsburgh) will be at the University Center McConomy Auditorium (with Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall from 4:15). Stephenson has been praised for having an almost prophetic vision of the future, and as a respected thinker in this area, is one of six visiting fellows at Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge Massachusetts. Stephenson admits that he runs into people who tell him there are companies in Silicon Valley who are basically throwing his novel Snow Crash on the table and saying "this is our business plan." MIT Media Lab Professor Michael Hawley says, "what Arthur C. Clarke was to a previous generation, Neal Stephenson is to ours. Neal is the kind of genius who puts one jarring idea on every page. Stephenson's talk at CFP2000 in Toronto was one of the more insightful I've ever heard, so I reckon this is worth a look-see. 1:32:22 AM    comment []