NewsScan Daily, 24 September 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 24 September 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Terrorism Information Awareness Alive and Well in the States
        MSN Muzzles Chat Rooms
        California Bans Spam
        Video Streaming Set to Take Off…
        …If Streaming Patents Don't Clog Up the Works
        Newspapers Play Catch-Up in Online Want Ads

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber Alexander von Humboldt
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age: Code Red for Jet Blue

TERRORISM INFORMATION AWARENESS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE STATES
Remember the "Terrorism Information Awareness" database controversy? That 
project would have allowed the Pentagon to assemble a huge collection of 
information on all U.S. citizens, including driver's license, credit card 
and financial records, etc., but Congress responded to citizens' privacy 
concerns by refusing to fund it. Now a similar project is take shape in 
more than a dozen states, fueled by $12 million in federal funds. Dubbed 
Matrix (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange), the database is 
being compiled and housed in a private company, but will be open to state 
and federal law officials, and perhaps even U.S. intelligence agencies. The 
project ostensibly is aimed at identifying and tracking terrorists, but 
privacy advocates and others say the use of Seisint Inc., a Boca Raton, 
Fl., company founded by a millionaire who police say made his money flying 
planeloads of drugs back in the '80s, puts millions of Americans' personal 
data at risk. "It's federally funded, it's guarded by state police, but 
it's on private property? That's very interesting," says University of 
Florida law professor Christopher Slobogin, an expert in privacy issues. 
"If it's federally funded, the federal government obviously has a huge 
interest in it." Already California and Texas have backed away from the 
project, citing security concerns, and Florida officials acknowledge that 
Matrix appears to skirt the federal laws barring the U.S. government from 
collecting routine information on "innocent citizens." "The CIA doesn't 
have this now," says Phil Ramer, special agent in charge of the Florida 
Department of Law Enforcement's intelligence office. "That's a major 
political issue we'll have to cross." (New York Times 24 Sep 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Terror-Database.html

MSN MUZZLES CHAT ROOMS
Microsoft MSN is closing down Internet chat services in most of its 34 
markets in Europe, Latin America and Asia, and is limiting service in the 
U.S., citing concerns over use of the online forums for pornography scams 
and pedophile and sexual predator activities. "We recognize that it's a 
common industry-wide problem," says an MSN spokeswoman. "We've taken a look 
at our service and how can we make efforts to step up our efforts to 
provide a safe environment." In the U.S., MSN will now require chat room 
users to subscribe to at least one other paid MSN service, so that it will 
have credit card numbers that it can use to track down those who violate 
MSN's terms of use. In Canada, Brazil, New Zealand and Japan, MSN will 
offer some moderated chat rooms and discussions. The move to restrict chat 
use will probably turn out to be a good thing for the company, says one 
Microsoft watcher, by allowing it to shed a number of freeloaders. "I think 
this change will have welcome side effects, like keeping spammers out of 
the chat rooms. But fundamentally I believe this is a move to make MSN more 
profitable. It will allow the company to get rid of some infrastructure 
that was supporting chat, and to make money on what it leaves in place." 
(AP 24 Sep 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030924/D7TON5BG2.html

CALIFORNIA BANS SPAM
California Governor Gray Davis has signed into law a measure that makes it 
illegal to send unsolicited e-mail to California residents, unless the 
recipient has a prior business relationship with the sender. Violators will 
be subject to fines of $1,000 for each message and up to $1 million for 
blitz campaigns. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City), 
will go into effect January 1, and Murray notes it's the first in the U.S. 
to hold an advertiser accountable along with the spammer. "We think it's 
going to be the toughest bill in the nation. The beauty of this is you go 
after the advertisers. They are fineable and attachable," says Murray. 
California lawmakers generally agree that it will be relatively easy to win 
judgments against spam merchants and their advertisers in state courts, but 
actually recovering damages from out-of-state or overseas perpetrators is 
more problematic. "It fails to address the core issue about spam. It 
totally fails to be able to reach the offshore criminals who are sending 
Viagra ads," says Ray Schultz, editorial director of a publication on 
direct marketing. (Los Angeles Times 24 Sep 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-me-privacy24sep24000427,1,4373634.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

VIDEO STREAMING SET TO TAKE OFF…
Video streaming subscription services should take off in the next few 
years, reaching a market value of $4.5 billion in 2007, according to a new 
study by In-Stat/MDR. That figure is more than triple the estimated $991 
million value of the current market. "The world of online content is 
undergoing a three-way metamorphosis, creating opportunities for major 
media companies and large service providers to finally get their fingers 
into the Internet revenue pie," says In-Stat/MDR analyst Gerry Kaufhold. 
Leading the charge for subscription-based video services will be Asia, 
which will generate about $1.2 billion in 2007, followed by substantial 
sales in Europe, according to the study. Still, U.S. consumers are also 
warming to the idea of paying for online content -- a recent report says 
spending for Internet content jumped 23% in the U.S. during the first half 
of 2003 from the previous year. (CNet News.com 24 Sep 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5080987.html

.. IF STREAMING PATENTS DON'T CLOG UP THE WORKS
Acacia Research is asserting its control over a stack of streaming media 
patents it holds, recently using a court injunction to persuade a Web 
hosting provider to unplug the Go Entertainment network of 42 "adult 
entertainment" sites. Go Entertainment got the message and has now signed a 
patent licensing agreement with Acacia. Acacia says it's in license 
negotiations with "all of the major sites that provide audio and video 
streaming on the Internet," says Rob Berman, senior VP and general counsel 
for the company. "All the methods we have looked at for streaming audio and 
video over the Internet are covered by our patents. While certain 
components existed prior to 1991, our inventors were the first guys to put 
all the components together to make the process known as video streaming 
and video on demand." Acacia originally sued 39 sites for patent 
infringement, and has managed to sign agreements with all but 16 of them. 
(CNet News.com 24 Sep 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5081177.html

NEWSPAPERS PLAY CATCH-UP IN ONLINE WANT ADS
Newspapers are investing more time and effort in building their online 
classified advertising sections in a strategy to recoup some of the print 
advertising dollars that have disappeared over the past few years. Today's 
market leader is a pure-play Internet firm, Monster.com, but two major 
newspaper-owned online employment businesses, CareerBuilder and CareerSite, 
are working hard to catch up. "In the first few years of Internet 
employment advertising, most newspaper companies responded weakly or not at 
all," says Peter M. Zollman, founder of Classified Intelligence. "Now 
they're making the financial and business-model commitments to fight back 
and regain market share. However, print employment advertising in 
newspapers will probably never recover to the levels it reached a few years 
ago. Major competitors such as Monster.com and Yahoo's HotJobs, and a 
growing number of broadcast-linked employment classified sites, will 
continue to gain market share from newspapers." For more information on the 
"Classified Intelligence 2003 Employment Annual" report, see 
www.classifiedintelligence.com . (Classified Intelligence press release 16 
Sep 2003)

*****

FLASH CARD
      "To get it right, be born with luck or else make it. Never give up. 
Get the knack of getting people to help you and also pitch in yourself. A 
little money helps, but what really gets it right is to never -- I repeat 
-- never under any conditions face the facts." (Ruth Gordon)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the German naturalist and explorer 
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1850), one of the founders of modern 
geography. His travels, experiments, and knowledge transformed western 
science in the nineteenth century.
      Charles Darwin once described him as "the greatest scientific 
traveler who ever lived." He explored much of Central and South America, 
visiting the coast of Venezuela, the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers, much of 
Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico. Together with his friend, the French 
medical doctor/botanist Aime Bonpland, he collected plant, animal, and 
mineral specimens, and studied electricity (including discovering the 
electric eel, the first animal that produced electricity). They prepared 
extensive maps of northern South America and performed many scientific 
observations, some of which included astronomical phenomena taken by 
climbing mountains to record-setting altitudes.
      Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1769. His father, a major in the 
Prussian army, died when he was nine years old and he and his older brother 
Wilhelm (the future linguist and Prussian Minister of Education) were 
raised by their mother, who provided them with an early education grounded 
in languages and mathematics.
      Once he was old enough, Alexander began to study at the Freiburg 
Academy of Mines. In 1792, at the age of 22, he began a job as a government 
mines inspector in Franconia, Prussia. When he was 27, his mother died, 
leaving him a substantial inheritance. The following year, he left 
government service to pursue his interest in the natural sciences. Soon 
thereafter began his South American travels with Aime Bonpland. Before 
returning to Europe in 1804, the pair visited Washington, D.C. where 
Humboldt met and befriended Thomas Jefferson.
      Upon his return to Europe Humboldt began to lead a busy life that 
brought him fame and public attention described by some as second only to 
that of Napoleon. He preferred to live in Paris where he could associate 
with fellow scientists and other leading intellectuals of the day. He was 
honored by the Berlin Academy of Sciences and was called upon by the 
Prussian court to serve as science minister and adviser, with assignment at 
times to diplomatic missions to the French government.
      He was in demand as a lecturer, and his scientific papers filled 
thirty volumes. At the invitation of the Tsar, he conducted explorations 
leading to the establishment of weather observatory stations across Russia 
to gather data on permafrost and other cold weather phenomena. As Humboldt 
got older, he decided to write everything known about the earth. He called 
his work Kosmos and the first volume was published in 1845, when he was 76 
years old. Succeeding volumes focused on man's effort to describe the 
earth, astronomy, and human interaction with the earth. Humboldt died in 
1859, leaving the fifth and final volume to be published posthumously in 1862.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140445536/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Alexander von Humboldt's "Personal Narrative" -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.)


SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE: CODE RED FOR JET BLUE
              by Chey and Stephen Cobb
      We had several interesting responses to our last column, concerning 
the blue TSA (Transportation Security Administration) tags that are 
appearing on airline baggage. So we stick with the travel theme this week. 
We even use the same color scheme: the story we want to cover concerns the 
airline known as Jet Blue.
      Whether you read this story as it broke on Wired.com, or saw the 
Associated Press piece in your local newspaper, alarm bells had to be going 
off. Here was a U.S. airline giving its passenger records to a Defense 
Department contractor (Torch Concepts) working with the TSA to test the 
feasibility of combining such records with other commercially available 
data (like credit bureau records) to single out passengers for additional 
security screening, all documented in a set of PowerPoint slides titled 
"Homeland Security -- Airline Passenger Risk Assessment," presented at a 
public conference in February of this year and subsequently posted on the 
Internet.
      If alarm bells did not go off, it may be because the media is now an 
irony-free zone. Tom Brokaw mentioned the Jet Blue story on NBC right 
before a "special report" on the insurance company practice of denying 
automobile coverage to people based on their credit records. NBC apparently 
missed the fact that the "Jet Blue project" could mean people getting 
frisked at airports, or even kicked off airplanes, based in part upon those 
same records.
      So let's spell out what happened. At the end of 2001, Torch Concepts 
made initial overtures to airlines asking for passenger data, namely who 
flew what flights. We may take some comfort in the fact that American and 
Delta appear to have said no. In March of 2002 the DoD funded the Torch 
Concepts research and in April the company started meeting with the DoT 
and, via "Congressional Liaison," with TSA. In June of 2002 a DOT-TSA 
meeting addressed the Torch Concepts project and in July told the company 
it would soon receive "the necessary database being used by CAPPS II 
contractors."
      Heavens knows what's in the CAPPS II database, currently the target 
of several lawsuits, but apparently Torch Concepts didn't get that 
database. What it got, in September, sounds like a consolation prize: the 
Jet Blue database. Torch Concepts complained that this was very limited in 
terms of the goals of the research, but went ahead with the project anyway. 
In October, Torch Concepts purchased additional demographic data from 
Acxiom, a company that sells a lot of interesting data, such as your social 
security number. That's right, you are probably among the 700 million 
individuals and companies on whom Acxiom keeps records, somewhere in its 
seven acres of computers.
     What kind of records? For a start there's name, birth date, social 
security number, plus current and former address. There's a good chance 
that Acxiom also knows who you work for, the names of the people who live 
with you, and whether you own or rent.
      What does Acxiom do with this information? It sells it, often in the 
form of data appending and verification services. Suppose I have some of 
the above pieces of information about a list of people, my customers 
perhaps, but I don't have all that information. Acxiom can provide the 
missing data (even if my customers declined to provide it when I asked for 
it). That's appending. Acxiom can also verify that the data I have on my 
customers is correct, by checking it against data on the same people held 
by other companies. In the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act, Acxiom has 
been keen to show that its database can also be used to fight terrorism, 
but the Arkansas-based company suffered an embarrassing setback last month 
when a flaw in its security led to a hacker accessing data being uploaded 
to Acxiom by a customer, something Acxiom only found out about when 
contacted by an Ohio law enforcement agency.
      Anyway, back in 2002, Torch Concepts used Acxiom to increase the 
amount of information it had on the people who flew Jet Blue; then analyzed 
everything to see what could be learned. Here are some of the conclusions 
presented at the conference:
      * Known airline terrorists appear readily distinguishable from the 
normal Jet Blue passenger patterns (that's a relief)
      * The "Passenger Stability Indicators" that distinguish normal Jet 
Blue passengers from past terrorists include social security number, 
length-of-residence, income, and home ownership (terrorists tend not to be 
homeowners with social security numbers?)
      These are hardly stunning revelations; we don't know how may taxpayer 
dollars it cost to reach them, but we are inclined to think it was too 
many. As for Jet Blue, which appears to have violated its own privacy 
policy when it handed over the data, the cost could also be too much. The 
Federal Trade Commission is apt to file suit when companies who do that, as 
in the cases of drug maker Eli Lilly and jeans maker Guess, Inc. Privacy 
advocates and state attorneys general are apt to follow suit, so to speak.
      As we see it, even if amassing and analyzing huge databases is a 
reliable way to spot terrorists, which frankly we doubt, it wouldn't be a 
good idea. Apart from the very serious privacy concerns, as Acxiom 
demonstrated last month, you put the data itself at risk. The day when 
computer security practices are as good as they should be is a long way 
off. We should use that time to address the reasons why people commit acts 
of terror, not hunt for needles in haystacks.
      [Chey Cobb, CISSP, the author of Network Security for Dummies, is an 
independent consultant (www.cheycobb.com) and a former senior technical 
security advisor to the NRO. She can be emailed as chey at patriot dot net. 
Stephen Cobb, CISSP, wrote his first computer security book twelve years 
ago. He can be emailed as scobb at cobb dot com.]

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