From       : Glenda M Stocks 
Subject    : Info Age Reap (fwd)
Message-ID : 
Date       : Thu, 26 Oct 1995 19:07:54 +0059 (EDT)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date    : Thu, 26 Oct 1995 11:06:49 +0000
From    : ladynada 
To      : snet@world.std.com
Subject : Info Age Recap 1/5

From       : mkelly@gate.net (Michael Kelly)
Newsgroups : alt.conspiracy.jfk,alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.reform
Subject    : Infowar & Disinformation; CIA Hackers vs. Vince Foster
Date       : 24 Oct 1995 21:01:09 GMT

[ Article crossposted from alt.conspiracy,alt.illuminati,
alt.politics.usa.constitution,alt.politics.org.cia,
alt.politics.org.un,alt.poltics.]

[ Author was James Daugherty ]
[ Posted on Tue, 24 Oct 1995 06:35:11 -0400 ]

Finally Back!  A-albionic Research Weekly Up-date! 10-24-95
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 > From NameBase NewsLine, No. 11, October-December 1995:


       Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net

                           by Daniel Brandt

     In 1967, a satire was published under the title "Report From Iron
Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace." This analysis
soberly reflected, in think-tank style, on the importance to society
of waging war. Leonard Lewin, who pretended that the secret report was
leaked and did not claim authorship until five years later, argued
forcefully that war provides a type of social and psychological glue,
without which society cannot function.

     "Roughly speaking," Lewin writes, "the presumed power of the
'enemy' sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a
society must be proportionate to the size and complexity of the
society. Today, of course, that power must be one of unprecedented
magnitude and frightfulness."[1] Lewin's tongue-in-cheek premise is
that before peace breaks out, it becomes urgent to find substitutes
for war.

     They say that life imitates art. Almost 30 years later, Lewin's
claim of authorship is lost amid the general enthusiasm over the
manuscript. Dog-eared copies of "Report frm Iron Mountain" are passed
around by patriots and militia groups as if it were the secret plan
from above.[2] This provides liberal critics of "conspiracism" a good
chuckle or two. But it's not at all clear who will laugh last. As a
predictor of the capacity of elites to manage public opinion, and to
deal with stubborn fringe groups, populists can do worse than to study
this 100-page volume.

     Already there's an effort underway to replace the Cold War in the
hearts and minds of Middle America. The ruling class has to do
something. Patriots in camo were easily managed when they had commies
to kick around. After these patriots struck out "Communism" on the
their enemies list, next up was "Council on Foreign Relations" and
similar organizations. This is proving temporarily inconvenient for
the global managers.

     One Cold War substitute might be Information Warfare. Novelist
Tom Clancy, a hard-line conservative and close pal of Bob Woodward
(media elites with spook connections transcend party politics), has
the evil Japanese planting a stock-exchange software bomb in "Debt of
Honor" (1994). Dain Gary, manager of the Pentagon-funded Computer
Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh, remarks at a conference
sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that
there are universities in Bulgaria that teach how to create more
effective viruses.[3] A cover story in Time magazine touts "cyberwar,"
the latest Pentagon fad.[4] "Hackers are even better than communists,"
says one Washington activist who deals with civil rights and
electronic privacy issues.

     Much of the Time story describes game-playing scenarios that are
currently popular at military think tanks. Designed to simulate future
capabilities, these games serve to identify potential vulnerabilities
in U.S. communications and information systems. As soon as this issue
of Time appeared, however, one reporter recommended it as confirmation
of his own story (see sidebar). Until recently a senior editor at
Forbes, this reporter gave up the god life in exchange for a fan club
on Internet conspiracy newsgroups. His story relies on spooky sources
who see infowar -- in the form of CIA hackers sucking out Swiss bank
accounts -- as something that's been going on for two years now.[5]
Life imitates art.

     Military professionals recognize that information technology is
leading to new modes of warfare. One Pentagon general described the
1989 operation in Panama, when the command centers were "noisy places
where a lot of people ran around and there were little sticky things
that were put on acetate maps," and compared these to the Haiti
operation, when commands were issued over video links. Between Panama
and Haiti, the Gulf War's smart bombs with nose cameras popularized
infowar on the battlefield. Even Tom Clancy's fans were impressed.

     Defense industries, feeling the squeeze of shrinking budgets, are
also climbing on board. As the leader in information technology, as
well as the cop on the international beat, America finds itself with a
new opportunity to spend billions on defense. The hacker gap has
replaced the missile gap, and operations security (OPSEC) is suddenly
the hottest field for think tanks and consultants that do business
with the government. The six-year-old OPSEC Professionals Society
increased their membership by sixty percent in 1994. Even the U.S.
Secret Service has an OPSEC department.[6]

     Rand Corporation has their cyberwar screed posted on the
Internet. In their essay, the new MTR (military technology revolution)
homes in on, among other things, the problem with WMD (weapons of mass
destruction). "Topsight" (seeing the big picture) is required. Colin
Powell is quoted (Byte, July 1992) about how "battlespace" includes an
"infosphere," and personal computers were "force multipliers" in the
Gulf War.[7] Mitre Corporation, another beltway bandit, has a Web page
that presents their Information Security Technical Center. They help
clients with Internet and database security issues, such as
"multilevel secure distributed data maagement, security for
federations of autonomous database systems, secure object-oriented
data management, and integrity protection and separation of duty."


     When punk hackers in Germany dialed into Mitre's computer lines
in 1986 and used them to romp around other defense-related computer
systems on the Internet, it cost Mitre thousands of dollars in
telephone bills. Their security experts said it couldn't be true.
Almost a decade later, after at least two books[8] and countless
newspaper articles, we now know that if hacker hype didn't exist, it
would have to be created. Every corporation should leave holes for
hackers; it gives reporters something to write about and it's good for
the security business. The proclamations of self-identity from OPSEC
professionals seem hazy at best; without hackers, they'd have nothing
at all.

     The Pentagon has their Defense Information Systems Agency, which
spares no effort to publicize the Defense Department's vulnerability
to hackers. They assign their own hackers to break into the
Department's Internet computers (which carry unclassified information
only), and 88 percent of the time, they get in. When they do, 96
percent of the time they are undetected. One estimate of the cost of
fixing it is between $15 billion and $18 billion. And infowar stories
rarely fail to mention that according to Defense officials, a group of
Dutch hackers offered to help Iraq during the Gulf War, by fouling up
the Pentagon's logistics communications -- 25 percent of which were
uncoded and sent on the Internet.[9] The next time, rumor has it,
Saddam isn't likely to refuse the offer.

     No one is better at getting his name into print than OPSEC
consultant Winn Schwartau, author of "Terminal Compromise," an infowar
novel that isn't worth the cost of a free download from CompuServe.
Schwartau also wrote "Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic
Superhighway" (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1994), described by a
reviewer as 400 pages in which the author "tells us what he's going to
tell us,tells us, and then tells us what he's told us."[10] At a
conference in September 1995, Schwartau told of American hackers he
had met, who for patriotic reasons were upset over French economic
spying. Schwartau said that they planned to hack into the Paris subway
and big French companies in retaliation, but then were scared off by
the FBI.

     Schwartau goes on to claim that he installs offensive, as well as
defensive, information weapon systems. "They're indispensable.
Installing an offensive system is the only way to get to know the
aggressive methods that you need to protect yourself against."[11]
This must be what the experts call a cybernetic feedback loop. Or
perhaps it's just one consultant's gravy train.


     Despite the hype, there are important historical trends behind
the interest in information warfare. French military authorities, for
example, suspect that unidentified hackers broke into their navy
system in July and, according to Reuters on September 20, "tapped into
the data on the acoustic signatures of hundreds of French and allied
ships." President Jacques Chirac ordered a major investigation. While
American and British liaison officers, who provided information on
their own vessels, were furious at the French and suspected the
Russians, some French officers suspect that the Americans were testing
French security.

     The electronic transfer of funds is another area that highlights
our growing dependency on high-tech. "We're more vulnerable than any
other nation on earth," the director of the National Security Agency,
John McConnell, told a seminar in June. He pointed to banks, global
financial markets, and the Federal Reserve.[12] Citibank, which
electronically transfers some $500 billion daily, recently worked with
the FBI and authorities in several other countries to sting a group of
Russian hackers. Before they were caught, they managed to transfer
$400,000 from Citibank to accounts in the U.S., Finland, Germany,
Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, and Switzerland.[13]

     Outgoing CIA deputy director William Studeman recently told
another conference that "massive networking makes the U.S. the world's
most vulnerable target for information warfare," and said that our
systems could be targeted by drug traffickers, organized crime,
computer vandals, disgruntled employees, or paid professionals.
Studeman pointed out that "denial of service" -- jamming with
overload, for example -- can be as effective as actually breaking in,
and is frequently easier. Potential near-term targets might include
telecommunications, power and utility distribution, stock exchanges,
the banking system, air traffic control, the Internal Revenue Service,
and Social Security.[14] Current CIA director John Deutch announced in
June that he was putting together some interagecy working groups to
look into information warfare.[15]

     Some of this interest in network vulnerability has been
transferred to other areas. Former CIA director Robert Gates said in
March 1993 that "the U.S. intelligence community does not and will not
engage in industrial espionage."[16] Several months later, CIA
director James Woolsey wanted to be "quite clear" about this: "The CIA
is not going to be in the business that a number of our friends' and
allies' intelligence services are in --spying on foreign corporations
for the benefit of domestic business."[17]

     Although professionals once insisted on a distinction between
business intelligence (the collection of business and competitive
information through legal and ethical methods), and industrial or
economic espionage (the clandestine collection of sensitive,
restricted or classified information),[18] this distinction is rarely
mentioned these days. A softening of position has occurred in just the
last year. Moreover, the major problem with this distinction is that
there's a massive gray area between these two extremes, and that's
where the action is.

     Two examples of this gray area come from U.S. intelligence, where
there is new activity and concern over economic spying. The U.S.
currently has a program to tap into international satellite
communications to collect financial data. This program is designed to
detect instances of bribery of foreign officials by foreign companies.
Since such bribery is illegal for U.S. companies, the playing field is
leveled when the CIA can blow the whistle on foreign companies through
diplomatic channels. Mike Jensen of NBC News (11 May 1995) reported
enthusiastically that "the analysis is done at CIA headquarters, where
a new era in spying has quietly begun." A number of large contracts
have been won for U.S. firms with this technique. This is
uncomfortably close to the use of blackmail to stop bribery.

     The other example is the proposed escalation of
counterintelligence efforts against economic spying. n August the
White House released a report produced by the National
Counterintelligence Center, which identified efforts by allied
governments to spy on the U.S. in the areas of biotechnology,
aerospace, telecommunications, computer software and hardware,
advanced transportation and engine technology, advanced materials and
coatings such as stealth materials, energy research, defense and
armaments, and manufacturing processes.

     The CIA has put the number of foreign countries involved at
around twenty. Among the methods used by foreign economic spies are
recruiting company insiders, computer intrusions and telephone
intercepts, and office or hotel-room break-ins and thefts.[19] But
anyone who has read a spy novel knows that the line between
counterintelligence and intelligence can seldom be drawn cleanly; the
same assets and activities are required for both.

     "The Pentagon has drafted a classified document asking the White
House to draw up a national infowar strategy," writes Neil Munro in
the Washington Post. "If the request is approved by the Defense
Department and accepted by President Clinton, senior officials from
the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, Secret Service,
State Department, U.S. Information Agency and Commerce Department
would develop the infowar strategy for the president's approval."[20]
According to Munro, the author of "The Quick and Dead: Electronic
Combat and Modern War" (St. Martins Press, 1991), defense officials
feel hamstrung by the American libertarian tradition, which limits
their ability to protect private-sector networks.

     The Pentagon is worried that an offensive capability in infowar
doesn't require much capital. "It's the great equalizer," says Alvin
Toffler. "That's why poor countries are going to go for this." Former
Pentagon communications chief Donald Latham adds that "a few very
smart guys with computer workstations and modems could endanger lives
and cause great economic disruption."[21] For those with capital, WMD
(weapons of mass destruction) becmes the great temptation. Even here,
the proliferation of information is the chief culprit, according to
Carl Builder of the Rand Corporation. At one time Builder was
responsible for the security of all nuclear materials in civilian
hands in the U.S. He worries about the fact that the flow of
information into and out of a nation can no longer be controlled:

    The materials for nuclear devices are increasingly in commerce,
    and all that lies between the taking of those materials and making
    nuclear devices is information. I was so concerned about this when
    I was responsible for nuclear safeguards that we called in some
    nuclear bomb makers and they told us hair-raising recipes: "If you
    really want to make a crude nuclear explosive, here is how you
    could do it, and do it very simply on your kitchen table, with
    materials that are available in the hardware store."[22]


     Too much information, too much vulnerability, and to top it off,
there's a sense of unreality about it. Walter Wriston, the former head
of Citibank and Citicorp, and a former trustee at Rand and other think
tanks, has claimed that information about money is more valuable than
money itself. A new "information standard" is replacing the gold
standard, as electronic data shifts exchange rates around the world
instantly, without any bullion or currency physically changing
hands.[23] What does it all mean?

     At a minimum, it provides new opportunities to feed post-Cold War
paranoia. In the Pentagon game scenario described by Time magazine,
ATM networks go berserk in Georgia, and people across the country
start panic withdrawals.[24] In real life it gets even better. On 22
November 1994, Robert Hager reported breathlessly on NBC News about
hacker intrusions into Pentagon computers. Just in case some kindly
old ladies failed to grasp the gravity of the situation, Hager's
voice-over gratuitously added that hackers broke into one nameless
hospital's records and reversed the results of a dozen pap smears.
Patients wo may have had ovarian cancer, Hager claimed, were told
instead that they were okay. If the Pentagon suddenly tells us that
Bulgarian hackers are the reason why the ATMs and card-swipe machines
in Peoria aren't working, will this be the new call to arms, the
modern equivalent to Pearl Harbor?

     It's not even clear that we're getting something in return for
our increasing insecurity. "We see computers everywhere but in the
productivity statistics," notes MIT economist Robert Solow.[25] A neo-
Luddite tendency is emerging, represented by writers such as Theodore
Roszak,[26] Kirkpatrick Sale,[27] and John Zerzan.[28] Sale recently
smashed a computer with a sledgehammer in front of 1,500 people at New
York City's Town Hall. Zerzan doesn't own a computer on philosophical
grounds. (Perhaps it's just as well. Once while I was tripping with
him in 1974, Zerzan remarked that his stereo wasn't working. I
instantly discovered that his cables were plugged into the wrong
jacks, and presto, we had rock and roll.)

     The ambivalence of the information age is a theme that also runs
through the works of Jacques Ellul. He worries that the hype about the
wonderful decentralization and democratization of the new technology,
and the insistence that we must adapt to it, is a form of "ideological
terrorism."[29] Alvin Toffler, a cheerleader for the information age
if ever there was one, also expresses reservations about the
"fragility" of knowledge (small bits can make a huge difference), the
"analysis paralysis" of information overload, and the power of the
media over a nation's political life.[30]


     As more people feel marginalized by information technology,
confusion over its significance and capabilities, as well as paranoia
and concern over its effects, are bound to increase. New surveillance
technologies alone will do this if nothing else does. In Britain, the
government promotes and supports the installation of closed-circuit
television cameras in public places. Today these cameras feature night
vision, computer-asssted operation, motion-detection capability, and
bullet-proof casing. Many of them can read a cigarette pack at 100
meters.[31]

     Communications surveillance technology is even more worrisome.
FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, enjoyed some media
hoopla under their first director, Brian Bruh, who used to give
interviews. No one is talking now under director Stanley Morris, and
their mission is quietly expanding. FinCEN collects and tracks
financial data, and then uses modeling techniques to detect money
laundering and organized crime. This year President Clinton expanded
their brief to include security-clearance investigations. An
interagency effort, FinCEN has over 200 employees from the IRS, FBI,
Secret Service, DEA, NSC, NSA, the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, and the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC), and they work closely with the BATF, CIA, and DIA.
Their dozens of databases function as a vacuum cleaner for financial
information, including currency transaction reports from banks, credit
reports, computerized real estate records, and the like.[32]

     Most likely this is only the beginning. In 1991 the FDIC was
asked to blueprint a plan that would monitor every single bank account
in the U.S. The FDIC wasn't enthusiastic, but they did determine that
it would cost only $30 million to build and $20 million per year to
operate. Congress dumped the idea in June 1993 because of concerns
about privacy. Due to the recent hype over domestic terrorism,
however, the CIA and other agencies have expressed renewed interest in
the concept.[33 Although the CIA and NSA are not supposed to be
involved in the surveillance of U.S. citizens, the interagency
approach represented by FinCEN, which allows constituent agencies to
roam unsupervised through their data, appears to have obviated this
prohibition.

     The Clipper Chip, about which so much has been written, is
currently on hold but not forgotten. On 30 March 1995, FBI director
Louis Freeh testified before a House subcommittee that "powerful
encryption is becoming commonplace," and "this, as much as any issue,
jeopardizes the public safety and national security of this country.
Drug cartels, terrorists, and kidnappers will use telephones and other
communications media with impunity knowing that their conversations
are immune from our most valued investigative technique."[34] In
August, the Electronic Privacy Information Center received hundreds of
FBI documents under the FOIA showing that more than two years ago,
despite their assurances that Clipper would be voluntary, federal
agencies had already concluded that Clipper would only succeed if
alternative security techniques are outlawed.[35]


     While U.S. intelligence agencies want a monopoly on encryption,
Congress and some lobbying groups are nervous about the new cyber-
savvy populism. Internet-phobe Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) tacked an
amendment to the Senate's terrorism bill which prohibits the
distribution of "information relating to explosive materials for a
criminal purpose." The amendment passed by unanimous consent and the
entire bill passed the Senate 91-8, but is currently stalled in the
House. Another Senator, Jim Exon (D-NE), reintroduced the
Communications Decency Act in February because "American children are
subjected to pornography and smut on the Internet."[36]

     Last December the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked the Prodigy
online service to stop "hate groups" from posting messages, and wants
the federal government to police the Internet in a similar manner.[37]
The Anti-Defamation League's Tom Halpern says that the ADL is
"undrtaking efforts to monitor the activities of Muslim extremists and
others on the Internet. When evidence arises that a posting
constitutes or encourages illegal activities, naturally we'd bring it
to the attention of law enforcement."[38]

     To fan the flames of incipient Internet repression, it's always
useful to run a front-page story about Subcomandante Marcos and his
laptop, which he carries in a backpack and plugs into the lighter
socket of an old pickup truck. "When federal police raided alleged
Zapatista safe houses in Mexico City and the southern state of
Veracruz last week, they found as many computer diskettes as bullets,"
writes Tod Robberson for the Washington Post from San Cristobal. In
January, the story goes, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo "became
acquainted with the power [of] the Internet when [he] announced the
start of a military offensive aimed at capturing the ski-masked
Zapatista leader." Within hours, Zedillo's fax machine "broke or was
eventually turned off," as "cyber-peaceniks" sent out urgent requests
on the Internet for a fax campaign. The hundreds of faxes caused
Zedillo to call back his troops.[39]

     If that doesn't make Congress nervous, another cover story in
Time should do the trick. An undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon
University named Martin Rimm spied on the personal directories and
downloading habits of 3,000 students, staff, and faculty to compile a
survey on computer pornography. Rimm's study was published in a law
journal, was the centerpiece in the Time cover story, enjoyed exposure
on the ABC News program Nightline, and was entered into the
Congressional Record by Charles Grassley (R-IA). Now a campus
committee is considering the ethics of the spying, which is apparently
considered an internal campus matter. But Time came as close as they
ever do to a retraction for a different reason: the methodology of the
study was so poor that the data did not support the conclusions.[40]
Carnegie Mellon, by the way, is the same university that hosts the
Pentagon's Computer mergency Response Team -- whose manager brought us
the Bulgarian virus story.

     The most consistent horror story is that the Internet is
dangerous for business. The Computer Security Institute in San
Francisco, in their 1995 Internet Security Survey, reports that one
out of every five Net sites has suffered a security breach. Thirty
percent of the intrusions occurred after a firewall, which is designed
to guard the site, was installed. There is a bright side: CSI
estimates that sales of anti-hacker software will grow from $1.1
billion in 1995 to $16.2 billion in year 2000.[41] What they don't
mention is that by then you'll also need a driver's license to cruise
the superhighway.

     The only mystery is why anyone would feel that new laws are
needed to rein in the Net. America Online cooperated with a two-year
FBI investigation into computer child pornography, and more than 120
homes were raided and searched in August.[42] (Adult pornography falls
under the "community standards" interpretation of the First Amendment,
but the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that child porn is always
illegal.) And all it would take to get a warrant to monitor the
Internet backbone would be to complain about Bulgarian viruses to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Between 1979 and 1994, this
secret court approved a total of 8,130 surveillance actions submitted
to it by federal agencies, and has yet to deny even one
application.[43]


     Apparently there's more to information warfare than hackers and
Pentagon buzz words, overpaid OPSEC consultants, economic
intelligence, and surveillance of financial networks. Something else
could be going on here, and Alvin Toffler offers a clue:

    The shift to third-wave information warfare is ... ultimately a
    battle for control of the information flows of the world. In the
    Gulf War you saw classic examples of the use of propaganda and
    perception management.... [In Washington] you had a young woman
    appear before television cameras and talk about babies eing ripped
    out of incubators in Kuwait.... It later turned out that she was
    related to the Kuwaiti embassy and that she was really apparently
    following a script. In the era of information warfare, all of that
    is going to become far more important and be managed with far more
    sophistication.[44]

     So one important aspect of infowar, it would seem, is
disinformation. This makes it especially difficult: it's not enough to
be merely informed, because now it's also necessary to consider the
motives and agendas of every source of information. With twice as much
access to information today, that means four times as much work. Few
of us are up for the challenge.

     Just when the stakes are highest, our major reporters, pundits,
and political representatives are least helpful. Their one-liners are
too predictable, they are too easily manipulated by forces they should
be trying to expose, and apart from endless analyses of the nuances of
presidential party politics, or what the jurors are thinking at the
O.J. trial, they have little to say about issues that matter. Millions
of ordinary people are sensing this, and are looking toward
alternative media such as zines, the Internet, and talk radio.

     We could all use some help. Academia has been out to lunch for
years; there's little point in wasting much time there. The populist
right and the incredible shrinking left, much to the delight of the
elites who manipulate them both, still waste their time attacking each
other. Small wonder that the neo-Luddites are nervous, the militias
suspicious, and the authorities would like to monitor everyone.
Welcome to the wonderful Information Age.

1.   Leonard C. Lewin, Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility
     and Desirability of Peace (New York: Dell Publishing / Delta,
     1967), p. 44.

2.   Robert Tomsho, "Though Called a Hoax, 'Iron Mountain' Report
     Guides Some Militias," Wall Street Journal, 9 May 1995, p. A5.

3.   Pat Cooper, "Organized Crime Hackers Jeopardize Security of
     U.S.," Defense News, 3-9 October 1994, p.18. Mr. Gary failed to
     respond to a 23 November 1994 letter from Public Information
     Research requesting more information on virus courses at
     Bulgarian universities.

4.   Douglas Waller, "Onward Cyber Soldiers," Time, 21 August 1995,
     pp. 38-46.

5.   A quotation from this reporter: "These feats turn out to be kids'
     stuff compared to the government's 'infowar' capabilities, touted
     in a recent Time cover story." James R. Norman, "Ye Shall Know
     the Truth ... and the Truth Shall Get You Fired," Media Bypass,
     October 1995, p. 18.

6.   An official definition of OPSEC is contained in National Security
     Decision Directive No. 298, dated 22 Januay 1988: "OPSEC is a
     systematic and proved process by which the U.S. Government and
     its supporting contractors can deny to potential adversaries
     information about capabilities and intentions by identifying,
     controlling, and protecting generally unclassified evidence of
     the planning and execution of sensitive Government activities."
     It appears to be the flip side of freedom of information and the
     public's right to know. On the OPSEC Professionals Society, see
     OPS News, December 1994. They are located at 7519 Ridge Road,
     Frederick MD 21702-3519, Tel: 301-663-1418, Fax: 301-371-8955.
     Some literature and back issues are available on the
     OPSEC/Infowar section of the National Computer Security
     Association forum on CompuServe (GO NCSA).

7.   John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (International Policy
     Department, Rand Corporation), "Cyberwar is Coming!", 1993. From
     the military section of the WELL gopher server; originally
     published in Comparative Strategy, Volume 12, No. 2, pp. 141-65.

8.   Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on
     the Computer Frontier (New York: Simon & Schuster / Touchstone,
     1992), pp. 181-2, 186; Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking
     a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (New York: Pocket
     Books, 1990), pp. 119-35.

9.   John J. Fialka, "Pentagon Studies Art of `Information Warfare' to
     Reduce its Systems' Vulnerability to Hackers," Wall Street
     Journal, 3 July 1995, p. A12.

10.  David Nicholson, "Doing Battle in Cyberspace," Washington Post, 5
     July 1994, p. C2.

11.  "Dawn of the Infowar Era," Intelligence Newsletter, Paris,
     France, 14 September 1995, No. 271, pp. 1, 8.

12.  Fialka, p. A12.

13.  Jerry Kronenberg, United Press International, 19 August 1995; Dan
     Blake, Associated Press, 19 August 1995.

14.  Jim Wolf, Reuter News Service, 18 May 1995.

15.  "CIA Chief Reviews Rights Issue," Associated Press, 21 June 1995.

16.  Jack Anderson and Michael Bistein, "CIA's Hottest Question,"
     Washington Post, 14 March 1993, p. C7.

17.  Bill Gertz, "CIA Chief Rejects Industrial Spying," Washington
     Times, 24 November 1993, p. A3.

18.  John F. Quinn, "Commercial Intelligence Gathering: JETRO and the
     Japanese Experience," Fifth National OPSEC Conference, 2-5 May
     1994.

19.  Bill Gertz, "Economic Spying in U.S. Is Done by Allies, Report
     Says," Washington Times, 9 August 1995, p. A3.

20.  Neil Munro, "The Pentagon's New Nightmare: An Electronic Pearl
     Harbor," Washington Post, 16 July 1995, p. C3.

21.  Waller, p. 43.

22.  Carl Builder is mentioned in Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and
     Anti-War (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 197-8, 202-3. The
     quotation is from a transcript of The I-Bomb, a documentary
     produced for BBC Horizon by Broadcasting Support Services.
     Produced by Kate O'Sullivan and edited by Peter Millson.

23.  Walter B. Wriston, "Technology and Sovereignty," Foreign Affairs,
     Winter 1988/1989, pp. 63-75; Walter B. Wriston, Risk and Other
     Four-Letter Words (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

24.  Waller, p. 46.

25.  Don L. Boroughs, et al., "Desktop Dilemma," U.S. News and World
     Report, 24 December 1990, pp. 46-8.

26.  Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise
     on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of
     Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

27.  Kevin Kelly interviews Kirkpatrick Sale, "Interview with the
     Luddite," Wired, June 1995, pp. 166-168, 211-6.

28.  Kenneth B. Noble, "Prominent Anarchist Finds Unsought Ally in
     Serial Bomber," New York Times, 7 May 1995, p. 12.

29.  Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Grand Rapids MI: William
     B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990), pp. 76, 384-7.

30.  Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (New York: Little,
     Brown, 1993), pp. 148, 158-9, 208-10.

31.  Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC Alert, 24 September
     1995. (EPIC, 666 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Suite 301, Wahington DC
     20003, Tel: 202-544-9240, Fax: 202-547-5482)

32.  Anthony L. Kimery, "Big Brother Wants to Look Into Your Bank
     Account," Wired, December 1993, pp. 90-3, 134; J. Michael
     Springmann, "FinCEN --American Financial Intelligence Service,"
     Unclassified (Association of National Security Alumni), Summer
     1995, p. 6.

33.  "Banking Secrecy Under Threat," Intelligence Newsletter, Paris,
     France, No. 270, 31 August 1995, p. 3.

34.  Electronic Privacy Information Center, "Wiretap Update," 18 April
     1995.

35.  EPIC Press Release, 16 August 1995.

36.  Jim Exon, "Letter to the Editor," Washington Post, 9 March 1995,
     p. A20.

37.  "Group Protests On-Line Hate," Associated Press, 14 December
     1994.

38.  Mike Mokrzycki, "Militants Turn to Cyberspace," Associated Press,
     16 April 1995.

39.  Tod Robberson, "Mexican Rebels Using a High-Tech Weapon,"
     Washington Post, 20 February 1995, p. A1.

40.  Peter H. Lewis, "Computer Smut Study Prompts New Concerns," New
     York Times, 16 July 1995, p. 11.

41.  John Edwards, "Organization Warns of Net Perils," CompuServe
     Online News, 21 September 1995.

42.  "FBI Lures Computer Pedophiles," Associated Press, 14 September
     1995.

43.  Steven Aftergood, "Secret Court Increased Surveillance in 1994,"
     Secrecy & Government Bulletin, September 1995. (Federation of
     American Scientists, 307 Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington DC
     20002, Tel: 202-675-1012)

44.  Alvin Toffler, from a transcript of The I-Bomb, a documentary
     produced for BBC Horizon by Broadcasting Support Services.
     Produced by Kate O'Sullivan and edited by Peter Millson.


Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 11, October-December 1995:

        CIA Hackers vs. Vince Foster: Feeding Frenzy on the Net

     In the opening scene of the movie The Net, released last summer,
a government official tells his chauffeur to "take the Parkway" this
time. At the park he puts a gun in his mouth and commits suicide. As
the movie develops, a Bill Gates look-alike is encouraging everyone to
install his "Gatekeeper" security software, recommended to avoid the
mysterious computer glitches that are threatening important systems
around the country.

     But a Trojan horse is embedded in Gatekeeper that allows his
people to secretly alter data on the computers that use it. The
heroine, an innocent hacker-type recluse, downloads some software that
could reveal the secret. Suddenly she discovers that she has a new
identity, complete with a criminal record, and she's wanted by the
police. It turns out later that the Vince Foster character in the
beginning of the movie had his computer test altered to show
incorrectly that he had AIDS. Thus the main opposition to the
government's proposal to install Gatekeeper in all their agencies was
conveniently eliminated.

     Scene two, take one: hold on to your hat -- this time it's for
real. A senior editor at Forbes, James R. Norman, is working on a
story about Inslaw, Inc. He discovers that another senior editor has a
father, Harry Wechsler, who is a former CIA officer and now heads a
company called Boston Systematics. This connection leads to Israel,
then from Israel back to the famous PROMIS software by Inslaw, then to
a different Systematics, Inc. in Little Rock, a frm that sells banking
software all over the world. Jackson Stephens was behind the Little
Rock Systematics, and once tried to buy into the American end of BCCI.

     This second Systematics uses the Rose Law Firm, and Vince Foster,
according to Norman, is their liaison with the National Security
Agency. This brings us back to PROMIS, which the NSA, through
Systematics, is installing all over the world. PROMIS has a back door
that is used by the CIA to shift secret funds to their proprietaries,
and by the NSA to secretly monitor financial transactions.

     Meanwhile, back at Langley, a small group of CIA hackers with a
Cray finds Foster's name in a Mossad database. This database points
them to Foster's Swiss bank account, where the hackers simulate a
withdrawal and suck out $2.73 million. Foster is about to go to
Switzerland again, but discovers that the account is empty. He finds
out that he's under investigation for spying for Israel and gets
depressed. Either he commits suicide or is murdered -- Norman doesn't
know which.

     The CIA hackers, who call themselves the "Fifth Column," proceed
to clean out the offshore accounts of some 200 leading lights of the
Republican and Democratic parties, for a total of more than $2
billion. All of this is unauthorized hacking, but it all goes back
into the U.S. Treasury. Luckily for the hackers, the guilty parties
aren't in a position to complain. Eventually Jim Norman is on the
case, and Forbes is set to publish his story. At the last minute the
story is spiked. Norman thinks he knows the reason: Caspar Weinberger,
publisher emeritus at Forbes, is one of those who had his Swiss
account emptied.

     Over several months, Norman feeds the story by bits and pieces
into an Internet newsgroup. J. Orlin Grabbe, a confederate of
Norman's, contributes some new morsels during this period. One is that
the NSA binders that Foster kept in Bernie Nussbaum's safe were
presidential authentication codes for the use of nuclear weapons.
Grabbe suggests that Israel, by getting this inormation from Foster,
was able to become a virtual nuclear power by hacking their way into
the U.S. arsenal. Norman is invited to leave Forbes in August. His
"Fostergate" story that never ran in Forbes, plus a follow-up story on
a key source of his (former CIA operative Charles S. Hayes), are
published in the August and October issues of "Media Bypass" magazine.

     While this was developing on the Internet, Susan Schmidt of the
Washington Post wrote a page-one article (4 July 1995) that mentioned
the Norman story and other Vince Foster theories. She added that
Systematics, Inc. in Little Rock (now called ALLTEL) had previously
denied every aspect of Norman's story and then hired a libel lawyer.
And Richard Mellon Scaife was financing some of the effort behind the
drive to open up the Foster investigation. For Smith and the Post, all
this is evidence that conspiracy theorists are wacko.

     Most of those who have been actively pushing the Foster case,
such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Reed Irvine, are merely interested
in showing that either Foster committed suicide and then the body was
moved to the park, or he was murdered. Although it's true that Foster
made trips to Switzerland on occasion, the theory that he was an
Israeli spy is not considered credible by them.

     Norman and Grabbe may have the best of intentions. But it's also
possible that they are relying on disinformation sources. A friend of
Grabbe's in this caper is Jack Wheeler, a right-wing adventurer who
writes for "Strategic Investment," a newsletter with Scaife links that
has been pushing the Foster matter. Wheeler considers himself one of
the fathers of the "Reagan Doctrine," which he credits with the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Since 1966 he has been friends with Dana
Rohrabacher (R-CA), a former Reagan speechwriter. During the 1980s,
Wheeler supported all manner of anti-communist insurgencies, including
RENAMO of Mozambique -- a brutal creation of South Africa's apartheid
government. In one Internet post dated 8 July 1995, Grabbe wites the
following: "I recalled the words of my friend Jack Wheeler, who told
me: 'We created a doctrine to do in the Soviet empire. And it worked.
It's now time to do in the Washington empire.'" This suggests that one
influence on Grabbe is the well-connected Wheeler, who may be
motivated by an agenda.

     If the Norman-Grabbe episode proves anything, it shows that it's
inadvisable to deal with today's flood of information at face value.
From both ends of the process -- the information producer with
possible hidden agendas, and the Internet consumer seeking
reinforcement for political prejudices -- the entire linkup is dicey
at best. Moreover, some on the Internet hide behind anonymity. Both
Norman (since early July) and Grabbe sign their names to their posts,
but several of their boosters use first names only or even pseudonyms.

     For the information age to work at all, the power of access it
offers must be coupled with new responsibilities. Otherwise it will
surely collapse of its own weight, with the little guy under all the
rubble. There's more riding on this than a plot turn in a Hollywood
movie.


--

Mike

"To commit the perfect crime, you don't have to be intelligent, just
 in charge of the investigation that follows."

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