When the first message on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s Internet) was sent by UCLA programmer Charley Kline, on October 29, 1969, the message text was the word “login”; the letters “l” and the “o” were transmitted, then the system crashed.

Forty two years later, the Internet is everywhere and rapidly becoming embedded in every device. Kevin Kelly sees the Net as evolving into a single “planetary computer” with “all the many gadgets we possess” as “windows into its core.” The Internet Society’s slogan is “The Internet is for everyone,” but Vint Cerf (who co-developed the TCP/IP network protocol that connects everything on the Net today) now prefers “The Internet is for everything.”

The world-wide adoption of a decentralized network that connects everything creates continuous technical, social and policy challenges that no one could have foreseen in 1969. Even as we take the Net for granted, the way we do the air that we breathe, decisions are being made by policy-makers, technologists and end-users that shape its future.

The success of the Internet has had a great deal to do with the development of open standards — often by volunteers — in groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Decisions in Working Groups (WG) of the IETF are reached by consensus on the group mailing list so that anyone active on that list can be part of the process.

The need to add capacity is a constant challenge. What balance of public and private funding, regulation or deregulation are appropriate, and which types of infrastructure (centralized vs. decentralized; fiber, cable, wireless) warrant investment are subject to ongoing debate.

The Net has provided a platform for incredible innovation and economic growth. How to reward innovation and creativity while encouraging the widest dissemination of new content and technologies? How to encourage disruptive technologies while mitigating their potentially negative impacts?

Does there have to be a conflict between freedom and privacy on one hand and security on the other? How can users safely share personal information using social media which rely on the sale of their personal data as a business model? What legal and technical protections are necessary for businesses to securely move into the cloud?

Internet users have continuously influenced key technology innovations and policy decisions. But keeping them in the decision-making loop as they increasingly take the Net for granted presents an ongoing challenge.

On June 14, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will address these questions as keynote speakers for the INET Conference in New York City, sponsored by the Internet Society and the Internet Society of New York. [Disclaimer: As President of the Internet Society of New York I will deliver opening remarks.]

There will also be panels featuring industry leaders, members of civil society organizations, open source software advocates and government officials. The conference is open to the public although advance registration is required. It will also be streamed live.

Just as a democracy is never the rule of the people, but rather the people who participate in the process, the Internet has evolved through the efforts of technologists and activists — many who have volunteered their time to develop open standards, open source software and to advocate for an open Internet. It’s your call: What kind of Internet do you want?

The temporary shutdown in Egypt of Internet and other telecommunication services, as well as similar interruptions in other Middle East countries experiencing large-scale protests and rebellions, has galvanized hackers and human rights activists as well as U.S. foreign policy makers. The consequences may be not be what anyone expected.

The technologies for secure, private, fault tolerant communication via the Internet exist but have not yet been widely implemented or bundled together in a single, user-friendly system.

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf was asked in a recent interview whether there was technical solution to a government shutdown of the Net. The Internet “is controllable by the government, [so] it’s possible to turn off the Internet,” he said. The solution, mesh networking, “can be done without benefit of things like routers provided by Internet Service providers.”

Mesh networking makes each device on a network capable of routing data to any other device, with the ability to rapidly change paths in the event of an interruption or blockage.

A current project of Cerf’s, the Interplanetary Internet, designed to overcome the delays and interruptions to communications during space exploration, could also be adapted to handle a partial shutdown of Net communications by an authoritarian government during a political crisis.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and software freedom advocate, first proposed the Freedom Box – a tiny device that could provide private, secure, fault-tolerant Internet access using mesh networking – at an Internet Society of New York event in February 2010. He has since founded the Freedom Box Foundation, has some early prototype software and expects to have a fully working device available for under $100 in twelve months. Another project, diaspora, was inspired by Moglen’s proposal and is developing a more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook. The Freedom Box and diaspora both use a decentralized, peer-to peer model for improved security and to give the user more control.

On February 15, Hillary Clinton’s gave her second annual Net Freedom Speech, which denounced the Egyptian government for its Net shutdown. The State Department now has a number of initiatives and grants for the development of Internet censorship circumvention technologies.

But governments often have different agendas and policies for different situations. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarek was viewed as a “force of moderation” before he became a “dictator” when the geopolitical winds shifted. As Clinton was making her speech, Wired reported that the FBI Pushes for Surveillance Backdoors in Web 2.0 Tools and an antiwar protestor in Clinton’s audience was roughed up when he turned his back to her. Would he have been unscathed if he had tweeted his protest?

Even with the best intentions, high-profile Internet freedom initiatives by nation-states can have unexpected consequences. Evgeny Morozov says of Clinton’s speeches:

Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don’t talk about promoting Internet freedom.

The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far from perfect before Clinton’s initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those countries’ fraught relations with the United States.

Today, foreign governments … are now seeking “information sovereignty” from American companies … Internet search, social networking, and even email are increasingly seen as strategic industries that need to be protected from foreign control.

The U.S military has developed open source software for secure, private communication on the Internet, however. The Tor project, which develops Tor, a tool for private, encrypted communication on the Internet, is used by many dissidents in authoritarian countries, as well as by Wikileaks, and was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

But not every such project has been as successful. The Haystack program, designed to help Iranian dissidents, actually endangered them because it was easily intercepted by the Iranian authorities due to flaws in its design. It received a huge amount of hype but the developer, Austin Heap, refused to allow security experts to examine it. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury Department granted Heap an Office of Foreign Assets Control license to export the software to Iran, in effect endorsing it. By the time it the software bugs became publicly known, the damage had been done.

Open source software advocate and cyberliberties activist Eric Raymond was also helping Iranian dissidents connect to the outside world at that time. He reflects:

… to protect your network, and yourself, you have to accept that you are going to have relatively little information about what your network partners are doing and what their capabilities are …. my rationally-chosen ignorance left me unable to form judgments about whether people in my network were lying to me. More subtly … it left me unable to form judgments about whether they were lying to themselves.

I don’t mean to excuse whatever lies Austin Heap may have told, but I do mean to suggest he may well have been his own first victim.

Open source software, where the inner workings of a program are available for public scrutiny, is essential when developing tools for secure communication in a highly insecure environment.

But open source is not a panacea. Take the case of OpenBSD, an open source operating system bundled with thousands of applications, which has been optimized for security by a team of the world’s best security experts. OpenBSD is sponsored by a nonprofit foundation and many of the programmers volunteer their time.

At one point the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) gave OpenBSD a grant, then rescinded it when OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt made remarks critical of the Iraq war.

In December 2010, de Raadt received an email alleging the FBI had paid some OpenBSD ex-developers to insert backdoors into the software. He was skeptical but immediately made the email public and invited an independent review of the relevant program code. A few bugs were fixed but no evidence of a backdoor was found. So even though the allegations turned out to be false, they succeeded anyway – as an act of psychological warfare – by destroying trust in the OpenBSD project.

George Orwell said:

… ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance…. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

At first it would seem that a social networking service like twitter, recently used by many protesters in the Middle East, would fit Orwell’s definition of a “simple weapon” that “gives claws to the weak”. But in fact the situation is much more ambiguous. Twitter is a for-profit corporation which must maintain large data centers and a complex infrastructure. And they are subject to many financial, legal and political pressures.

Internet freedom initiatives must be independent of political connotations, run on a decentralized infrastructure, and use technology that is subject to public review by security experts. Most importantly, users must have complete trust in the skills and integrity of the people providing those tools and services.

If they don’t the cure could prove worse than the disease.

Note: Wikipedia has a good list of other anti-censorship software.

Protesters fed up with political repression, corruption and poverty (particularly recent food price inflation) toppled the government of Tunisia. They threaten to do the same in other countries throughout the Mideast as pundits hail the “Twitter and Facebook revolution.” But repressive governments have as much compunction about shutting down communication services as they do about torturing dissidents.

Egypt has cut all Internet access and most mobile phone service as huge protests threaten to topple that government. For a while the ISP Noor remained online — largely because it connects the country’s Stock Exchange and many offices of foreign companies to the outside world. Noor has now been cut off as well.

Interestingly, Egypt and Tunisia have some of the largest percentages of the population online in Africa. Egypt’s Communications Minister, Tarek Kamel, was secretary and co-founder of the global Internet Society’s Egyptian Chapter (which is no longer active). He is still listed as a member of the Board of Trustees on the Internet Society’s website. The Internet Society has strongly denounced the Internet shutdown.

Kamel is widely recognized as the person who brought the Internet to Egypt. He has publicly supported the open development of the Internet. His bio on the Internet Society’s website states that in the early years of the development of the Internet in Egypt, “Kamel’s work extended into liberalization issues such as a tax reduction for ISPs as well as a government/private sector partnership to serve the Egyptian Internet community. He has actively participated in the establishment of community centers in remote areas to bring the Internet to the have-nots.” His role in the shutdown is unknown, although he wasn’t among the cabinet members removed in the shakeup of the Egyptian government in the wake of the protests.

Cutting off most communication with the outside world for an extended period would be economic suicide for any modern, developed country, but temporary interruption — long enough to kill or imprison a large number of protesters without too much visibility for squeamish foreign allies — is viable for a poor country ruled by an elite supported by gifts of military technology from wealthier countries.

The protesters’ vulnerability is relying on highly centralized communication networks and services while fighting an overly centralized political system. The younger ones probably don’t have any memory of being without mobile phones and the Internet and may have taken them for granted.

To succeed in the face of violent repression and the shutdown of Internet and phone service, they must quickly develop low-tech strategies that are as fast and flexible as the ones that have been lost.

Another approach is to build communication services that cannot be intercepted or shut down. Human rights activists and hackers are already starting to do it with combination of low-cost commodity hardware and free open source software:

• Landlines still work in Egypt and a French ISP FDN offers free dialup Internet to Egyptians. Instructions to connect to foreign ISPs via dialup with a mobile phone are also being circulated for those who can use them.
• For Egyptians who are still able to use their mobile phones, there is Sukey, “a security-conscious news, communications and logistics support service principally for use by demonstrators during demonstrations.”
• Tech entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar put a call out on Twitter for volunteers to help construct self-configuring unblockable mobile ad hoc networks to prevent government caused blackouts during future protests worldwide.
• We Rebuild, a Europe-based group working for free speech and an open Internet is developing non-Internet modes of communication, including amateur, shortwave and pirate radio as well as a fax gateway, to assist protesters and humanitarian relief efforts. Information on these efforts can be found on their Telecomix news site.
• Remaining Internet activity is certainly being monitored. The Tor network of anonymous, encrypted proxies has seen a huge increase in Egyptian traffic.

Efforts like these could be the tipping point for the uprisings. In 1989 Czech student protesters received a gift of then state of the art 2400 baud modems from a mysterious man who may have been from the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. Modems were illegal but the most Czech police didn’t even know what they were. The students set up BBS systems to coordinate actions throughout the country and successfully overthrew the Soviet communist backed dictatorship.

If you think the problems people in Egypt have could never happen here, you might want to think again. In the U.S. the “Internet kill switch” bill in Congress would allow interruption of Internet services in a “national cyberemergency.” Senator Joe Lieberman, who introduced the bill in the Senate, has described the Internet as a “dangerous place” and promised the bill would protect against “cyber terrorists.”

Some of our current political leaders, hanging on every word of their consultants and pollsters, and terrified of harsh criticism, might consider hostile online commentary more of an “emergency” than something trivial like say, a collision with an asteroid.

General Douglas MacArthur said, “No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.” Today that vigilance means learning to build and modify the technology that we use rather than being passive consumers of it.

If only I were Edith Piaf. But alas, I can’t say je ne regrette rien. Once upon a wasted time (circa late 1970′s and early 80′s) I hung on New York City’s downtown art/music scene. The scene never fit me, I tried to fit it. Which was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. My only excuse is that I was caught in a spiritual downdraft. Couldn’t see how deeply the Punk New Wave No Wave Ironic Transgressive thing wasn’t me. Its gods weren’t mine. The Velvet Underground gave good vinyl but their legend was tiresome. William Burroughs seemed shallow. Neo-Expressionism? A few pieces were sharp (albeit over-priced) but a lot looked like puke splattered on a sidewalk outside the Mudd Club.

Oh. Yeah. Those fabulous avant-garde nite spots…

Color me ashamed for ever taking pride in being approved by a doorman.

By ’83, I was outta there. Living in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan. In those days Hoboken felt far from NYC. An escape from hip happening hell. David Solomonoff (my future husband) and I lived in a five floor walk-up in the tallest building on our block. No telephone. Couldn’t afford it. Up there in the clouds, where no phone ever rang, we began doing Mail Art and making music cassettes as Solomonoff & Von Hoffmannstahl. The post office became our scene and we loved it. No cliques, clacks or clutter, just real deal underground art. Via snail mail we connected with artists and musicians all over the world.

Our first connect came via Jim Sauter of Borbetomagus. (Aka the “pioneers of aggressive improvised noise music.”) Jim gave us contact info for Japanese Mail Artist and musician Masami Akita. The work received from Akita was a revelation. His dense rich collages were non splatter and his music as Merzbow was full-tilt lush noise. Apres Akita, the deluge. Our correspondents eventually numbered in the hundreds. Some were creative trifectas (art, music, words) others specialized. We developed collaborative relationships (as opposed to just trading work) with many, both for Mail Art and cassette projects. We contributed numerous pieces to cassette compilations and also supplied material for other musicians to cut up and rework.

In no particular order, our cassette culture collaborators* included: Joel Haertling (Architect’s Office), Zan Hoffman (Zanstones, Zanoisect, Zidsick, etc.), Al Margolis (Sound of Pig; If Bwana), GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters), Seiei Jack Nakahara (Joke Project), Rafael Flores (Comando Bruno), Mike Honeycutt (Mystery Hearsay), M. Nomized (Fraction Studio), Hal McGee (Homemade Alien Music), Shinichi Igari (Uterus of Plant), Alain Neffe (Insane Music Productions), Rudi Tuscher (Nisus Anal Furgler), Wally Shoup, Kowa Kato, Bart Plantenga, Ken Clinger, Denier Du Culte, Calypso Now, Soft Joke Productions, Magthea, Absolute Body Control, DDAA (Déficit Des Années Antérieures), Intrendent Fansette, Bog-Art, Reportage, and So On & So Forth. The last a place holder for anyone I’ve inadvertently omitted.

Over roughly four years, we produced five cassette “albums”: In The Mood, Swim Or Die, Great In Bed, God Is Love, and finally, The Element That Defies Description. Great In Bed was a compilation which included work by some of the people listed above. It came packaged in a black nylon stocking. (We’d bought boxes of them at a Hoboken odd lots store.) In The Element we took tracks supplied by others and reworked the material into an overarching musical structure and metaphysical theme.

The Solomonoff & Von Hoffmannstahl sound was shaped by having little money. Dirty Harry/Clint Eastwood once said “A man’s got to know his limitations.” The same goes for broke musicians. Our equipment was limited and we knew those limitations intimately. We worked them. Our apartment was our studio. Its ancient inadequate wiring meant lots of line hum. The hum would sing in shrill choruses when channeled through the frequency analyzer (aka ring modulator), a groovy 70′s effect manufactured by Electro-Harmonix. David had a made-in-Korea electric guitar and a Polytone Mini-Brute amp. Which was indeed brutish. When its spring-reverb was sproinging and its distortion was cranked the Mini-Brute turned into Godzilla doing Tokyo. We also had a vintage tube hifi amp which we played through the kind of wooden PA speakers that once hung in schoolrooms.

Our biggest (in terms of size and lineage) instrument was a 1960′s Vox Continental organ. The keyboard that carried The Doors. When momentarily flush from a freelance writing job, I’d bought the Vox for 200 bucks from The Major Thinkers, an Irish punk group. They claimed it previously belonged to Hall & Oates. The Vox was a workhorse. It had a few iffy drawbars but the randomness was a good thing; it seemed as if the Vox were actively improvising. Vox and Mini-Brute were bosom buddies.

Our other keyboards were miniature Casios. An MT-40 and VL-5. Among the earlier Casios on the market, their cheesy rhythm sections had options that allowed jump-cut transitions twixt say, samba and disco. When jacked with the line-humming frequency analyzer and/or our Doctor Q envelope filter (also made by Electro-Harmonix) samba and disco shattered into infinity. When the Casios’ batteries got weak, the shattering became even more extreme.

We also snagged rhythm from records. Most typically, ones from the 1950′s that demonstrated the exciting new audio technology of Stereo. Think demented bongos bouncing back and forth, forth and back, while Dad mixes martinis (clink clink) in the rec room. We also pulled snippets of exotic instrumentation from easy listening albums. We found countless treasures of Incredibly Strange Music and Exotica in Hoboken’s many junk shops. Prices ranged from 10 cents to a dollar. An LP had to be really special to warrant a dollar. Something like: Mario Lanza Gargles Gershwin — in Stereo.

We listened intently to the records we mined. Culling snippets of rhythm, minuscule musical phrases, and single syllables. Everything we sampled was sampled without a sampler. David was fast on the draw with our Pioneer turntable. He’d hover over a spinning platter, tone arm in hand — his other hand poised to punch the ree-cord button on our cheapie cassette deck. We had three cheapie decks. Plus a stereo amp with cheapie speakers, a good set of headphones, and a Radio Shack four channel mixer. Four tracks in, two tracks out. Layer up and do it all over again. Toss in a few guitar effect pedals (which we also used on samples and keyboards), a Roland analog micro synth/sequencer, a microphone, and me on vocals. That was our sound. Tech wise. As for the creative process –

When creating a piece we carefully assembled and structured the materials, then combined them through improvisation. We’d have a clear idea of what mood we wanted to create, how it should sound, and how the piece should generally progress. But the road was open to inspiration. Instrumentals by David and myself, together and solo, were improvised but sometimes sampled, cut-up, and recast. My vocals were fairly straight (no, no Yoko) inclining more to cocktail lounge and big band than rock. Sometimes a bit gospel. The sound of Solomonoff & Von Hoffmannstahl (in Stereo) was/is described by others with words such as Industrial, Electronic, Experimental, Sound-Collage, Noise, Art-Rock. I’ve never known how to describe it. Guess I’d just say it is what it is.

One thing I do know — we had a whole lot of fun doing it. Though being so broke was no fun. That big old railroad apartment was only heated at one end, by the kind of gas heater that even then was archaic. Up on the top floor we froze in the winter and baked in the summer. We didn’t have a stove for a year and juggled pots on a hot plate. And like I said, no phone. But hey, we always managed to scrape together enough for postage and blank cassettes. And when the no-cash blues got tough we got going. Cranking the Mini-Brute to the max and ring-modulating our cares into the international ether.

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

“I hear you singing in the wire, I can hear you through the whine…”

Wichita Lineman, Jimmy Webb, 1968

*So as to not clog this paragraph with links, I’m supplying contacts and/or background material re our cassette collaborators below. Haven’t been in touch with some of them for years. Apologies if I’ve missed more apropos links:

• Joel Haertling/Architect’s Office
• Zan Hoffman/Zanstones, Zanoisect, Zidsick, etc.
• Al Margolis/Sound of Pig; If, Bwana
• GX Jupitter-Larsen/The Haters
• Seiei Jack Nakahara/Joke Project
• Rafael Flores/Comando Bruno
• Mike Honeycutt/Mystery Hearsay
• M.Nomized/Fraction Studio, Fraction Studio blog
• Hal McGee/Homemade Alien Music
• Shinichi Igari/Uterus of Plant
• Insane Music Productions/Alain Neffe
• Rudi Tuscher/Nisus Anal Furgler
• Wally Shoup
• Kowa Kato
• Bart Plantenga
• Ken Clinger
• Denier Du Culte
• Calypso Now
• Soft Joke Productions
• Magthea
• Absolute Body Control
• DDAA (Déficit Des Années Antérieures)
• Bog-Art
• Reportage — No info found. Too bad, ’cause their Iron Curtain sound was delightfully relentless.

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998 at the behest of the music and movie industries, has done little to benefit anyone except a select group of companies who have used its provisions to establish, maintain and expand a virtual stranglehold on the entertainment industry. The cartel which has arisen after this act does not benefit consumers at all; rather, it gouges them for as much money as they can possibly suck out, corrupts modern technology, and sets back the state of the art.

The remainder of this message is encrypted using an algorithm which provides virtually no security, but which (if I were so inclined) would open you up to lawsuits if you decrypted it without my permission.

Va 2001, gur pnegry vagebqhprq UQPC, be Uvtu-onaqjvqgu Qvtvgny Pbagrag Cebgrpgvba, n frphevgl zrnfher vagraqrq gb cebgrpg qvtvgny pbagrag nf vg’f genafzvggrq orgjrra UQ-pncnoyr qvtvgny qrivprf, fhpu nf arjre UQGI naq UQ-QIQ be Oyh-Enl cynlref. Gur ceboyrz vf gung vg vfa’g irel frpher ng nyy, naq va snpg vf snveyl rnfl gb oernx. Va snpg, vg jnfa’g vagraqrq nf erny frphevgl va gur svefg cynpr; vg jnf qrfvtarq gb nyybj gur zhfvp naq zbivr vaqhfgevrf gb svyr zber ynjfhvgf.

Rq Srygra bs Serrqbz gb Gvaxre unf na rkpryyrag sbhe-cneg frevrf cbfgrq guvf jrrx nobhg UQPC. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Gur synjf va UQPC frphevgl jrer npghnyyl qrfvtarq va gb gur flfgrz sebz gur fgneg. Gung’f evtug, Ubyyljbbq jnagrq gur flfgrz gb or vafrpher. Gurl jrer arire vagrerfgrq va cebivqvat erny cebgrpgvba sbe qvtvgny pbagrag, ohg vafgrnq gb cebgrpg gurve pnegry.

Haqre gur flfgrz nf qrfvtarq, nalobql jub jnagf gb ohvyq n gryrivfvba frg, QIQ cynlre, be nalguvat ryfr gung qbrf cerggl zhpu nalguvat jvgu qvtvgny ivqrb unf gb trg n yvprafr sbe UQPC. Vs gurl ohvyq na hayvprafrq qrivpr, gurl pna or fhrq haqre gur QZPN.

Gur boivbhf vzcyvpngvba bs guvf vf gung pbafhzre pubvpr vf yvzvgrq. Grpuabybtl juvpu jbhyq bgurejvfr rkvfg vf arire qrirybcrq orpnhfr bs gur yvprafvat erdhverq. Srjre cebqhpgf pbzr gb znexrg, naq gubfr gung qb pbzr gb znexrg ner zber rkcrafvir. UQPC nqqf nf zhpu nf $100 gb gur pbfg bs rnpu UQGI frg, sbe vafgnapr. Yrff vaabingvba gnxrf cynpr. Rira Zvpebfbsg zhfg obj, xvff gur evat, naq cnl hc, vs gurl jnag gb pbagvahr gb vapyhqr QIQ cynlonpx pncnovyvgl va Jvaqbjf.

Va gur zrnagvzr, UQPC vf rkcrpgrq gb or oebxra jvguva gur arkg lrne be gjb. Nyy gung’f arrqrq ner 40 qrivprf jvgu UQPC ohvyg va gb gurz naq n yvggyr ovg bs gvzr. Bapr gung unccraf, rirel UQPC rdhvccrq qrivpr vf creznaragyl pbzcebzvfrq. Fbzr frphevgl.

Ivn Ryrpgebavp Sebagvre Sbhaqngvba.

P.S. If you’re successful in decrypting the message, post the plaintext below.

I want to take a moment to give a warm welcome to our newest readers, the Open Source Center of the Central Intelligence Agency. Welcome to Homeland Stupidity!

Actually, they aren’t the newest readers; they’ve been around reading here for several months now. But now I can finally tell you who they are, what they do and why they’re reading this site.

The OSC is responsible for gathering intelligence from the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and other unclassified sources of information worldwide. Its analyses are disseminated to intelligence customers ranging all the way from the President to local police departments.

Among other sources, the OSC is aggressively reading and monitoring weblogs. So now, the things you and I say online could ultimately wind up in the Oval Office and influence Presidential decision making.

Well, ideally. In practice, the White House is almost never going to read your individual posts for themselves (though it could happen; it’s happened here before). What generally happens in practice is an intelligence analyst at the OSC will read several sources of information on a given topic, write a report, and that report will be shared with the appropriate government agencies. It may even be shared with the White House in the President’s daily intelligence briefing.

Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center’s creation in November.

“We’re certainly scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer,” said Mr. Jardines, who became the first high-level official in charge of the government’s nonsecret intelligence in December.

“I can’t get into detail of what, but I’ll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president’s daily brief has gone up rather significantly,” Mr. Jardines said. “There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we’ve been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community.”

[OSC Director Douglas J.] Naquin said recent OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come from open sources, he said.

“Have we got coups out of it? Close to it,” Mr. Naquin said. “But certainly we’ve had more insight than we’ve ever had before.” — Washington Times

Unfortunately, I’m fresh out of insights today, but hopefully I’ll get some in tomorrow’s shipment.

Thanks to Matt Parker for the news tip.

These updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity focus exclusively on election and voting issues, a major issue with the 2004 elections still in doubt and the 2006 elections fast approaching.

• The Federal Election Commission really didn’t want to regulate political campaign speech on the Internet, but the courts forced them to. So they did as little as possible, regulating only paid advertisements on Web sites. This will likely kill the Online Freedom of Speech Act.
• If you’re in Washington this Thursday or Friday, consider lobbying Congress to pass H.R. 550, which would require voter-verified paper records among other voting reforms. The lobbying, sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, follows a similar effort last summer.
• Burlington, Vermont, has figured out how to run free election software on old Diebold equipment. While the software is only free as in beer right now, the company plans to fully open source it and make a Linux version.
• And finally, Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, who was proud to have delivered the 2004 election to Bush and mandated that the state use Diebold equipment in 2006, actually owns Diebold stock. Way back when, I was among the first to break the story of his gubernatorial bid.

Government bureaucrats are the same everywhere. That is, they’re stupid. And today’s stupid bureaucrat is Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma.

Last Wednesday afternoon, Taylor noticed that the city’s web site was not accessible anymore. Instead of the web site, it was displaying the CentOS Test Page, the page shown after the CentOS Linux operating system is installed, but before a web site has been set up.

But instead of contacting the city’s Web hosting company, Taylor contacted CentOS directly.

CentOS is an all-volunteer effort to create, distribute and maintain an enterprise-grade distribution of Linux. Its product bears a very close resemblance to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but does not include technical support or the hefty price tag.

So Taylor’s first message was something of a surprise: “Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it??? Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.”

CentOS developer Johnny Hughes jumped in and tried to help Taylor sort out the problem, but as can be seen from the email exchange, Taylor was hostile and uncooperative. He even threatened to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Fat lot of good that would have done.

A full day later, Taylor finally gave up the Web site address having the problem, and Hughes was able to locate the hosting provider who had caused the problem. It turns out that they had reinstalled the operating system after a hardware failure.

But, and this is where it gets really stupid, Taylor wasn’t at all grateful that anyone at CentOS had helped him track down the problem. Instead, he blamed them for the problem, when they had nothing to do with it. “I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages.”

Sure it would have. But it’s your fault, Jerry Taylor, for not cooperating in the first place.

The Register notes that Taylor was probably having a bad day because another city website had been hacked recently, and as of today, still hasn’t been repaired.

Disclaimer: Homeland Stupidity uses the CentOS Linux operating system for its Web server, e-mail server and telecommunications equipment.

Was the 2004 presidential election stolen? Well, as it turns out, it’s easier to rig an election than to rig a Las Vegas slot machine.

University of Pennsylvania visiting professor Steve Freeman compares slot machines to ballot boxes in his new book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, due out this summer.

The Washington Post mentioned Thursday that Freeman gave a presentation of data from his book in October at the Philadephia chapter of the American Statistical Association. Among the problems he found in elections, none of which come as a surprise to my long time readers, were:

• Election software is kept secret, while gambling software is required to be kept on file with the state.
• State inspectors spot check gambling machines to ensure their software and computer chips haven’t been tampered with. Nobody knows what software or chips are in election machines, or whether they’re the right ones, and the vendors don’t care.
• Software programmers for gambling software must undergo background checks, while programmers for election software could be anybody, even convicted felons.
• Gambling equipment is tested and certified by disinterested third parties, while election equipment is tested and certified by companies in bed with the election equipment vendors.
• And finally, if someone thinks a Las Vegas slot machine cheated them, there’s a 24 hour hotline they can call and someone will be out to check that machine. If you think the ballot box cheated you, there’s nothing you can do.

Again, none of these were very surprising if you’ve been following the fallout from the 2004 election closely. But if you haven’t, prepare to be shocked. And by the way, there’s a lot more money to be made rigging an election than by rigging a slot machine.

Last week President George W. Bush toured the National Security Agency to offer his support to NSA employees. A photo accompanying a Washington Post article about the visit showed some sort of global threat display in the background, and Boing Boing, among others, have been going crazy over the fact that this photo contains completely unclassified information that anybody can display right on their own computers. Today I’m going to tell you what that display was, where the information came from, why people are overreacting, and what NSA is really doing.

First off, the display in the background of that photo is the Talisker Computer Defence Operational Picture, which you too can display right on your own computer. It displays the latest computer security news, vulnerabilities, virus information, links to security tool versions, and a graph of network port scan activity. It’s a pretty useful tool if you’re monitoring threats on the Internet.

Which NSA does indeed do every day, but I’ll get into that later.

The reason that that’s on display in the first place is not because the President showed up, but because he had the press with him. NSA, like other government agencies which deal with classified information, must “sanitize,” or remove all classified information from, any area in which people not cleared to see it will visit. In this case, that means the press. So, regardless of what’s on that particular display on any given day, it’s either going to have to be blank, or show unclassified information, when the press — or anybody without a security clearance — shows up. This only makes sense.

Now, one thing a lot of people don’t know is that NSA does indeed monitor computer and Internet security threats. It does so through its National Computer Security Center, right on site at Fort Meade, which largely works with unclassified information. NCSC is also responsible for evaluating computer technology for use by the Department of Defense and other government agencies for its ability to securely process classified information. They’re also responsible for the rainbow books.

So what’s the big deal?