Cyberspace wars

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 	This article is from NameBase NewsLine, which is distributed to users of
 	NameBase, a microcomputer database with 170,000 citations and 78,000 names.
 	This 3-megabyte database is available on floppy disks and is used by over
 	700 journalists and researchers around the world. For a brochure write to:
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	>From NameBase NewsLine, No. 2, July-August 1993:
	Cyberspace Wars: Microprocessing vs. Big Brother
	by Daniel Brandt
	Just ten years ago the issues were so simple, the arguments so clean.
	The concept of hackers was cute and quaint, best understood through
	Hollywood thrillers like "War Games." The major media had yet to use
	the word "cyberspace," a term just then created by William Gibson in
	Neuromancer, his first masterpiece in a strange new genre of "cyberpunk"
	fiction.
	It was ten years ago that establishment liberal David Burnham wrote
	"The Rise of the Computer State" with Ford, Rockefeller, and Aspen
	Institute money. This book ignored microprocessing and limited its
	nightmarish vision to the dangers posed by Big Brother's mainframes. One
	chapter covered the threat posed by the National Security Agency (NSA),
	the largest U.S. intelligence agency with the world's best computers, an
	agency that is not subjected to any oversight. In the mid-1970s the Senate
	Intelligence Committee headed by Frank Church warned that "if not properly
	controlled," the NSA's technology "could be turned against the American
	people at a great cost to liberty." For thirty years the NSA obtained
	copies of most telex messages entering and leaving the U.S., and the CIA
	illegally intercepted thousands of first-class letters as they left the
	country. If the high-tech NSA were ever turned against us, Church said,
	"no American would have any privacy left.... There would be no place to
	hide."[1]
	One word -- privacy -- summed up the debate nicely then, because Big
	Brother had a monopoly on computing power. But some cracks were already
	appearing in this pre-cyberspace version of the problem. In 1978 the
	Carter administration admitted that the Soviets were tapping into
	microwave links in New York, Washington, and San Francisco; microwave was
	like a sieve compared to the old underground intercity telephone cables.
	That was only a minor irritant compared to January 15, 1990, when half
	of the entire AT&T network crashed due to a single software bug. The
	technicians in the hardware lab where I worked used to kid the software
	engineers, saying that if civilization had developed the way programmers
	write programs, one woodpecker could come along and bring it all down.
	Also in 1978 the NSA began harassing certain mathematicians in
	the private sector, claiming "sole authority to fund research in
	cryptography."[2] Then came the microprocessor. Within a few years every
	mass-market magazine for microcomputer hobbyists was running an occasional
	article on new encryption techniques, and the NSA couldn't keep the lid
	on. Hackers were experimenting on their crude machines with a technique
	called "public key cryptography."[3] A recent estimate has it that "a
	buildingful of NSA's specially hot-rodded supercomputers might take a day
	to crack a 140-digit code," but from NSA's point of view that's not good
	enough. Today's micros are roughly 100 times faster with 100 times the
	capacity of the machine I bought ten years ago; the price is lower and it
	fits on your lap. They can easily encrypt and decrypt with keys this size.
	While the world's most powerful supercomputer grinds all day to crack one
	key, "what is it going to do when 100 million people each use 100
	different keys per day?"[4] Big Brother has suddenly lost his monopoly on
	encryption technology, and hackers everywhere could not be more delighted.
	Yes, the rules of the game have changed, due primarily to the rapid
	evolution of microprocessing power. The simple concept of "privacy" no
	longer works as well as it did for Frank Church and David Burnham. The
	little guy on his microcomputer bulletin board system (BBS) -- by one
	estimate there are now 60,000 of these in the U.S.[5] -- wants privacy
	from Big Brother, but corporations will also be screaming for privacy as
	they adopt the new encryption technology. And then what about
	transnational corporations seeking to avoid government intrusion? Or
	organized crime and international drug cartels? One, two, many Big
	Brothers? Privacy for whom?
	William Gibson's vision in Neuromancer may read like heaven for
	hackers, but for the rest of us the term "cyberpunk" seems about right. We
	shudder at Gibson's future, where transnational corporations hold all the
	wealth and all the information, and outcast data pirates must jack into
	their cyberspace decks, maneuver around the "black ice" of corporate data
	security systems, and forage for their livelihoods. It's rather like
	children stealing food from garbage cans, but it all seems like ice cream
	to the hackers who find this inspiring.
	The hacker ethic is a laissez-faire vision of total freedom to
	microcompute and telecommute, a world of unbreakable encryption, anonymous
	E-Money transfers, and lately talk of a fiber-optic data superhighway,
	leading to a place in cyberspace where everyone can connect with anyone.
	They even have their own Washington lobby. Electronic Frontier Foundation
	(EFF) started out with funding from Mitch Kapor and a few other computer
	millionaires, but is now underwritten by IBM, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, MCI,
	Bell Atlantic, Adobe, the Newspaper Association of America, and the
	National Cable Television Association.[6] And the word "cyberspace" is
	trumpeted in Scientific American, Time, Washington Post, and The New
	Republic. We can expect to see it soon in Webster's. This is bigger than
	a handful of hackers, and it's time to become conversant with the issues.
	There IS a new reality, and we needed a new word. But more than a
	mere reality, it's a massive moving target careening blindly into the
	future. No one has a handle on it. Cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling
	worries about hacker ethics, one narrow slice of the big picture, but he
	doesn't pretend to have many answers.[7] The Washington office of Computer
	Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) is in the same building as
	EFF, and both work against the NSA's efforts to mandate encryption
	hardware that the government can break -- the so-called "Clipper Chip"
	that was announced by the White House on April 16, 1993.[8] But on other
	issues CPSR is suspicious of EFF's pro-corporate leanings. One imagines
	CPSR arguing that our government, at least, can be petitioned and our
	representatives are elected. Comparatively, how much input are we allowed
	by major corporations? Given their priorities, how responsive will they
	be to the information needs of the poor and underprivileged? What will
	happen, for example, if public libraries and public schools get left
	behind in the dust of the data superhighway?
	In Washington DC, the information capital of the world, the newest
	game in town is Cyberspace Wars. Unfortunately, it's also the latest
	buzzword. Pack journalists in this town are seemingly required to log
	in on these, which invariably generates more heat than light.
	I don't have a graduate degree, but I spent three years in grad
	school studying something they called "social ethics," which included much
	philosophy. My undergraduate degree is in sociology. In high school I
	had a ham radio license, and spent many evenings building equipment and
	working traffic networks, a Morse Code version of "cyberspace." (These
	days my transmitter is hooked to my computer.) After grad school I
	retrained in electronics, and during the 1980s I held a variety of
	hardware and software jobs in high-tech industries. The hardware ranged
	from telephone interface circuits to digital switches at the senior tech
	or junior engineer level. The software was generally written using
	Assembly, dBase or BASIC to develop hardware control systems or database
	programs.
	In other words, my career is so checkered that no one will ever refer
	to me as an "expert," which is also why you are reading this in an obscure
	little publication. But I am familiar with the territory. And could it be
	that too many of the experts are too narrow? Furthermore, I can recognize
	high-tech hype when I see it and I can recognize sloppy ethics; there's
	too much of both in cyberspace. I can forgive EFF guru and co-founder
	John Barlow, a former Grateful Dead songwriter, for being an "acid-head
	ex-Republican county chairman" (Mitch Kapor's description). But when
	he invokes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere" as a model for
	cyberspace, a "global brain that would seal humanity's spiritual
	destiny,"[9] I have to draw the line. I studied enough of Teilhard to know
	that his theology lacks any conception of evil. Where cyberspace and New
	Age meet out in California's Silicon Valley somewhere, everything becomes
	alarmingly mushy.
	Another example of sloppy ethics is found in the way the word
	"privacy" is babbled about without qualification. I have yet to see any
	suggestion that the right to privacy ought to be inversely proportional to
	social power, and should be balanced against the right to know. Joe
	Sixpack deserves more privacy than David Rockefeller, because Joe's simple
	livelihood may be affected by Rocky's wheeling and dealing. Joe has more
	of a right to know what Rocky is up to than vice-versa. It does not
	require a philosophy degree to grasp this; libel law in the U.S., for
	example, makes a similar distinction between a public figure and a private
	figure. Every journalist knows this, but when writing about privacy issues
	the same concept never makes it into print. Then again, my definition of
	privacy does not justify hacker ethics (microcomputer vs. mainframe,
	little guy vs. Big Brother), because hackers are motivated more by
	malicious amusement than by genuine self-defense.
	More hype comes from a bizarre intersection of cyberspace with
	conspiracy theory: the incredible PROMIS software by Inslaw, Inc. For
	months I was reading accounts of how this software was revolutionary, and
	could track everything about everyone. This is crazy, I thought, because
	as a programmer I knew that software is painfully developmental, never
	revolutionary. After ten years of inputting for NameBase I also knew that
	until you key in good data, a mere database program is nothing at all.
	Then it came out that there was a "back door" installed in PROMIS. This
	made more sense, as a "back door" to get around password protection is
	easy for any programmer, and it explained why the intelligence community
	might be interested in peddling it to foreign governments.
	Please note, however, that you still need physical access to the
	computer, either through a direct-connect terminal or a remote terminal
	through the phone lines, in order to utilize a back door. Ari Ben-Menashe
	wants us to believe that foreigners (Britain, Australia, Iraq, South
	Korea, Canada, and "many others") allow technicians from another country
	to install new computer systems in the heart of their intelligence
	establishments, and don't even think to secure physical access to the
	system before they start entering their precious data.
	Then he claims that PROMIS, "a sinister, Big Brother-like computer
	program," can suck in every other database on earth, such as those used by
	utility companies, and correlate everything automatically. The rest of his
	book is frequently believable, but this example of hype is grating because
	publisher Bill Schaap, who is not computer illiterate, should have done
	Ben-Menashe a favor by deleting the chapter on PROMIS.[10] I generally
	believe that "conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by
	normal means,"[11] so I don't like to see whistleblowers like Ben-Menashe
	needlessly discredited by their own high-tech gullibility.
	The last example of hype is from a 1988 article, which suggests that
	the right also suffers from an overactive technical imagination:
	Retired Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, a member of the board, says
	Western Goals wanted to build a computer data base containing the
	leadership structure and membership of every left-wing group in the
	country. The right, he says, needed to match the left's ability to
	mobilize on short notice and track the activities of conservative
	Americans. 'The radical left,' he claims, 'in this country has an
	incredible, computer-connected network that has enormous files
	connected with them.'[12]
	Singlaub swallowed someone's line the same as Ben-Menashe did, and
	just as journalists are inclined to do when it comes to high-tech issues.
	It is no longer excusable for major players to remain ignorant of
	important high-tech developments. The remainder of this article will
	follow the battles and trends of the last few years -- the Cyberspace Wars
	that unfolded as microprocessors robbed Big Brother of its monopoly on
	data access and manipulation. Then I'll propose a somewhat expanded, more
	useful definition of "cyberspace" to include all digitized information,
	and consider the issues involved in the potential data networks that
	worried Singlaub. His notion of the left was fantastic and his plans for
	Western Goals never materialized. But the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
	B'rith, which is beginning to use computers, was caught this year in a
	massive spying scandal. Their defense of spying is my ultimate example of
	sloppy ethics. In another ten years there might not be scandals, because
	the files will have been sucked into cyberspace, complete with unbreakable
	encryption and access by anonymous players. It may not be the NSA, or the
	ADL, or any current entity. But we will all be at risk, and Ben-Menashe,
	Singlaub, and the cyberpunk novelists will finally seem prophetic.
	Privacy and domestic security are a zero-sum game. Society consists
	of discrete individuals; if these individuals each have total privacy,
	then society has zero security. Conversely, for the body politic to have
	total security as an organism, the individuals within must have zero
	privacy. Idealists may quibble with this scenario, but today we're
	required to coexist with massive national security establishments, and
	they tend to see things this way. Realistically, then, it's a useful
	handle for understanding Cyberspace Wars.
	A 1992 Harris poll showed that 78 percent of Americans now express
	concern about their personal privacy, and 68 percent perceive a threat
	from computers. These figures have roughly doubled over the last twenty
	years.[13] One area of concern is in the workplace, where U.S. privacy
	laws lag behind those in Europe and Japan. Although the 1986 Electronic
	Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) prohibits phone and data-line tapping,
	law enforcement and employers are exempted, so an E-Mail system that is
	paid for or run by the employer might not be secure. Macworld asked 301
	companies about snooping, and "about 22 percent of our sample have engaged
	in searches of employee computer files, voice mail, E-Mail, or other
	networking communications."[14] Job applicants sometimes find that the
	company has a contract with a research service to scan credit reports,
	workers' compensation claims, medical records, and criminal histories.
	Access to some of this data for such a purpose has recently become
	illegal, but employers say they need this data because of the rash of
	"negligent hiring" lawsuits.
	Personal privacy is a problem outside the workplace as well. Surveys
	of the data available from the big three credit bureaus -- TRW, Equifax,
	and Trans Union -- find error rates of up to 43 percent. Federal laws have
	addressed this issue for years, and more may be on the way. Lately the
	credit bureaus have seen their monopoly on personal information eroded
	from a variety of commercial information brokers (over 1,253 are listed in
	the Burwell Directory). Most of these collect information on companies,
	but some specialize in records such as address, marital, salary, driving,
	and employment history, as well as corporate affiliations, who your
	neighbors are, vehicle and real estate holdings, and civil and criminal
	court records. Lotus Development Corporation (where Mitch Kapor made his
	millions) and Equifax recently proposed to compile some of this data for
	120 million consumers on CD-ROM, and market it for $700 as "Marketplace:
	Households." But 30,000 angry letters killed their proposal.[15]
	If it's only name, address, and telephone number that interests
	you, then check out ProPhone.[16] This is a set of seven CD-ROM disks
	consisting of 70 million residential and 7 million business listings.
	The software can access the listings through either the name, address,
	or phone number, and the business listings are indexed by SIC code as
	well. The listings tend to be at least several years old or otherwise
	incomplete, but this will improve over the next few years. We bought it
	because most NameBase users are investigative journalists. Zeroing in on a
	neighborhood where you lived as a child in a little town in North Dakota,
	and getting a printout of today's residents, feels something like what
	hackers must feel when they break through password protection. It also
	feels like an excellent reason to keep one's own number unlisted.
	While cyberspace trends give privacy advocates plenty to worry about,
	the situation is equally alarming from the perspective of the government.
	If you live in an apartment building and have a scanner, your neighbors'
	cordless telephone conversations are easily monitored. Cellular phone
	monitoring became illegal in 1986 but not cordless, which is reasonable
	because no one HAS to use a cordless phone. The law against cellular
	monitoring was opposed by hams and shortwave listeners, who generally feel
	that if the signal makes it into their living rooms, they have a right to
	tune it in. Last year President Bush signed a second law, prohibiting the
	manufacture or import of scanners that are capable of cellular monitoring.
	But in a demonstration for a congressional subcommittee last April, a
	technician took three minutes to reprogram a cellular phone's codes so
	that it could be used for eavesdropping. It turns out that you don't have
	to use a scanner at all: "Every cellular phone is a scanner, and they
	are completely insecure," John Gage of Sun Microsystems told the
	subcommittee.[17] Congress keeps slipping off the back end of the
	cyberspace curve, simply because the curve is moving so fast.
	Congress is caught in the middle, pulled in one direction by privacy
	advocates and the other by our national security establishment. In March
	1992 the FBI proposed legislation that would require private industry to
	provide access ports in digital equipment for the purpose of tapping
	specific conversations. Telephone carrier signals are increasingly
	digitized and multiplexed, with specific channels interleaved among many
	others in a continuous stream of ones and zeros. For decades, the FBI
	needed only a pair of alligator clips to tap phones, and now they're
	getting panicky. This particular proposal died, but the FBI is going to
	try again. Several years ago I worked for a little company that made
	analog long-distance equipment for export to Soviet bloc countries.
	Frequently the specifications called for an access port for each channel,
	which we dubbed the "KGB output." Now it turns out that the FBI wants the
	same thing.
	Not to be outdone, the NSA played the major role in the development
	of the "Clipper Chip" recently approved by President Clinton, and soon the
	government will start requiring industry to provide phones and computers
	equipped with it. This chip contains encryption algorithms that can be
	broken by two halves of a secret master key. The idea is that someone with
	a warrant will then go to each of two agencies to get the portion of the
	key in their custody, like two pieces of a treasure map torn in half. This
	chip will be used to scramble phone lines used for voice, modems, and fax
	machines. Presumably the NSA already has both halves of the key, and
	their record for self-restraint is not reassuring. Private industry is
	not enthusiastic. For one thing, U.S. products containing NSA-breakable
	encryption will not compete well on the international market. One person
	asked, "Do you think I'm dumb enough to buy something endorsed by the
	NSA?"[18]
	Some worry that the administration may try to ban encryption
	altogether if this chip doesn't catch on. Ham radio operators, for
	example, have for decades been prohibited from using encryption on the
	air, and export of encryption software has been restricted for years
	under COCOM regulations. Others are amused that the government is
	even bothering along these lines, since encryption that is practically
	unbreakable is already easily purchased, or even available as Shareware
	by downloading it from a BBS.
	The most dramatic conflict between privacy and security occurred in
	1990. Big Brother was already edgy, as BellSouth in Florida had discovered
	in mid-1989 that microcomputer intruders had been harmlessly reprogramming
	their digital switches. It seems that callers to the Palm Beach County
	Probation Department were reaching "Tina," a phone-sex worker in another
	state. BellSouth was not amused, and worried that their 911 system was
	vulnerable. Then when the AT&T system half-crashed the following January
	-- even though this was NOT hacker-related -- the Secret Service, which
	had nothing if not an active imagination, began working closely with telco
	cops. The federal effort started years earlier after Congress passed the
	1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but in May 1990 it culminated in
	Operation Sundevil, by far the largest series of high-profile raids ever
	conducted against hackers. About 42 computer systems were seized around
	the country, along with 23,000 floppy disks.
	Federal anti-hacker strategy involves a dramatic search and seizure.
	Agents crash simultaneously through the front and back doors, everyone
	is questioned, and then they carry off the evidence: computers, monitors,
	keyboards, printers, modems, manuals, disks, notebooks, telephones,
	answering machines, and even Sony Walkmans. There are no arrests and even
	much later charges are rarely filed. In the meantime, however, the feds
	study their "evidence" for months or even years. It's enough to bring many
	hackers to their knees.
	EFF began defending these hackers, and by 1991 the steam had gone out
	of the crackdown. One document, a description of 911 system administration
	called "E911," was found on a BBS and came to the attention of AT&T
	security. They considered it hot property worth exactly $79,449. E911
	later formed the basis of one of the hacker prosecutions, but the
	government's case fell apart when the defense showed that more detailed
	information about the 911 system was publicly available from AT&T for the
	mere price of $13:
	The right hand of Bellcore knew not what the left hand was doing. The
	right hand was battering hackers without mercy, while the left hand
	was distributing Bellcore's intellectual property to anybody who was
	interested in telephone technical trivia.... The digital underground
	was so amateurish and poorly organized that it had never discovered
	this heap of unguarded riches.[19]
	Another hacker legal victory resulted from a raid against Steve
	Jackson Games of Austin, Texas. SJG published games that were played on
	paper, with pencils, dice, and books. Jackson and his fifteen employees
	used computers to run the business, not for hacking. One of the games he
	developed was published as a book titled "GURPS Cyberpunk." Upon seeing
	the word "cyberpunk," our fearless G-men assumed that the E911 document
	was lurking on SJG's computers. The warrant was sealed, however, so for
	months the SS led everyone to believe that they carted off SJG's computers
	because SJG presumed to publish a science fiction book. This naturally
	resulted in much sympathy for the defense. Without its computers the
	company was crippled, and had to lay off half of its employees.
	In 1991 the company sued the government, and on 12 March 1993 a
	federal judge in Austin awarded the company $42,000 for lost profits in
	1990, plus expenses. He also ruled that the Secret Service violated the
	1986 ECPA because it had seized stored messages from many users of the BBS
	who were not suspected of anything. Several hackers in other cases have
	actually gone to prison over the last few years. But considering how
	sociopolitically stunted many hackers were until EFF finally sent in some
	lawyers, it's amazing how little the government has to show for all of its
	dramatic efforts.
	The term "cyberspace" is normally meant to convey that fuzzy area
	between two digital devices, like the term "airwaves" that refers to a
	thin slice of the spectrum most often used for communications. But only
	a small portion of this accepted notion of cyberspace is in the form of
	microwave links; the rest is plain old traces or wires, from inside the
	microprocessor chip all the way to the telco office and beyond. Before
	"cyberspace" finds its way into the dictionary, I propose an expanded
	definition which will place the emphasis on the unique nature of digitized
	information. Any digitized information is already in cyberspace, whether
	it's in a file on a floppy, a CD-ROM at your local library, or a
	minicomputer on an Internet node. Once digitized, information takes on an
	entirely new quality; it is this quality that begs for a new word to
	describe it.
	First and foremost, digitized information can be copied locally or
	remotely an infinite number of times without any degradation. Secondly,
	the physical space required for storage is minuscule by previous
	standards. And finally, the software required to translate digitized
	information between two devices with different functions is usually
	trivial. However, if the data is converted to analog form, as when a file
	is sent to a printer, then its "cyberspace" quality is lost. Converting
	from the printed page back into ones and zeros is not trivial, and
	generally causes information to be lost or degraded.
	NameBase resides in cyberspace, then, even though we send disks
	through the mail. It's trivial to dump the results of searches into a new
	file, and zap them by modem to another computer. Daisy-chain that file
	between every computer in the world, and if the transfer software uses
	error-correction protocol, at the end of the process you have exactly the
	same file you started with. If it didn't infringe on our copyright, every
	set of NameBase disks we've distributed could each generate an infinite
	number of additional sets. Incidentally, another advantage to disk
	distribution as opposed to on-line systems is its decentralized quality.
	One of AT&T's computers in Dallas had so much extra capacity that they
	generously allowed it to used as a BBS host. But as their paranoia
	increased in 1990, AT&T considered it too risky and pulled the plug
	without warning, leaving 1,500 little modems out there, searching and
	chirping for their disconnected mother.[20]
	Any public or private intelligence agency that uses computers is
	potentially more ominous than one that doesn't, and the public has a right
	to expect certain standards for collection and dissemination. An example
	of an intelligence agency that fails this test is the Anti-Defamation
	League, whose San Francisco and Los Angeles offices were caught in a
	scandal earlier this year. The tax-exempt ADL has 30 regional offices in
	the U.S. (and offices in Canada, Paris, Rome, and Jerusalem), a staff of
	400, and an annual budget of $32 million. For many decades they have been
	gathering information on U.S. citizens, using public sources as well as
	paid infiltrators, informants, investigators, and liaison with local law
	enforcement and the FBI. There is also evidence of connections with Mossad
	and South African intelligence.
	As a private agency the ADL enjoys no oversight, no requirements for
	probable cause prior to political spying, and no Privacy Act or Freedom of
	Information Act responsibilities to the public. By contrast, the FBI, CIA,
	and some major police departments in the U.S. are held accountable by
	various hard-won legal restrictions. Some observers feel that the ADL's
	relationship with many local police, the FBI, and intelligence agencies
	suggests that they are playing the role of a cutout. Government agencies
	might be getting the information they want without incurring any legal
	risk, simply by using the ADL. In exchange, the ADL apparently enjoys
	privileged access to police and FBI files.
	This is what happened in San Francisco, where a police intelligence
	officer (and former CIA agent in El Salvador) named Tom Gerard has been
	indicted for passing confidential police intelligence files to the local
	ADL office. Another principal in this case is Roy Bullock, who was a
	secret employee of the ADL for 40 years, a close associate of Gerard, and
	also an FBI informant. After learning that Gerard was meeting with South
	African intelligence, the FBI investigated. This encouraged the
	involvement of San Francisco prosecutors. They served two ADL offices with
	search warrants, and Bullock's computer was seized from his home.
	Interviews with Bullock revealed that he had tapped into one group's phone
	message system, and his computer contained data on 9,876 individuals and
	1,359 political groups, distributed about evenly on both the left and
	right.[21] While it's evident that ADL spying is centrally coordinated
	from New York by ADL spymaster Irwin Suall, at this writing it's unclear
	whether San Francisco authorities will try to prosecute anyone from this
	powerful organization.
	The ADL does not hail from any particular portion of the left-right
	political spectrum. Such a classification is irrelevant once a group
	becomes a private intelligence agency, as then they generally inbreed with
	their adversaries and mutate into a peculiar political animal. John
	Singlaub's Western Goals, and Political Research Associates (PRA) of
	Cambridge, Massachusetts, both extremely tiny compared to the ADL, are two
	additional examples of this phenomenon. All three groups identify with
	certain constituencies as a flag of convenience: the ADL with the Jewish
	community, Western Goals with the right, and PRA with the left. But by
	using the same methods of collecting information -- garbage surveillance,
	infiltration of target groups, and the use of guilt-by-association in
	their propaganda -- each of these three groups has perverted itself with
	clandestinism and denunciation for its own sake.
	This opinion of mine is based on statements from John Rees (formerly
	of Western Goals and a person with extensive computer files on the left),
	Chip Berlet of PRA (formerly a BBS operator, with extensive files on the
	right), and testimony from Mira Boland of the ADL (extensive files on
	everyone). All admit to attending one or more secret meetings in 1983-1984
	with U.S. intelligence operatives such as Roy Godson, representatives from
	intelligence-linked funding sources, and journalists such as Patricia
	Lynch from NBC. Besides Berlet, other leftists attending included Dennis
	King and Russ Bellant. The purpose of these meetings was to plan a
	campaign against Lyndon LaRouche. The LaRouche organization was another
	private intelligence agency, but they had too many curious foreign
	contacts and were getting too close to certain individuals at the National
	Security Council. More importantly, LaRouche opposed U.S. intervention in
	Nicaragua just as the NSC was planning an expanded role there.[22] In
	another ten years, scenarios like this might be played out in cyberspace.
	Instead of a fifteen-year prison sentence, a future incarnation of
	LaRouche might jack into his cyberspace deck one day, and to his horror,
	discover that his collection of hard-won access codes no longer works.
	ADL national director Abraham Foxman defends his organization by
	claiming that the ADL's sources "function in a manner directly analogous
	to investigative journalists" and "the information ADL obtains is placed
	in the public domain."[23] He adds that "the very people making these
	charges [of ADL spying] themselves maintain and use such files whether
	they be journalists, lawyers or academics."[24] But as we begin to enter
	the cyberspace age, his excuses seem particularly inadequate.
	We have only Foxman's dubious word that ADL's information is placed
	in the public domain. Various investigative journalists, even those whose
	interests parallel the ADL's, have told me that it's difficult to get
	access to the ADL's main library in New York; you have to be connected
	to their old-boy network before you can see their files. Secondly,
	journalists seldom use the methods preferred by ADL's spies: going through
	a target's garbage and using deception to infiltrate target groups. On
	the rare occasions that a journalist does these things, it is implicitly
	balanced against the public interest, and done only to develop a specific
	story. Once published, the journalist's targets know what happened and
	have recourse to civil litigation. Normally journalists are expected by
	the standards of common decency to contact all parties criticized in
	a story, and double source any dubious items. Journalists identify
	themselves before soliciting any information, in order to provide the
	choice of cooperating on the record, not for attribution, on background,
	off the record, or refusing comment altogether. Finally, the public
	reasonably expects that journalists are not secretly working with law
	enforcement and intelligence agencies.
	Foxman is simply blowing smoke on this issue. At Public Information
	Research we resent any hint of a comparison between his activities and
	ours. NameBase is basically a value-added public library; it has a
	citation from the public record for every bit of information, and is
	available to every member of the public. The extra value comes from
	the enhanced access to the public record. We don't consort with law
	enforcement or intelligence agencies, and we don't use deception to
	collect information.
	On one occasion in ten years, a person whose name we had indexed
	complained to me that the source we cited misrepresented the facts. I
	asked him for a copies of published material about him that he considered
	more accurate, and cited these under his name along with the original
	citation. (If he didn't have such sources, but could convince me that a
	source we cited was mistaken, then I would I have deleted the citation.)
	On another occasion a person with whom I had worked for two years was
	upset to find her name in NameBase after I entered a book about the left
	that was published by the right. Her name is still in NameBase because I
	knew that the information about her in this book was true. I don't claim
	to be objective; my subjectivity is seen in the annotations I write for
	the sources, and in the selection of materials for inputting. This level
	of subjectivity comes with the territory -- sometimes it's unavoidable,
	and other times I like it, feeling that it's my only reason for
	continuing. But at the same time I do try to use common sense.
	It would be comforting to have a Cyberspace Bill of Rights and
	Responsibilities, if the target wasn't moving so rapidly. Even an issue as
	self-evident as "privacy" is tricky, as the transnational corporations
	join the chorus in an effort to preclude government regulation. The
	international elites who control these corporations are well on their way
	toward installing the New World Order, and are no friends of the little
	guy who really needs privacy. Then again, our national security apparatus
	has an equally poor record. Everyone is waiting to see where the chips
	fall before they declare themselves. In the meantime we find ourselves
	peering over the edge into cyberspace, surrounded by high-tech hype and
	journalistic buzzwords. We need a better-informed public with a keener
	sense of their own interests, but there's no time to wait. For those of us
	who work in this new cyberspace, our ethical thinking -- the ability to
	consider interests beyond our own -- must be honed to a new level.
	1. David Burnham, The Rise of the Computer State. Forward by Walter
	Cronkite. (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 124, 130, 206.
	2. Ibid., p. 139.
	3. John Smith, "Public Key Cryptography," Byte Magazine, January 1983,
	pp. 198-218.
	4. Kevin Kelly, "Cypherpunks, E-Money, and the Technologies of
	Disconnection," Whole Earth Review, Summer 1993, pp. 46-47.
	5. Washington Times, 10 May 1993, p. A3, citing a recent issue of
	Boardwatch, "a leading BBS magazine."
	6. Robert Wright, "The New Democrat from Cyberspace," The New Republic,
	24 May 1993, p. 20.
	7. Bruce Sterling, "A Statement of Principle," Science Fiction Eye, June
	1992, pp. 14-18.
	8. John Mintz and John Schwartz, "Chipping Away at Privacy? Encryption
	Device Widens Debate Over Rights of U.S. to Eavesdrop," Washington
	Post, 30 May 1993, pp. H1, H4.
	9. Wright, p. 26.
	10. Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms
	Network (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1992), pp. 127-141.
	11. Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (Berkley Publishing, 1977),
	p. 25.
	12. Doug Birch, "Master of the Politics of Paranoia," Baltimore Sun
	Magazine, 5 June 1988, p. 26.
	13. Charles Piller, "Privacy in Peril," Macworld, July 1993, p. 124.
	14. Charles Piller, "Bosses With X-Ray Eyes," Macworld, July 1993,
	p. 120.
	15. Piller, "Privacy in Peril," p. 126-127.
	16. Produced for IBM-compatibles with a CD-ROM drive by ProCD, 8 Doaks
	Lane, Little Harbor, Marblehead MA 01945, Tel: 617-631-9200, Fax:
	617-631-9299. Suggested list for ProPhone is $449, but several
	mail-order firms offer it for $179 or less.
	17. Cindy Skrzycki, "Dark Side of the Data Age," Washington Post,
	Business Section, 3 May 1993, pp. 19, 28.
	18. Mintz and Schwartz, p. H4.
	19. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the
	Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam books, 1992), p. 278.
	20. Ibid., pp. 125-126, 141-142.
	21. I obtained the 700 pages of documents which San Francisco prosecutors
	released on 8 April 1993. For a summary of this case see Robert I.
	Friedman, "The Enemy Within," Village Voice, 11 May 1993, pp. 27-32;
	and Richard C. Paddock, "New Details of Extensive ADL Spy Operation
	Emerge," Los Angeles Times, 13 April 1993, pp. A1, A16.
	22. For an outline of the conspiracy against LaRouche by the ADL and U.S.
	intelligence operatives, see U.S. District Court for the Eastern
	District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, Petitioners' Rebuttal to
	the Government's Response and Memorandum. In United States v. Lyndon
	H. LaRouche, Jr., William F. Wertz, Jr. and Edward W. Spannaus, Case
	No. 88-243-A. Submitted by Odin Anderson, Ramsey Clark, and Scott T.
	Harper, attorneys for the defense, 1 May 1992, pp. 1-16. For a
	description of the secret meetings at the residence of John Train,
	see Herbert Quinde, Affidavit, Commonwealth of Virginia, County of
	Loudoun, 20 January 1992, pp. 1-28. Quinde describes interviews with
	Rees, Berlet, and several others. For confirmation of Chip Berlet's
	role, see Doug Birch, "Master of the Politics of Paranoia," Baltimore
	Sun Magazine, 5 June 1988, p. 27. Birch's description of John Rees'
	career includes a quotation from Chip Berlet, a longtime Rees
	watcher, that inadvertently confirms Berlet's collusion with Rees at
	an anti-LaRouche meeting. Berlet's spying is confirmed by his
	quotations in David Miller, "Letter from Boston," Forward, 22 January
	1993, pp. 1, 14. This article also quotes ADL's Leonard Zakim: "The
	information that Political Research Associates has shared with us has
	been very useful."
	23. Abraham H. Foxman, "Letter to the Editor," Village Voice, 18 May
	1993, p. 5.
	24. Abraham H. Foxman, "It's a Big Lie, Hailed by Anti-Semites," New York
	Times, 28 May 1993, p. A29.
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Category:Pre Second Cold War