10/22/2000

GOVERNMENT WEB SITES TRACK USERS
By D. Ian Hopper
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Despite a White House prohibition, 13 government agencies are secretly using technology that tracks the Internet habits of people visiting their Web sites and in at least one case provides the information to a private company, a congressional review has found.
The agencies range from the Federal Aviation Administration to the federal offices that provide disaster relief and administer Medicare, the General Accounting Office found in a study obtained by the Associated Press.
"How can this administration talk about protecting privacy when its own agencies jeopardize some of the public’s most private information?" asked Sen. Fred Thompson R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
Thompson’s committee has jurisdiction over the 1974 Privacy Act and other laws that dictate the government's privacy practices.
At issue is the use by the 13 government Web sites of small text files called "cookies" that record information about an Internet user’s browsing habits when they visit a site.
In June, the White House Office of Management and Budget advised all federal agencies that they are not allowed to use such text files without approval from the agency head. If they are used, the OMB directive said, Web site visitors must be given "clear and conspicuous notice" of such use.
But the GAO, the investigatory arm of Congress, found that 13 agencies were using the technology to track visitors, although their formal Internet policy claimed they weren’t doing so, and none of the Web site visitors was advised that the technology was being used.
The study found all 13 tracked consumers’ paths during their visit to the site, and some were employing "persistent" text files that could be read for years after the initial visit.
In addition, the U.S. Forest Service’s International Programs site was found to be using so-called "third-party cookies" that transmit the visitors’ activities to a private company that had been hired to compile reports for the agency. Such a practice is not mentioned in the Forest Service site’s privacy policy.
Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh said he was unaware of the use of the tracking technology until contacted for comment Friday.
The other agencies found to be using the cookie software were the U.S. Customs Service, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Bureau of Land Management, Central Federal Lands Highway Division, the Energy Department’s Ames Laboratory, National Park Service, Office of Personnel Management, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, and the Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare.

11/5/2000
ASTEROID COULD HIT EARTH – IN 2030
By Robert Lee Hotz
From the Los Angeles Times

There is a small but significant chance that an asteroid will strike Earth in 2030 with a force up to 100 times the Hiroshima bomb, an international team of astronomers concluded Friday.
The International Astronomical Union and space scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said there is a 1-in-500 chance that a newly discovered asteroid-like object called 2000 SG344 could impact Earth on Sept. 21, 2030. The object could be anything from a discarded rocket booster to a sizable asteroid.
The statement, posted on the Internet by the International Astronomical Union, is the first formal public prediction of a potential collision with a piece of the cosmic debris that litters the solar system.
The warning arises from a special astronomical review process designed to eliminate false alarms or premature predictions of celestial calamities.
On a newly devised 10-point scale for grading potential impact hazards, the object is just at the threshold of concern. It was given a rating of 1., meaning the object merits careful monitoring.
The object was discovered trailing in Earth’s orbit around the sun by astronomers using the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on the island of Hawaii. The relatively high probability that it might impact Earth in 2030 was first determined earlier this week by JPL researcher Paul Chodas. It was then verified over the past 72 hours by technical re- viewers in Italy, Finland and the United States, organized by the International Astronomical Union.
"This is a first for us," said space scientist David Morrison at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
"We have never before had a pre- diction at this high level of probability. In the past we have talked about 1 in 10,000 or 1 in a million." In making their concerns public, the astronomers walked a delicate line between prudent secrecy and public disclosure, weighing a chance of ridicule against their demands of public responsibility.
It has been only two years since asteroid watchers at the Minor Planets Center in Cambridge, Mass., triggered worldwide alarm by announcing – and then almost immediately retracting – news that a mile-wide asteroid called XF-11 might hit Earth in 2028.
To avoid any repetition of that embarrassment, astronomers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the IAU devised a system in which any claims of a potential Earth impact would be verified quickly by a special technical review panel be- fore being made public.
Although this new object is much smaller than XF-11, the probability of impact calculated so far is twice as high as the chances initially given that XF-11 would collide with Earth.
For the time being, no one knows yet just how large the SG344 object may be, its composition, or the likelihood it would survive its fiery entry into the planet’s atmosphere.
On one hand, the object may be a discarded Saturn rocket booster, lost in space since the days of the Apollo moon program and virtually certain to burn up on entry, said Brian Marsden, director of the Minor Planets Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.
NASA records show that nine Saturn 5 rockets were launched toward the moon in the Apollo pro- gram. In each case, spent rocket boosters ended up in uncharted or- bits around the sun.
But it is equally likely that the object may be an asteroid between 100 and 230 feet in diameter – about the size of a multi-story office building.
If it is an asteroid – as several experts believe most likely – it could be a flying gravel pit of loosely compacted rubble that might easily disintegrate as it skims into the atmosphere. Or it could be a lethal ball of solid stone and iron that could explode on impact with an estimated energy of two megatons, experts said.
Without additional information, there is no way to narrow the range of uncertainty.
"That is our problem – we don’t know what it is," said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program Office at JPL.

11/16/2000

FBI ON LINE SPYING CAPACITY
By D, Ian Hopper Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The FBI’s controversial e-mail surveillance tool, known as Carnivore, can retrieve all communications that go through an Internet service – far more than FBI officials have said it does – a recent test of its potential sweep found, according to bureau documents.
An FBI official involved with the test stressed Friday that although Carnivore has the ability to grab a large quantity of e-mails and Web communications, current law and specific court orders restrict its use.
Nevertheless, privacy experts said they are worried about the breadth of Carnivore’s capability and questioned why the FBI even conducted such a test in June if it intends to use the tool only for narrow purposes.
"That really contradicts the explanation that the FBI has provided as to the purpose of the system and how it works," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "We’ve been Ied to believe that the purpose of Carnivore is to filter and pinpoint the particular communications that the FBI is authorized to obtain. If that’s true, then why are they testing the system's ability to store and archive every- thing?
" Sobel’s group recently obtained the FBI documents providing the test results as part of litigation it brought under the Freedom of In- formation Act.
In the lab report, FBI officials said Carnivore "could reliably capture and archive all unfiltered traffic to the internal hard drive", and could save the information on removable, high-capacity disks as well.
Marcus Thomas, head of the FBI’s cybertechnology section, said in an interview with the Associated Press that the test was only done to check Carnivore’s "breaking point." He said the tool wouldn’t be used to capture broad swaths of Internet communications in a real-world situation.
Thomas was one of the FBI agents who approved the lab report.
"Certainly, in operation, you could set the filters up to do nothing," Thomas said. "But our procedures are very detailed; we’ll only do what we’re allowed to in a court order.
"The difference of opinion is the latest in what has become a debate between Carnivore’s capabilities and its actual use.
While law enforcement officials have admitted that Carnivore can capture much more than e-mail, including Internet chats and Web browsing, FBI officials insist it is only used to copy e-mail to or from a criminal suspect in accordance with a court order.
Opponents say the "black box" nature of the system keeps the public from knowing what it can really do, and its installation at an Internet provider may cause net- work problems.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, started receiving batches of Carnivore-related material in October, after a court ordered the FBI to release the information.
EPIC representatives said they have received about 550 pages so far, and expect to get only about 30 percent of the 3,000 documents related to Carnivore. Most of the released documents have large portions blacked out.
FBI officials say Carnivore has been used in about 25 cases, most involving national security.
Congress considered several measures this year to rein in Carnivore, but none survived. Law- makers have said they may consider measures again next year.
An independent review of Carnivore was ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno, and that report was due to be received by the Justice Department on Friday, Justice spokeswoman Chris Watney said.
Watney said the report is expected to be released to the public early next week, after it is edited to eliminate references to Carnivore’s internal blueprints and other sensitive material.