The secret Downing Street memo

The following memo was originally published in the Sunday Times of Britain on May 1st, and reported on "The Truth About Political Stuff" blog on May 5th. It has yet to be reported in any significant way by the so-called US press. This is the smoking gun!!! Why is the US media ignoring this?

Here is the pertinent item from the July 23, 2002 memo:

"It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."




The Sunday Times - Britain

May 01, 2005

The secret Downing Street memo
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

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Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day
(May 8, 2005)

"The Republicans' hands aren't clean on this either. What we did with Bill Clinton's nominees -- about 62 of them -- we just didn't give them votes in committee or we didn't bring them up."

-- Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), quoted by the AP, on the judicial filibusters used by Democrats to block seven (7) of President Bush nominees.

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Call center agents ... without the call centers

MSNBC.com

Call center agents ... without the call centers
Need customer service? Increasingly, callers connected to home-based workers
The Associated Press

ARLINGTON, Texas - “Hello, is Jennifer there? Jennifer at extension 43?”

Nancy Allor tilts back from the workstation at the foot of her king-size bed, momentarily puzzling the voice on her headset. A soap opera flickers silently on the TV behind her. Inside the otherwise hushed suburban townhouse, Allor’s parakeet chirps.

Whoever Jennifer is, she’s not here.

“I’m sorry,” Allor says, grinning. “I’m in a call center and we can’t transfer. But I’d be happy to help you.”

Americans dialing for customer service are increasingly being connected to workers like Allor — call center agents without call centers. The move to home-based agents, working from bedrooms and kitchen tables across the country, started as a trickle in the late 1990s. But it is picking up speed as a low-cost alternative to traditional call centers.

It’s not as cheap as offshoring, the shift of operations to countries with pools of low-paid but well-educated workers. But companies bent on cutting costs also see home agents as a way to avoid some of the consumers complaints common to overseas call centers.

More than 100,000 U.S. workers now field customer service calls from home, according to a recent report by consulting firm IDC. Over the next two years, one of every 10 U.S. call centers is likely to shift at least partly to home-based agents, according to another report by consultant Gartner Inc.

Some dub it “homeshoring.”

Call in an order to 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. for Mother’s Day, and there’s a good chance it will be handled by a home-based agent. The same is true for consumers calling The Vermont Teddy Bear Co. or to book a room at a Wyndham International Inc. hotel.

Retailer Office Depot Inc. is closing 10 of its 12 U.S. call centers this year, replacing 900 full-time agents with home-based agents. They include Allor, an agent for Plano, Texas-based Working Solutions Inc., one of several virtual call center firms.

Cutting costs is not the only selling point of virtual call centers, but it’s a large part of the appeal.

Getting rid of call center buildings saves money on real estate. Most of the home-based agents work part-time or as independent contractors, so employers don’t pay for health insurance and benefits. Unions, which represent workers at some large call centers, will be hard-pressed to reach workers spread across thousands of homes, analysts say.

In addition, home-based agents for most companies pay for their own equipment. And companies say the workers are better qualified and more content than those at traditional call centers saving on recruitment and training.


“We are actually realizing some pretty good double-digit savings from this,” says Julian Carter, the Office Depot executive in charge of the call center switch. The company expects savings of $15 million a year.

It’s not just the cost savings, though.

Fielding calls with home agents “gives you the ability to staff with local people who speak the language well, that have the same culture, the same trends, that basically live in the same place,” said Esteban Kolsky, a Gartner analyst. “That’s very appealing to most customers.”

Some of the biggest advocates of virtual call centers are home-based agents, who say the arrangement provides flexibility unavailable in traditional office jobs. Customers of 1-800-Flowers.com, for example, have no way of knowing that when agent Barbara Leeper-Zilk picks up their call at her home in Littleton, Colo., she’s often is doing a load of laundry between calls.

“I get up at 10 to 6, let the dogs out, grab a bottle of water, go upstairs and turn on the computer and I’m at work,” says Leeper-Zilk, one of nearly 4,000 agents working for Alpine Access Inc., a Golden, Colo.-based virtual call center firm.

Leeper-Zilk first signed on for extra spending money. Many other home agents are mothers of young children who work during school hours, and older people who want to work limited hours or pick up supplemental income.

“If I was to have a desk job and was required to sit seven out of eight hours, that would be too much for me,” said Pam Brackett, who takes calls from her home in Bellingham, Mass. and whose daily routine is limited by severe rheumatoid arthritis. “If it wasn’t for doing this, I wouldn’t be doing anything.”

The virtual call center concept has been around since the 1990s, but companies were reluctant to give up the managerial control and supervision of a brick-and-mortar call center.

One of the earliest adopters was JetBlue Airways Inc., in 2000. The airline now has a 900-agent network of work-at-home reservation agents, all in the Salt Lake City area.

“We have this pretty much down to a science of where our peak demand is and how many hours we need on the phones,” said Steve Mayne, JetBlue’s manager of business processes. Agents “can bid for an ideal schedule, but it’s awarded on seniority. We tell them they need to be flexible.”

Not everybody — or every home — is suited to call center work. Companies make that clear, and frequently listen in on calls to ensure agents follow the rules.

“This is not alternative childcare. This is a special work environment — no kids, no pets, zero tolerance,” said Tim Houlne, CEO of Working Solutions. “We can’t afford for the dog to start barking when the FedEx man comes to the door.”

Still, Houlne says, compared to a traditional call center the work-at-home arrangement requires a level of trust that has strong appeal to many people.

“Instead of bringing people in to work, we would bring the work out to them,” said Jim Ball, co-founder of Alpine Access. “We basically have an unlimited pool available to us.”

Many of the agents work 15 to 20 hours a week. But some have fashioned it into a financial mainstay, jockeying schedules and making the most of incentive rules, sometimes juggling multiple accounts.

Take Allor, the suburban Dallas agent. She switches from taking orders for printer cartridges and legal pads to booking hotel reservations, timed to the make the most of both the morning rush by office workers to place orders, and the midday pickup in people making travel plans.

Late in the morning, Allor’s older daughter, Carrie Cerneka, tiptoes upstairs and signs on at another workstation on the other side of the bed. In between calls, mother and daughter joust over who’s the most productive home agent.

“Hey, look, I got 4 — 4 reservations!” Allor teases.

“That’s what she says to make herself feel better,” says Cerneka, 23.

On this account, Allor earns 22 cents per minute on the phone and 75 cents for each reservation. The pay averages better than $14 an hour. Allor usually works 50 to 55 hours a week and says she earned about $27,000 last year, when she worked fewer hours.

The rap on jobs like Allor’s, an issue even the virtual call center companies say people should be mindful of, is that it can leave some agents feeling isolated. But agents say it beats trading office gossip around the watercooler, and eliminates office politics. The proof, Allor says, is the constant stream of messages she volleys with co-workers around the country.

“I have friends on here that I truly adore,” Allor says of her virtual colleagues. “Sometimes we hang up at night and the last thing you want to do is get on the phone. But we do. We’ll call each other and root each other on.”

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U.S. view of Iraq insurgency shifting

MSNBC.com

U.S. view of Iraq insurgency shifting
Foreign fighters, jihadists take center stage
By Bradley Graham
The Washington Post

BAGHDAD, May 8 - Senior U.S. commanders say their view of the Iraqi insurgency has begun to shift, with higher priority being given to combating foreign fighters and Iraqi jihadists.

This shift comes in response to the recent upsurge in suicide attacks and other developments that indicate a more prominent role in the insurgency by these radical groups, the commanders say.

Previously, U.S. authorities have depicted the insurgency as being dominated largely by what the Pentagon has dubbed "former regime elements" -- a combination of onetime Baath Party loyalists and Iraqi military and security service officers intent on restoring Sunni rule. But since the Jan. 30 elections, this segment of the insurgency has appeared to pull back from the fight, at least for a while, reassessing strategies and exploring a possible political deal with the new government, senior U.S. officers here say.

Acting on the assumption that foreign fighters and Iraqi extremists may now pose the greater and more immediate threat to security in Iraq, U.S. commanders have given orders in recent days to reposition some U.S. ground forces and intelligence assets in northwestern Iraq to further fortify the border with Syria and block suspected infiltration routes. They are also stepping up efforts to go after leading bomb-makers and key organizers of the suicide attacks.

In interviews, several commanders and intelligence officers cautioned that their shift was still tentative and based more on fragmentary information and intuition than on solid, specific evidence. They said assessments differ among U.S. intelligence specialists.

But the officers said the impression that a harder-core insurgent element has become more important is supported by the increase in suicide missions and the greater ruthlessness of the attacks, many of which have been positioned and timed to kill civilians as well as Iraqi security forces. U.S. and Iraqi authorities say suicide drivers are invariably foreign fighters. Officers here said they knew of no documented case in which a suicide attacker turned out to have been an Iraqi.


A recent U.S. intelligence estimate also shows an increase last month in the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, according to several officers familiar with it.

"There seems to be an increasing foreign element to the insurgency," said Army Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.

‘Fairly competent terrorist base’
With Baathist-led Sunni groups appearing to sit on the sidelines for now, some senior officers say the insurgency seems to have shrunk as its tactics have become more vicious.

"The base of the insurgency is getting very narrow, but it is still a fairly competent terrorist base," said one commanding officer on condition of anonymity.

The generals allow for the possibility that the apparent change in the nature of the insurgency may be only temporary. They noted, for instance, that a failure to draw the Sunnis into the new political process could again drive the Baathists into more violent opposition.

"They may have just taken a pause," said Army Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas III, the top military intelligence officer in Iraq. "I'm not sure they've quit the insurgency. They can certainly come back."

Even with the reported rise in foreign fighters, several senior officers said, the number estimated to be coming into the country each month is still relatively small -- in the neighborhood of several score. In numerical terms, they said, the insurgency remains essentially homegrown. Iraqi members of extremist Islamic factions, such as the Ansar al Sunna Army, continue to account for many insurgent attacks.

But in terms of overall effect, the foreign fighters who serve as suicide bombers and cause high casualties are having a disproportionate impact, the officers said. The most prominent foreign fighter -- Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi -- has become Iraq's best-known insurgent, leading a network that has asserted responsibility for some of the bloodier attacks.

Like Zarqawi, a number of foreign fighters are said to be forming tactical partnerships with Iraqi extremist groups to carry out attacks. Though foreigners may drive the suicide cars, Iraqis are frequently behind the scenes operating the networks that provide safe houses, assemble the explosives and arrange other support.

The number of car bombings jumped from 64 in February to 135 in April, according to U.S. military statistics. The proportion of such attacks involving a suicide driver also soared, from about 25 percent to just over 50 percent.

‘Their precision weapon’
"The car bomb has become the weapon of choice for these guys, it's their precision weapon," another general here said.

Overall, the rate of attacks has climbed from about 30 to 40 a day in February and March to an average of about 70 a day now, by the U.S. military's count.

The main infiltration route into Iraq for foreign fighters continues to be through Syria, the officers here said. Citing terrorist Web sites that advertise for recruits in such countries as Sudan, Libya and Saudi Arabia, the officers said the fighters tended to be flown to Damascus, the Syrian capital, where they were met by facilitators and moved across the border into Iraq.

The spate of car bombings has prompted U.S. commanders to put renewed emphasis on interdicting infiltrators near the border and uncovering bomb-making networks inside Iraq. But commanders are still debating how much to refocus U.S. military operations on the more radical elements of the insurgency.

"Do you focus the preponderance of effort on the former regime elements, or do you shift the targeting effort to another part of the insurgency? That's what people are grappling with right now," said DeFreitas, the intelligence officer.

With the recent rise in attacks, U.S. commanders acknowledge that some of the momentum gained from January's election has been lost. But they say they still hope to make enough progress containing the insurgency and building up Iraqi security forces this year to allow for a significant reduction in U.S. troops early next year. A formal assessment of the progress toward that end is scheduled for next month.

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Probe twist: cash & Bern

nydailynews.com
Probe twist: cash & Bern

Kerik hit up pal for apt.

By RUSS BUETTNER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Bernard Kerik was desperately worried about being able to afford a Bronx apartment that is now at the center of a bribery investigation involving the former NYPD boss, his E-mails show.

Kerik repeatedly asked a friend for money to help buy the Riverdale co-op in the summer of 1999, saying he felt like a "schmuck" because he didn't have cash for closing costs, let alone the remodeling needed to make it "livable."

Despite saying he was broke, Kerik managed an overhaul that included top-of-the-line appliances, a granite kitchen counter and three new marble bathrooms, including one with a Jacuzzi, an appraiser noted.

Kerik's attorney says he paid $170,000 for the apartment and up to $65,000 for renovations. Somehow, though, the three-bedroom unit sold 3-1/2 years later for $460,000, records show.


Since a Daily News story in December, investigators have zeroed in on whether the apartment was part of a bribery scheme in which Kerik helped a city contractor, Interstate Industrial, appease regulators in exchange for the renovations.

The story was published as Kerik withdrew his nomination to head the federal Department of Homeland Security, citing a nanny's documentation problems.

The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement in March subpoenaed records from Kerik related to the apartment and Interstate, noting that a bribe, if proven, would make Interstate ineligible to build casinos. Kerik recently agreed to be deposed.

The city Department of Investigation is probing similar issues.

Kerik's attorney, Joseph Tacopina, said Kerik hired a company not affiliated with Interstate for the renovations. He has refused to disclose the name until the investigations end.

When he bought the apartment, Kerik was the city's correction commissioner. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the same building, at 679 W. 239th St., with his pregnant wife, Hala.

From April through July 1999, Kerik wrote six E-mails to a close friend, Lawrence Ray, asking for money to help with the apartment. Ray was then working for Interstate, a job Kerik helped him get with a positive reference.

Ray last year provided the E-mails to The News, and later to investigators.

Tacopina has called the purchase of the apartment a "modest" cost to Kerik at $170,000.

But in the E-mails, Kerik described himself as too worried to sleep and demeaned by having to beg for cash. He said he had drained his pension of available funds and couldn't bear to ask his wife's family for money.

"I've got to make sure we can do the renovations, mostly, the new kitchen and the two small bath rooms, or else I can't do this because it's not livable as is," he wrote on April 29, 1999.

Kerik added that because of his bad credit, the bank had demanded a bigger down payment, money "that I would have used to fix it up."

His despair only rose.

"I'm walking on eggshells until this apartment is done," he wrote on July 24, 1999. "I had to beg, borrow and [humiliate myself] for the down payment and I'm still [sweating] over the $5,000 I need for closing if it happens. Then the renovations."

But the renovations happened. Tacopina has described them as minor, costing Kerik $50,000 to $65,000. But advertisements and an appraisal done after Kerik put it on the market in December 2001 sound closer to magnificent.

John Edwards Real Estate, Kerik's agent, raved, "Renovated kitchen with a granite countertop, modern appliances, and marble baths. ... A Gem!"

A Foxtons ad mentioned the "elegant marble foyer."

Edwards listed it at $775,000 - more than three times what Kerik said he invested. Tacopina said Edwards determined the price. Edwards referred questions to Kerik.

Edwards advertised the apartment for 14 months, dropping the price to $547,000 when it was last listed, in February 2003. Kerik signed a contract to sell it for $460,000 in April 2003, according to court records filed by the buyer.

Oddly, buyers Kay and Gerald Nugent got the money for the purchase from a $3.75 million legal settlement with the city, stemming from Nugent's 1996 auto accident with a police cruiser.

Originally published on May 8, 2005

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Democrats voted out of church because of their politics, members say

USA TODAY

Democrats voted out of church because of their politics, members say

WAYNESVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Some in Pastor Chan Chandler's flock wish he had a little less zeal for the GOP.

Members of the small East Waynesville Baptist Church say Chandler led an effort to kick out congregants who didn't support President Bush. Nine members were voted out at a Monday church meeting in this mountain town, about 120 miles west of Charlotte.

"He's the kind of pastor who says do it my way or get out," said Selma Morris, the former church treasurer. "He's real negative all the time."

Chandler didn't return a message left by The Associated Press at his home Friday, and several calls to the church went unanswered. He told WLOS-TV in Asheville that the actions were not politically motivated.

The station also reported that 40 others in the 400-member congregation resigned in protest after Monday's vote.

During the presidential election last year, Chandler told the congregation that anyone who planned to vote for Democratic Sen. John Kerry should either leave the church or repent, said former member Lorene Sutton.

Some church members left after Chandler made his ultimatum in October, Morris said.

George Bullard, associate executive director-treasurer for Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, told the Asheville Citizen-Times that a pastor has every right to disallow memberships if a church's bylaws allow for the pastor to establish criteria for membership.


"Membership is a local church issue," he said. "It is not something the state convention would enter into."

He added that the nine members were not legally terminated because Monday's meeting was supposed to be a deacons meeting, not a business meeting. They have a lawyer looking into the situation, he said.

The head of the North Carolina Democratic Party sharply criticized the pastor Friday, saying Chandler jeopardized his church's tax-free status by openly supporting a candidate for president.

"If these reports are true, this minister is not only acting extremely inappropriately by injecting partisan politics into a house of worship, but he is also potentially breaking the law," Chairman Jerry Meek said.

Doris Wilson, one of Chandler's neighbors and a member of First Baptist Church in Waynesville, said God doesn't play partisan politics.

"I hate to see the church suffer like that," she said. "God doesn't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. It just hurts to see that going on."

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Push to replace voting machines spurs confusion

USA TODAY
Push to replace voting machines spurs confusion
By Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Election officials across the nation are scrambling to meet a Jan. 1 deadline to replace outmoded voting machines with equipment that is supposed to be more accurate. But a controversy over the reliability of computerized voting machines continues to cloud their decisions.

"The people who are trying to get this done at the local level are just running blind," said Keith Cunningham, president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials. "I hope there's not a 'train wreck,' but that term is being used quietly in conversations among election officials."

There is a consensus among state and local election officials that any machine that relies on computer technology should have some kind of independent backup that voters can use to make sure their votes were recorded correctly and that could be used to verify results if a recount is needed, said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a non-profit organization that monitors election policy.

But election officials are hearing conflicting advice from experts about what kind of backup is best. And a new report from a technical standards committee, which could be delivered as early as today to the federal Election Assistance Commission, takes no position on whether a widely favored option — a paper printout — is advisable.

"There is no clarity whatsoever on what the replacement should be," Chapin said. For cash-strapped election administrators, "there is significant downside risk that you will buy a system that will have to be modified later. They are going as slowly as they can, but the deadline may wind up forcing their hands."

Adding to the confusion is a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that found problems with paper backup for electronic voting machines.

In the study, 36 "voters" used electronic machines to pick candidates and were asked to double-check their ballots using a paper printout. Then they were asked to go through a similar exercise in which their vote choices were played back to them by a computer-generated voice through headphones. Errors were interspersed in the ballots. Only 8% of those using the paper backup caught the errors, compared with 85% using the audio system.

Ted Selker, an authority on human interaction with machines who oversaw the MIT research, said the study supports observations he made of voters using paper backups during recent elections in Chicago and Nevada. "I have lost confidence in paper trails," he said.

Ohio, the most closely watched battleground state in the 2004 elections, is among those struggling with the decision of what to buy.


In Tuscarawas County, Elections Director Charles Miller is awaiting a decision from his elections board by May 24, the deadline set by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

The county was poised to buy computerized touch-screen machines a year ago but delayed the purchase as controversy mounted over their reliability. Last year's presidential election was conducted on the county's old punch-card machines. Early this year, Blackwell directed counties to buy optical-scan machines, which Tuscarawas County proceeded to do.

A month ago, the state relented and opened the door for touch-screen machines — so long as they have a paper backup — and the county was back in limbo.

"They are frustrated about jumping back and forth," Miller said of his elections board. "I don't know what they are going to do."

The 2002 Help America Vote Act has provided $2.3 billion to help states replace antiquated punch-card and lever voting machines by Jan. 1. Punch cards were blamed for many of the problems in the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida, giving rise to the term "hanging chad."

But many of the machines remain in use. The problem goes back to a lack of federal guidance about what technology works best, said Cunningham, who also is election director in Allen County, Ohio.

"The federal government is a year to 18 months behind its own time frame but refuses to adjust the deadlines that counties are facing," Cunningham said. "We are on the verge of wasting one of the biggest pots of money the federal government has ever put forth."

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City, state cell phone taxes on the rise

USA TODAY
City, state cell phone taxes on the rise
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
Cell phone users are being hit by new taxes as state and local governments scramble to replace declining tax revenue from traditional phones.

The new charges are adding $2 to $10 or more a month to cell phone bills on top of existing federal and state taxes and fees for emergency 911 communications. Examples:

•Thirty-two of Virginia's 39 cities have levied cell phone taxes since the Legislature approved the tax in 2003. Most recently: Alexandria approved a $3-a-month tax last week.

•Baltimore added a $3.50 monthly tax in September.

•Oregon's Legislature is considering a 5% tax, the Missouri Legislature a 3% or 4% tax.
THE COST OF CONVENIENCE
State and local taxes on cell phone service vary widely. Also applying in every state is a 6.05% federal levy composed of an excise tax and a fee that subsidizes service to low-income homes and remote areas. Average taxes as of Jan. 1.

Many state and local governments consider new cell phone taxes necessary to recoup money lost from a drop in the number of standard wired phones. The number of wired phone lines nationwide fell from 167 million in 2000 to 132 million in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission reports. cell phone subscribers rose from 109 million to 182 million during that time.

The wireless industry says cell phones are already taxed heavily and often unfairly. The industry is funding a Web site — www.stopaddingtomybill.com — as part of its lobbying effort to squelch the new taxes.

"People can just look at their cell phone bill and see the taxes are already excessive," says Joseph Farren, spokesman for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group. He says taxes accounted for about $9 of the average $51 monthly cell phone bill last year.

Farren says the "watershed event" that started the new round of taxation was Pennsylvania's approval of a 5% cell phone tax in 2003. Other state and local governments have followed suit or are considering it.


State State/ Federal
local taxes Total
taxes
------ ----- ------- ------
Ala. 7.42% 6.05% 13.47%
Alaska 4.02% 6.05% 10.07%
Ariz. 11.05% 6.05% 17.10%
Ark. 10.19% 6.05% 16.24%
Calif. 13.18% 6.05% 19.23%
Colo. 9.35% 6.05% 15.40%
Conn. 6.40% 6.05% 12.45%
Del. 5.46% 6.05% 11.51%
D.C. 12.54% 6.05% 18.59%
Fla. 16.10% 6.05% 22.15%
Ga. 7.49% 6.05% 13.54%
Hawaii 7.47% 6.05% 13.52%
Idaho 2.19% 6.05% 8.24%
Ill. 15.52% 6.05% 21.57%
Ind. 9.57% 6.05% 15.62%
Iowa 6.51% 6.05% 12.56%
Kan. 11.33% 6.05% 17.38%
Ky. 9.93% 6.05% 15.98%
La. 4.37% 6.05% 10.42%
Maine 6.51% 6.05% 12.56%
Md. 10.57% 6.05% 16.62%
Mass. 5.61% 6.05% 11.66%
Mich. 7.05% 6.05% 13.10%
Minn. 8.07% 6.05% 14.12%
Miss. 9.02% 6.05% 15.07%
Mo. 10.37% 6.05% 16.42%
Mont. 4.96% 6.05% 11.01%
Neb. 15.10% 6.05% 21.15%
Nev. 1.11% 6.05% 7.16%
N.H. 7.85% 6.05% 13.90%
N.J. 7.82% 6.05% 13.87%
N.M. 7.61% 6.05% 13.66%
N.Y. 16.16% 6.05% 22.21%
N.C. 7.62% 6.05% 13.67%
N.D. 10.90% 6.05% 16.95%
Ohio 7.63% 6.05% 13.68%
Okla. 9.56% 6.05% 15.61%
Ore. 2.23% 6.05% 8.28%
Pa. 13.52% 6.05% 19.57%
R.I. 14.55% 6.05% 20.60%
S.C. 6.47% 6.05% 12.52%
S.D. 11.97% 6.05% 18.02%
Tenn. 11.52% 6.05% 17.57%
Texas 14.17% 6.05% 20.22%
Utah 12.66% 6.05% 18.71%
Vt. 7.27% 6.05% 13.32%
Va. 7.59% 6.05% 13.64%
Wash. 16.21% 6.05% 22.26%
W.Va. 3% 6.05% 9.05%
Wis. 5.55% 6.05% 11.60%
Wyo. 10.64% 6.05% 16.69%
U.S. avg. 9.04% 6.05% 15.09%
Source: Scott Mackey, State Tax Notes

State and local governments have long taxed land-line telephones, but cell phones had escaped most of these taxes. An exception: In California, about 160 local governments have cell phone taxes, including 10% in Los Angeles and 7.5% in San Francisco.

"The question is, does it make sense to treat one phone differently from another?" asks Ken Fellman, mayor of Arvada, Colo., a Denver suburb, and head of a telecommunications committee for the National League of Cities.

Wireless companies say they shouldn't be treated the same as old phone companies because they are not monopolies and do not use public rights of way for phone lines. "The wireless industry has never been a utility and shouldn't be treated that way," Farren says.

But local governments are changing tax laws to reflect changes in the economy. cell phone revenue grew from $56 billion in 2000 to $102 billion in 2004. During that time, land-line revenue dropped from $228 billion to $197 billion, the Telecommunications Industry Association says.

Independence, Mo., will collect $1.75 million in taxes next year from land-line phones, down from a peak of $2.4 million in 2002. "A phone is a phone is a phone," city councilman Jason White says. "A cell phone company doing business in our community should pay the same taxes."

Cell phone taxes earmarked for emergency services are rising quickly, too. West Virginia last week doubled the state's 911 service fee on cell phones to $3 per month.

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North Korea 'may have six bombs'

BBC NEWS
North Korea 'may have six bombs'

UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohammed ElBaradei has said North Korea could possess several nuclear bombs.

Speaking on US television, he said Pyongyang had enough plutonium to make five or six nuclear weapons.

The country also has the necessary infrastructure to convert the plutonium into weapons, Mr ElBaradei added.

North Korea announced in February that it had nuclear arms - but that claim has not been verified by Mr ElBaradei's International Atomic Energy Agency.

When asked by CNN if it was the IAEA's assessment that North Korea already had as many as six bombs, Mr ElBaradei replied: "I think that would be close to our estimation."

"We knew they had the plutonium that could be converted into five or six North Korea weapons," he went on to say.

"We know that they had the industrial infrastructure to weaponise this plutonium. We have read also that they have the delivery system."

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told the BBC there was no way the agency could know for sure whether North Korea had six bombs.

But she said it would not be surprising if it did.


'Cry for help'

The agency's inspectors were kicked out of North Korea at the end of 2002.

Pyongyang has shunned multilateral talks on its nuclear programme for almost a year.

Recently, reports have suggested it is preparing to test a nuclear bomb. Mr ElBaradei warned that a nuclear test would have disastrous political and environmental consequences.

"I do hope that the North Koreans would absolutely reconsider such a reckless, reckless step," he told CNN.

He said that whether the activity observed by satellites was real or simply a bluff, "it involves crying for help, frankly."

"North Korea, I think, has been seeking a dialogue with the United States, with the rest of the international community... through their usual policy of nuclear blackmail, nuclear brinkmanship, to force the other parties to engage them," he said.

Mr ElBaradei has already urged the international community to put pressure on North Korea not to go ahead with the test, and appealed to Pyongyang to return to the negotiating table.

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A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable

The New York Times
May 9, 2005
A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

BERLIN - In the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the nation has struggled - painfully and sometimes defensively - to come to terms with its Nazi past. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Berlin, the restored capital, where a vast rebuilding effort has transformed the once-ravaged city center.

The new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, is the apotheosis of this soul-searching. A vast grid of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth, it is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality - showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion.

The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust's shadow. Its focus is on the delicate, almost imperceptible line that separates good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence.

The location could not be more apt. During the war, this was the administrative locus of Hitler's killing machine. His chancellery building, designed by Albert Speer and since demolished, was a few hundred yards away just to the south; his bunker lies beneath a nearby parking lot.

Covering five and a half acres in the center of Berlin, the memorial, which opens May 10, will be an unavoidable fixture of the city's life - reassuring those who see the Holocaust as a singular marker of human evil while upsetting those who feel that Germany has already spent too much time wallowing in guilt.


By putting to rest the fantasy that the Holocaust can be conveniently relegated to the past, Mr. Eisenman is clearly exploring these tensions. The memorial's grid, for example, can be read as both an extension of the streets that surround the site and an unnerving evocation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that kept the killing machine grinding along. The pillars, meanwhile, are an obvious reference to tombstones.

But the memorial's central theme is the process that allows human beings to accept such evil as part of the normal world - the incremental decisions that collectively lead to the most murderous acts.

There is no way to glean this from photographs; it can be understood only by experiencing the memorial as a physical space. No clear line, for example, divides the site from the city around it. The pillars along its periphery are roughly the height of park benches. A few scattered linden trees sprout between the pillars along the memorial's western edge; at other points, outlines of pillars are etched onto the sidewalk, so that pedestrians can actually step on them as they walk by.

The sense of ambiguity - the concerns of everyday life, a world of unspeakable evil - will only be amplified once the memorial opens to the public. It is not hard to imagine Berliners sitting on the pillars at the memorial's edges, reading books or sunning themselves on a spring afternoon. The day I visited the site, a 2-year-old boy was playing atop the pillars - trying to climb from one to the next as his mother calmly gripped his hand.

These moments speak to one of the Holocaust's most tragic lessons, the ability of human beings to numb themselves to all sorts of suffering - a feeling that only intensifies as you descend into the site. Paved in uneven cobblestones, the ground between the pillars slopes down as you move deeper in.

At first, you retain glimpses of the city. The rows of pillars frame a distant view of the Reichstag's skeletal glass dome. To the west, you can glimpse the canopy of trees in the Tiergarten. Then as you descend further, the views begin to disappear. The sound of gravel crunching under your feet gets more perceptible; the gray pillars, their towering forms tilting unsteadily, become more menacing and oppressive. The effect is intentionally disorienting. You are left alone with memories of life outside - the cheerful child, for example, balanced on the concrete platform.

This is a chilling moment. For me, it evoked Primo Levi's description of the death camps. "To sink is the easiest of matters," he wrote in "Survival in Auschwitz." "It is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp." Only through constant struggle and arbitrary luck was survival possible.

But it is only as you re-emerge from the memorial, rejoining the everyday world, that what you have experienced becomes clear. Mr. Eisenman, the architect, has said that his greatest fear was to sentimentalize the Holocaust. "I don't want people to weep and then walk away with a clear conscience," he explained.

Instead, he leaves you standing on the edge of the abyss. In so doing, he suggests that the parameters of guilt are not so easily defined: it includes those who looked the other way, continued with their work, refused to bear witness. It is true of Americans as well as Germans, Roman Catholic clerics as well as Nazi secretaries.

Our collective responsibility cannot be neatly ignored or packed away. The threat of genocide continues to be a reality in many parts of the world; there are those who still deny the Holocaust or seek to justify Hitler's actions. Despite Mr. Eisenman's objections, for example, the pillars are protected by a graffiti-resistant coating because the government worried that neo-Nazis would try to spray paint them with swastikas. For Mr. Eisenman, graffiti would simply have testified to the memorial's impact. Similarly, Mr. Eisenman's proposal to locate the memorial's information center in Joseph Goebbels's bunker, buried beneath a corner of the memorial, was rejected for fear that it could become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.

Such anxieties reverberate throughout the memorial. While the memorial is open to myriad interpretations, the information center, which ended up in a more discreet location at the site's eastern edge, is not. It begins with a timeline that lays out the history of the so-called Final Solution, from when the National Socialists took power in 1933 through the murder of 500,000 Soviet Jews in 1941 - numbers, the exhibition text says, that mark the transition to genocide.

The rest of the exhibition is divided into four rooms dedicated to personal aspects of the tragedy - the individual families, the letters thrown from the trains that transported them to the death camps.

Architecturally, the information center's strongest feature is its coffered concrete ceilings, whose undulating surfaces echo the pattern of the pillars and pathways above, so that at moments you feel as if you have entered the graves. But the exhibitions seem literal-minded, as if they were directed at people who cannot find the capacity to believe that the Holocaust occurred.

During the design process, Mr. Eisenman worried that such compromises would detract from the power of his design. But they don't; they only underline it. The quiet abstraction of the memorial - its haunting silence and stark physical presence - psychically weave the Holocaust into our daily existence in a way that the painstaking lists at the information center cannot. It memorializes past sufferings but also forces us to acknowledge that history's relevance today.

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Row of Loosely Guarded Targets Lies Just Outside New York City

[File this under: Thanks for telling the terrorists and the wannabe terrorists!!!]

The New York Times
May 9, 2005
Row of Loosely Guarded Targets Lies Just Outside New York City
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

KEARNY, N.J., May 7 - It is the deadliest target in a swath of industrial northern New Jersey that terrorism experts call the most dangerous two miles in America: a chemical plant that processes chlorine gas, so close to Manhattan that the Empire State Building seems to rise up behind its storage tanks.

According to federal Environmental Protection Agency records, the plant poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius.

Yet on a recent Friday afternoon, it remained loosely guarded and accessible. Dozens of trucks and cars drove by within 100 feet of the tanks. A reporter and photographer drove back and forth for five minutes, snapping photos with a camera the size of a large sidearm, then left without being approached.

That chemical plant is just one of dozens of vulnerable sites between Newark Liberty International Airport and Port Elizabeth, which extends two miles to the east. A Congressional study in 2000 by a former Coast Guard commander deemed it the nation's most enticing environment for terrorists, providing a convenient way to cripple the economy by disrupting major portions of the country's rail lines, oil storage tanks and refineries, pipelines, air traffic, communications networks and highway system.


Since 9/11, those concerns have only been magnified. Law enforcement officials have warned of the need to prepare for an assault on one of the four major chemical plants in the area or an attempt to ship nuclear or biological weapons through its two port complexes.

Trying to safeguard more than 100 potential terrorist targets in two miles surrounded by residential communities, industrial areas and commuter corridors has proved a daunting challenge. Federal, state and local officials have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to install gates, roadblocks and security cameras and to provide additional patrols, surveillance and intelligence operations.

But even those in charge of the effort say the job is incomplete, bogged down by obstacles that are a microcosm of the nation's struggle against potential terrorist threats.

After distributing tens of billions to state and local governments since 9/11, the federal Department of Homeland Security cut New Jersey's financing this year to about $60 million from $99 million last year. Many security experts have complained that the formula - which provides Montana with three times as much money per capita as New Jersey - is guided more by politics than by the likelihood of an attack.

Meanwhile, security at Newark Airport, while more rigorous and time-consuming for passengers, has been marred by embarrassing breakdowns, as screeners have repeatedly failed to prevent federal officials from sneaking weapons and fake bombs onto planes.

The time and expense of screening shipping containers has slowed attempts to tighten security at Port Newark and Port Elizabeth, where customs officials say their radiation screening devices are ineffective and need replacement.

The private companies that own 80 percent of the most dangerous targets have given varying degrees of cooperation, officials said, and the chemical industry has effectively blocked attempts in Washington to mandate stricter regulations.

As a result, many of the most crucial security tasks are left to local police departments, some of which say they are too understaffed and poorly equipped to mount a proper counterterrorism effort.

"They tell us to patrol, do this, do that, but don't give us the money or equipment," said Sgt. Michael Cinardo of the Kearny Police Department, one of several agencies responsible for patrolling around the chlorine plant.

He said the department requires patrol officers to stop by the plant at least five times each shift.

Security against terrorism is a particularly sensitive issue in New Jersey. More than 700 people killed on 9/11 lived there. And, in October 2001, the first major bioterrorism attack on United States soil was launched from a New Jersey post office when a series of anthrax-laced letters were mailed to members of Congress and the news media. The State Health Department's muddled response came to symbolize the nation's need to prepare itself to face new threats.

Since then, New Jersey officials have spent more than $350 million in state tax money on counterterrorism, building an apparatus that is run by seasoned law enforcement experts and is generally well regarded.

New Jersey's Homeland Security Department, established in 2002, has helped to train, coordinate and increase staffing at local law enforcement and emergency medical agencies; assembled a 1,000-person task force to focus on urban areas; and purchased boats, decontamination suits, radio systems and a computerized intelligence network so federal agents and the New Jersey State Police can share information with all 566 municipalities.

In the most dangerous two miles, they have erected concrete barriers outside hospitals and office buildings and put fences along elevated highways that pass chemical plants. The State Police patrol the skies, highways and coastal waters, and federal officials have used various surveillance techniques.

On the New Jersey Turnpike, troopers try to check any vehicle that stops for as little as five minutes.

But given the sheer number of vulnerable sites - three major oil and natural gas pipelines, heavily traveled rail lines and more than a dozen chemical plants - many security experts acknowledge that the response is inadequate.

In the months after 9/11, government officials routinely refused to discuss the most mundane aspects of security, saying that they did not want to offer inside information to potential enemies. Now, said Sidney J. Caspersen, the director of the state's Office of Counterterrorism, there is more risk in remaining silent.

"The terrorists already know what's out here," Mr. Caspersen said. "They have been found with blueprints of our buildings, and a lot of the information is available over the Internet or at a public library. The only question is whether we will find a way to protect these targets before they find a way to attack them."

The answer to that question will depend largely on the ability to operate with limited money and a tangle of bureaucracies.

In several instances, counterterrorism money sent to the state has been used for questionable purposes: the city of Newark spent $300,000 on two air-conditioned garbage trucks, and New Jersey Transit has proposed using $36 million in security money to overhaul the Hoboken Ferry terminal. Even watchdog groups like Taxpayers for Common Sense say that places like New Jersey, Houston and Long Beach, Calif., deserve a larger portion of federal dollars.

As for the ports, the federal Homeland Security Department's inspector general's office recently criticized the agency for directing much of its $517 million in port security money to relatively low-risk sites in places like Kentucky and Tennessee, and not giving enough to busy, vulnerable facilities like Port Newark. Although the Port of New York and New Jersey recently received an additional $42 million for counterterrorism efforts, Port Newark lacks the up-to-date equipment now used to search cargo at ports like Hong Kong.

"We put more resources into securing the average large bank in Manhattan than we do for the entire security of Port Newark," said Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander who is now a security analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations and who conducted the study that first identified this part of North Jersey as the nation's most terror-prone two miles. "That's just irresponsible."

Some New Jersey officials have hoped that the newly appointed secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, will be sympathetic to the state's situation because he is a native of Elizabeth. But when he visited New Jersey during a terror drill last month, Mr. Chertoff was noncommital about restoring cuts.

"Frankly, it's not a matter of spending a great lot of money," he said. "It's a matter of taking resources we have and having a plan in place so we use them effectively."

New Jersey officials say that the cuts will force them to reduce surveillance of possible targets, cancel training sessions for first responders and counterterrorism experts, and forestall the purchase of equipment to detect chemical, nuclear or biological agents. The state has said it will also have to scale back plans to fortify storage facilities and rail lines near the Pulaski Skyway, an area known as "chemical alley."

Even if New Jersey were to receive more money, however, its counterterrorism effort would still face other difficulties.

At Newark Airport, which handles 32 million passengers a year, the federal government and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have spent tens of millions of dollars on high-tech baggage screening equipment, more guards and other security improvements. But Transportation Security Administration employees failed to detect weapons or fake bombs in about a quarter of the 81 tests conducted between last June and September. In December, when a machine detected a simulated explosive, baggage screeners lost track of it and it was loaded onto a flight to Holland.

Meanwhile, even less has been done to secure the nation's greatest vulnerability to terror attacks, its 15,000 chemical plants, 123 of which pose a threat to at least 1 million people, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A spokeswoman for the Chemistry Council, an industry group representing 150 of the nation's largest chemical plants, said the group's members had already invested $2 billion in improved security and were working with Congress to establish standardized federal safety guidelines.

"We want to work with the Department of Homeland Security and Congress to make these plants safer in a way that works for everyone," Kate McGloon, the spokeswoman, said.

Michelle Petrovich, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said agency officials had visited more than half the nation's 300 most dangerous plants and urged the companies to enhance perimeter security and switch to less hazardous chemicals and processes. As a result, Ms. Petrovich said, she believes North Jersey is "one of the safer areas because it has received the most attention in terms of protective measures."

But Richard A. Falkenrath, a former deputy homeland security adviser to the White House, said that effort has done little to make the public safer. "Saying that you're doing something doesn't mean you're actually making a difference," said Mr. Falkenrath, who recently testified before Congress, urging tighter regulation of the chemical industry.

Since 2001, at least two major efforts to bolster chemical plant security have been stalled, in part by industry lobbyists.

The latest proposal to tighten security at chemical plants, which appears to be gaining support in Congress, would establish safety guidelines. But Senator Jon S. Corzine said that it is only a half measure because it would not mandate that plants in densely populated areas stop using highly dangerous chemicals like chlorine gas and switch to more benign alternatives, like sodium hypochlorite. The plants use such chemicals to make antiseptics for water purification plants.

For those who live in the shadow of these plants, there is little expectation that the federal government will mount a more vigorous security response.

Carolyn M. Chapluske of Kearny, who has lived in North Jersey all her life, said, "People pay taxes and deserve to be protected. But they probably won't. It's just the way things work."

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Laura Bush's Mission Accomplished

The New York Times
Laura Bush's Mission Accomplished
By FRANK RICH

AS we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Drudge Report and the second anniversary of the Jayson Blair scandal, American journalists are in a race with the runaway bride for public enemy No. 1. Newspaper circulation is on the skids, the big three network anchor thrones are as precarious as King Lear's, bloggers are on the rampage, and the government is embracing fake reporters and threatening to jail real ones. A Pew Research Center poll shows that Americans now trust the press less than every other major institution, from government to medicine to banks. We can only be grateful that the matchups didn't include pornographers or Major League Baseball.

Then - just when you think things couldn't get any worse - along comes the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

This is the black-tie Washington Hilton fete at which journalists mingle with sources and celebrities and play host to the president, who is then required to be "funny." This year's outing is already famous for a startling innovation: a first lady delivered a shaggy horse gag about masturbation for the first time in our history. (In public, anyway.) Watching the proceedings from the safe distance provided by C-Span, I was as impressed as everyone else by Laura Bush's slick performance. If the Friars can't book Susie Essman or Sarah Silverman for the dais of their next roast, Mrs. Bush would kill.

It's the press's performance that is discomforting. Once these dinners were just typical Washington rubber-chicken fare, unseen on television and unnoticed beyond the Beltway. That began to change in 1987 when Michael Kelly, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, invited as a guest Fawn Hall, the glamorous mystery woman in the Iran-contra scandal. Over the years, Kelly's amusing prank has metastasized into a pageant of obsequiousness and TV Land glitz, typified by this year's roster of A-list stars from the 1970's (Goldie Hawn, Mary Tyler Moore) and C-list publicity hounds from the present (Jon Cryer, Ron Silver, the axed "American Idol" contestant Constantine Maroulis). As this gaggle arrives via red carpet, it's hard to know which is worse: watching reporters suck up to politicians in power or watching them clamor to rub shoulders with Joe Pantoliano.

Jonathan Klein, the new boss at CNN and a dinner attendee, hit the right note when, in an April speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, he made the "modest proposal" that the gala be canceled and that the White House Correspondents' Association "instead spend that time and energy creating standards - and enforcing them - for those who would call themselves White House correspondents." He meant Jeff Gannon, who masqueraded as a reporter at White House news briefings for two years before it was discovered that his news organization was a front for G.O.P. activists and that his most impressive portfolio had been as a model in ads for an escort service. But there's a bigger issue here than Mr. Gannon. The Washington press corps' eagerness to facilitate and serve as dress extras in what amounts to an administration promotional video can now be seen as a metaphor for just how much the legitimate press has been co-opted by all manner of fakery in the Bush years.

Yes, Mrs. Bush was funny, but the mere sight of her "interrupting" her husband in an obviously scripted routine prompted a ballroom full of reporters to leap to their feet and erupt in a roar of sycophancy like partisan hacks at a political convention. The same throng's morning-after rave reviews acknowledged that the entire exercise was at some level P.R. but nonetheless bought into the artifice. We were seeing the real Laura Bush, we kept being told. Maybe. While some acknowledged that her script was written by a speechwriter (the genuinely gifted Landon Parvin), very few noted that the routine's most humanizing populist riff, Mrs. Bush's proclaimed affection for the hit TV show "Desperate Housewives," was fiction; her press secretary told The New York Times's Elisabeth Bumiller that the first lady had yet to watch it.

Mrs. Bush's act was a harmless piece of burlesque, but it paid political dividends, upstaging the ho-hum presidential news conference of two days earlier in which few of the same reporters successfully challenged administration spin on Social Security and other matters. (One notable exception: David Gregory of NBC News, whose sharply focused follow-ups pushed Mr. Bush off script and got him to disown some of the faith-based demagoguery of the Family Research Council.) Watching the Washington press not only swoon en masse for Mrs. Bush's show but also sponsor and promote it inevitably recalls its unwitting collaboration in other, far more consequential Bush pageants. From the White House's faux "town hall meetings" to the hiring of Armstrong Williams to shill for its policies in journalistic forums, this administration has been a master of erecting propagandistic virtual realities that the news media have often been either tardy or ineffectual at unmasking.

It was only too fitting that Mrs. Bush's performance occurred on the eve of the second anniversary of the most elaborate production of them all: the "Top Gun" landing by the president on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Washington reviews of her husband at the time were reminiscent of hers last weekend. "This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command," David Broder raved on "Meet the Press." Robert Novak chimed in: "He looks good in a jumpsuit." It would be quite a while before these guys stopped cheering the Jerry Bruckheimer theatrics and started noticing the essential fiction of the scene: the mission in Iraq hadn't been accomplished, and major combat operations were far from over.

"We create our own reality" is how a Bush official put it to Ron Suskind in an article in The Times Magazine during the presidential campaign.

That they can get away with it shows the keenness of their cultural antennas. Infotainment has reached a new level of ubiquity in an era in which "reality" television and reality have become so blurred that it's hard to know if ABC News's special investigating "American Idol" last week was real journalism about a fake show or fake journalism about a real show or whether anyone knows the difference - or cares. This is business as usual in a culture in which the Michael Jackson trial is re-enacted daily on cable and the most powerful television news franchises, the morning triumvirate of "Today" and its competitors, now routinely present promotional segments about their respective networks' prime-time hits as if they were news.

No wonder many local TV news operations thought nothing of broadcasting government video news releases in which fake correspondents recruited from P.R. firms pushed administration policies; in some cases, neither the stations' managers nor journalists even figured out these reports were frauds. Now that public broadcasting is being turned over to Republican apparatchiks, such subterfuge could creep into the one broadcast news organization that, whatever its other failings, was thought to be immune to government or commercial interference.

The more the press blurs these lines on its own, the more openings government propagandists have to erect their Potemkin villages with impunity. "Our once noble calling," wrote Philip Meyer in The Columbia Journalism Review last fall, "is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry or entertainment." You know we're in trouble when Jeff Gannon, asked about his murky past on Bill Maher's show on April 29, moralistically joked that "usually the way it works is people become reporters before they prostitute themselves." No less chastening was the experience of watching Matt Drudge, in conversation with Brian Lamb the same day, sternly criticize Fox for cutting off the final moments of the Bush news conference for Paris Hilton's reality series. When Mr. Drudge is a more sober spokesman for the sanctity of news than his fellow revelers at the correspondents' dinner, pigs just may start to fly.

Much as we all delight in the latest horse-milking joke, the happiest news in comedy last week was the announcement that "The Daily Show" will be spinning off a new half-hour on Comedy Central starring its "senior White House correspondent," Stephen Colbert. Make no mistake about it: the ratings rise of Jon Stewart's fake news has been in direct relation to the show's prowess at blowing the whistle on propaganda when the legitimate press fails to do so. The correspondents' dinner, itself a "Daily Show" target last week, could not have been a more graphic illustration of why, at a time when trust in real news is plummeting, there's a bull market for fake news that can really be trusted to know what is fake.

Speaking of Comedy Central and journalistic bloopers: Contrary to what I wrote here a week ago, the cable network did not bleep out the 162 repetitions of a four-letter expletive in an episode of "South Park," God bless 'em.

originally published May 8, 2005

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U.S. military security defeated by copy and paste

CNET News.com
U.S. military security defeated by copy and paste

By Munir Kotadia

Experts are warning people to be careful with electronic documents that contain sensitive data after a breach in which classified U.S. military information thought to be hidden in a PDF document was uncovered.

Portions of the document had been "blacked out" by electronic means. But apparently, it was possible for outsiders to copy and paste the blacked-out sections into another file--and see the text that had been hidden.

The document is a report written after an investigation into the death of Italian citizen Nicola Calipari at a checkpoint in Iraq. It contains both classified and unclassified information about what happened at the traffic control points in Baghdad on March 4, the day of the incident. The U.S. military has since removed the document from the Internet, but not before it was copied and republished on several Web sites.

The military apparently made an error when it chose to use an electronic technique for obscuring certain words and paragraphs from the original document. (According to a report by the Associated Press, a representative of Adobe Systems, owner of the PDF format, has suggested that whoever attempted to censor the report did so by placing black rectangles over the text in question, rather than deleting the text.)


The technique used would indeed have protected the data if the document were being read online or printed. However, by an attacker selecting the blacked-out text and using the copy and paste functions, he or she could easily reproduce the document in its entirety on any word-processing application.

Samia Rauf, director at document security specialist Workshare in Asia-Pacific, said this kind of mistake is common--the information was hidden but not removed.

"(The military) had blacked out the text but not protected the document at the perimeter level," Raud said.

According to Rauf, the problems associated with hidden data are not restricted to the PDF format.

She said it is actually far more common for people to make this type of mistake when using an application like Microsoft Word.

"Every single Word document contains metadata, but the scary thing is that 90 percent of the population don't know it exists," Rauf said. "Metadata has a useful purpose. If a document crashes, you can do an autorecover and it will bring everything back for you.

"Anyone can make this mistake--we heard a story about a law firm losing its clients because documents went out with 'track changes' enabled."

Story last modified May 04 2005

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Dr. Bush's Social Security Snake Oil

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Religious Bias In The Media

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The People Have Spoken

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"Stick to the Script!"

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Will Spyware Be Spitzer's Next Big Thing?

ABC News
Will Spyware Be Spitzer's Next Big Thing?
Purveyors of Spyware and Adware Fear That N.Y. Attorney General Spitzer Will Target Them Next
By MICHAEL GORMLEY
The Associated Press

May. 7, 2005 - The windowless, cluttered 10-by-15-foot storeroom on the third floor of a Manhattan government building seems an unlikely setting for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's next big thing. But purveyors of spyware and adware and even the major companies that advertise in the surreptitious downloads fear exactly that from the Democrat dubbed the "Sheriff of Wall Street."

"There has been a vacuum of enforcement to date," said Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard University student who specializes in spyware research.

Though Spitzer may get complaints he is attacking legitimate companies, Edelman said, the "fact is, there are lots of surprisingly big companies making serious money from these tactics. So Spitzer's intervention in users' defense is much appreciated and quite helpful."

The problem has become epidemic as people spend more time online and spyware developers get more aggressive.

Some repair shops blame spyware, particularly the subset of ad-delivery programs called adware, for more than half the trouble they're seeing. One study found spyware on the computers of 80 percent of participants.

Although users still get such programs attached to games, screensavers, file-sharing software and other freebies, often without their full knowledge, newer techniques need no user intervention whatsoever and rely on security flaws in Microsoft operating systems and browsers.

The Federal Trade Commission filed a major spyware case last fall. But it is understaffed, said Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.

Enter Spitzer, a candidate for governor in 2006, is best known for his high-profile crusades against conflicts of interest in business but hasn't ignored cyberspace. Last year, his office settled a spam lawsuit against OptInRealBig.com of Colorado as his year-old investigation of a "spam ring" continues.

In pursuing spyware, last week's civil lawsuit against Intermix Media Inc. of Los Angeles is likely just the opening salvo.

Spitzer accused the company of secretly installing software that delivers nuisance pop-up advertisements and can slow and crash personal computers. Spitzer said such programs are fraudulent and threaten to discourage e-commerce.


"Mr. Spitzer has put a match to this and it will be interesting to see just how many volleys take place," said David Moll of Webroot Software Inc., an anti-spyware vendor.

Intermix denies any fraud or use of spyware, saying many of the practices in dispute were established by previous leadership. The company insists it is committed to the Internet's best practices.

Its competitors, meanwhile, insist their programs do not spy and say they welcome uniform rules.

"We strongly support efforts to clean up spyware and rid the Internet of malicious software," said Daniel Todd of 180 Solutions, a major adware company. "As a company that is providing free software and products to consumers, we think that working with technology experts, legal scholars, researchers and anti-spyware companies to establish such standards is a top priority."

Good thing, Spitzer said.

"People are fed up with adware and spyware," he said. "They feel as though they've lost control of their computers and they want something to be done."

Enforcement, however, is difficult.

"Those who engage in these abuses are hard to track down. An operation can be terminated and another literally pops up overnight," Spitzer said. "Hopefully, technology will provide a comprehensive solution at some point but until that time, there needs to be a cop in cyberspace who will stop the most egregious abuses."

Spitzer sees himself as the police.

While Congress and about half the states including New York debate legislation to clamp down on spyware, Spitzer is taking business fraud and consumer protection investigation into the 21st century:

His people set up three personal computers up in a storeroom in Spitzer's Manhattan office. For months, investigators visited the freebie-giveaway Web sites likely to carry adware and spyware. Investigator Vanessa Ip regularly analyzed the hard drive to detect any unwanted downloads.

"The most important thing was to try to mimic a typical consumer's experience," Ip said.

Kenneth Dreifach, chief of Spitzer's Internet Bureau, said the office is "limited only by the bounds of creativity and diligence of our investigators which is limitless."

And don't expect Spitzer to focus only on companies that make and distribute spyware, Dreifach said.

"The companies with which they deal and companies that fund them realize that this is an illegitimate activity from which they want to distance themselves," he said. "No one should infer ... that actual advertisers that drive this activity are immune. They are not."

Companies including Netflix Inc. and Orbitz LLC have acknowledged using adware.

Spyware legislation typically defines it narrowly as surreptitious downloads that monitor a users' activity and could steal personal information.

Spitzer goes further to include downloads of advertising onto hard drives that may or may not extract personal information.

Spitzer's spyware investigation recalls his successful national crusades against conflicts of interest among Wall Street stock analysts, dealers of mutual funds and insurance companies: A consumer concern is followed by a single lawsuit in an enforcement no man's land.

Negotiation for settlements follow, along with reforms to create new industry standards.

"This should be the next big thing for enforcement efforts because there are some likely targets and, more than with white-collar crime, this will resonate with people," said John C. Coffee, a Columbia Law School securities law expert who has closely followed Spitzer.

Those crusades on traditional American business have been good politically for Spitzer, Coffee said.

Spitzer appears to have prepared for the opportunity. Since Spitzer created the Internet Bureau in December 2000, the staff has doubled to four attorneys, a bureau chief, four investigators and seven college and law school students. The support staff has also doubled.

Even Spitzer's most recent public critic is pleased so far.

Bill Holstein, editor of Chief Executive magazine, has called for Spitzer's resignation, saying his investigations are overzealous and harmful to companies. Yet Holstein sees the spyware battle as "a case where the attorney general and his people are doing exactly what they ought to be doing.

"I agree e-commerce and the Internet are at risk," Holstein added. "It's smart politics, but it's also smart policy."

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Sen. Biden Asks Rice for Bolton Documents, Scolds Her for Ignoring Requests

ABC News
Sen. Biden Asks Rice for Bolton Documents
Sen. Biden, D-Del., Asks Rice for More Documents on Bolton, Scolds Her for Ignoring Requests
By ANNE GEARAN
The Associated Press

May. 7, 2005 - The top Democrat on the Senate committee considering the nomination of John R. Bolton as United Nations ambassador scolded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Saturday for ignoring Democratic requests for additional information about the embattled nominee.

In a curt letter to Rice, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., reiterated his requests for State Department documents related to charges that Bolton tried to bend or ignore government intelligence findings that did not suit his hard right ideology.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to vote on Bolton's nomination on Thursday. Biden repeated a warning to Rice that Democrats could hold up the vote if they are not satisfied they have investigated Bolton fully.

Biden acknowledged that the State Department sent the GOP-led committee a large number of documents last week from Bolton's four-year tenure as the department's arms control chief. But the documents answered only requests from the committee's Republican chairman, and ignored what Democrats wanted to see, Biden wrote.


"In particular, the unfulfilled portions of the request relate to the nominee's reported efforts, in speeches and testimony, to make statements that went far beyond what the intelligence would support," Biden wrote.

"What I seek to determine is whether these documents demonstrate a pattern of conduct that calls into question the nominee's fitness to serve as U.S. Representative to the United Nations," he said.

A copy of the letter was obtained by The Associated Press.

Biden said that in her public remarks about the Bolton nomination fight last week, Rice implied "that you do not believe you have a duty to respond to requests from the minority."

Biden also complained about a bureaucratic impasse over Bolton's acknowledged pursuit of names of U.S. officials whose communications were secretly recorded by the National Security Agency.

The new national intelligence chief, John Negroponte, may allow the spy agency to brief some senators next week on Bolton's unusual request for names and details of the secret intelligence intercepts, but it is not clear how many senators would receive the information or how detailed it would be.

"I recognize that this information is not under your direct control, but it relates to the consideration of the nomination," Biden wrote.

State Department spokesman Noel Clay said he could not confirm whether Rice had seen the letter. Rice is traveling in Europe with President Bush. Clay also had no comment on the letter. He referred a reporter to statements from other spokesmen last week that the State Department is cooperating fully with the Senate committee.

Bolton's nomination is the most contentious of Bush's second term, and has revealed fissures in Republican support in the Senate. Four of the 10 Republicans on the Senate committee have expressed reservations about Bolton, but none has said they will definitely vote against him. GOP qualms are based on allegations that Bolton abused underlings or ran roughshod over intelligence analysts who disagreed with him.

All eight Democrats on the committee are united against Bolton. One Republican vote against him would deny Bolton the committee's endorsement, although his nomination could still reach the Senate floor.

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U.S. to Spend Billions More to Alter Security Systems

The New York Times
May 8, 2005
U.S. to Spend Billions More to Alter Security Systems
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, May 7 - After spending more than $4.5 billion on screening devices to monitor the nation's ports, borders, airports, mail and air, the federal government is moving to replace or alter much of the antiterrorism equipment, concluding that it is ineffective, unreliable or too expensive to operate.

Many of the monitoring tools - intended to detect guns, explosives, and nuclear and biological weapons - were bought during the blitz in security spending after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In its effort to create a virtual shield around America, the Department of Homeland Security now plans to spend billions of dollars more. Although some changes are being made because of technology that has emerged in the last couple of years, many of them are planned because devices currently in use have done little to improve the nation's security, according to a review of agency documents and interviews with federal officials and outside experts.

"Everyone was standing in line with their silver bullets to make us more secure after Sept. 11," said Randall J. Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and former government adviser on scientific issues. "We bought a lot of stuff off the shelf that wasn't effective."

Among the problems:

¶Radiation monitors at ports and borders that cannot differentiate between radiation emitted by a nuclear bomb and naturally occurring radiation from everyday material like cat litter or ceramic tile.

¶Air-monitoring equipment in major cities that is only marginally effective because not enough detectors were deployed and were sometimes not properly calibrated or installed. They also do not produce results for up to 36 hours - long after a biological attack would potentially infect thousands of people.

¶Passenger-screening equipment at airports that auditors have found is no more likely than before federal screeners took over to detect whether someone is trying to carry a weapon or a bomb aboard a plane.

¶Postal Service machines that test only a small percentage of mail and look for anthrax but no other biological agents.


Federal officials say they bought the best available equipment. They acknowledge that it might not have been cutting-edge technology but said that to speed installation they bought only devices that were readily available instead of trying to buy promising technology that was not yet in production.

The department says it has created a layered defense that would not be compromised by the failure of a single device. Even if the monitoring is less than ideal, officials say, it is still a deterrent.

"The nation is more secure in the deployment and use of these technologies versus having no technologies in place at all," said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

Every piece of equipment provides some level of additional security, said Christopher Y. Milowic, a customs official whose office oversees screening at ports and borders. "It is not the ultimate capacity," he said. "But it reduces risk."

Some critics say that even though federal agencies were pressed to move quickly by Congress and the administration, they made some poor choices. In some cases, agencies did not seek competitive bids or consider cheaper, better alternatives. And not all the devices were tested to see how well they worked in the environments where they would be used.

"After 9/11, we had to show how committed we were by spending hugely greater amounts of money than ever before, as rapidly as possible," said Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. "That brought us what we might expect, which is some expensive mistakes. This has been the difficult learning curve of the new discipline known as homeland security."

Radiation at Seaports

One after another, trucks stuffed with cargo like olives from Spain, birdseed from Ethiopia, olive oil from France and carpets from India line up at the Port Newark Container Terminal, approaching what looks like an E-ZPass toll gate.

In minutes, they will fan out across the nation. But first, they pass through the gate, called a radiation portal monitor, which sounds an alarm if it detects a nuclear weapon or radioactive material that could be used to make a "dirty bomb," a crude nuclear device that causes damage by widely spreading low levels of radiation.

Heralded as "highly sophisticated" when they were introduced, the devices have proven to be hardly that.

The portal-monitor technology has been used for decades by the scrap metal industry. Customs officials at Newark have nicknamed the devices "dumb sensors," because they cannot discern the source of the radiation. That means benign items that naturally emit radioactivity - including cat litter, ceramic tile, granite, porcelain toilets, even bananas - can set off the monitors.

Alarms occurred so frequently when the monitors were first installed that customs officials turned down their sensitivity. But that increased the risk that a real threat, like the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear bombs, could go undetected because it emits only a small amount of radiation or perhaps none if it is intentionally shielded.

"It was certainly a compromise in terms of absolute capacity to detect threats," said Mr. Milowic, the customs official.

The port's follow-up system, handheld devices that are supposed to determine what set off an alarm, is also seriously flawed. Tests conducted in 2003 by Los Alamos National Laboratory found that the handheld machines, designed to be used in labs, produced a false positive or a false negative more than half the time. The machines were the least reliable in identifying the most dangerous materials, the tests showed.

The weaknesses of the devices were apparent in Newark one recent morning. A truck, whose records said it was carrying brakes from Germany, triggered the portal alarm, but the backup device could not identify the radiation source. Without being inspected, the truck was sent on its way to Ohio.

"We agree it is not perfect," said Rich O'Brien, a customs supervisor in Newark. But he said his agency needed to move urgently to improve security after the 2001 attacks. "The politics stare you in the face, and you got to put something out there."

At airports, similar shortcomings in technology have caused problems.

The Transportation Security Administration bought 1,344 machines costing more than $1 million each to search for explosives in checked bags by examining the density of objects inside. But innocuous items as varied as Yorkshire pudding and shampoo bottles, which happen to have a density similar to certain explosives, can set off the machines, causing false alarms for 15 percent to 30 percent of all luggage, an agency official said. The frequent alarms require airports across the country to have extra screeners to examine these bags.

Quick Action After 9/11

Because the machines were installed under tight timetables imposed by Congress, they were squeezed into airport lobbies instead of integrated into baggage conveyor systems. That slowed the screening process - the machines could handle far fewer bags per hour - and pushed up labor costs by hundreds of millions of dollars a year. At busy times, bags are sometimes loaded onto planes without being properly examined, according to several current and former screeners.

"It is very discouraging," said a screener who worked at Portland International Airport until last year, but who asked not to be named because he still is a federal employee. "People are just taking your bags and putting them on the airplane."

Equipment to screen passengers and carry-on baggage - including nearly 5,000 new metal detectors, X-ray machines and devices that can detect traces of explosives - can be unreliable. A handgun might slip through because screeners rely on two-dimensional X-ray machines, rather than newer, three-dimensional models, for example. The National Academy of Sciences recently described the trace detection devices as having "limited effectiveness and significant vulnerabilities."

As a result, the likelihood of detecting a hidden weapon or bomb has not significantly changed since the government took over airport screening operations in 2002, according to the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. Transportation security officials acknowledge that they cannot improve performance without new technology, but they dispute suggestions that no progress has been made.

"We have created a much more formidable deterrent," said Mark O. Hatfield Jr., a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. "Do we have an absolute barrier? No."

Counting machinery and personnel, aviation screening has cost more than $15 billion since 2001, a price that Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida, says has hardly been worthwhile.

"Congress is the one that mandated this," Mr. Mica said. "But we should have done more research and development on the technology and put this in gradually."

Concerns Despite Reliability

Some screening equipment has performed reliably. Machines that test mail at the United States Postal Service's major processing centers have not had a single false alarm after more than a year, officials said. But the monitors detect only anthrax, which sickened postal workers in 2001. And only about 20 percent of mail is tested - mostly letters dropped into blue post boxes, because they are considered the most likely route for a biological attack.

In about 30 major cities, equipment used to test air is also very precise: there have been more than 1.5 million tests without a single false positive. But only about 10 monitors were placed in most cities, and they were often miles apart, according to the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency. Detecting a biological attack, particularly one aimed at a specific building or area, would require perhaps thousands of monitors in a big city.

In addition, as contractors hurried to install the devices before the start of the war with Iraq - the Bush administration feared that Saddam Hussein might use biological weapons on American cities - they were often placed too low or too high to collect satisfactory samples, the inspector general noted. The monitors use filters that must be collected manually every day before they can be analyzed hours later at a lab.

"It was an expedient attempt to solve a problem," said Philip J. Wyatt, a physicist and expert on biological weapons monitoring equipment. "What they got is ineffective, wasteful and expensive to maintain."

Homeland security officials say that they have already moved to address some of the initial problems, and that they are convinced that the monitoring is valuable because it could allow them to recognize an attack about a day sooner than if they learned about it through victims' falling ill.

At the Nevada Test Site, an outdoor laboratory that is larger than Rhode Island, the next generation of monitoring devices is being tested.

In preparing to spend billions of dollars more on equipment, the Department of Homeland Security is moving carefully. In Nevada, contractors are being paid to build prototypes of radiation detection devices that are more sensitive and selective. Only those getting passing grades will move on to a second competition in the New York port.

Similar competitions are under way elsewhere to evaluate new air-monitoring equipment and airport screening devices. That approach contrasts with how the federal government typically went about trying to shore up the nation's defenses after the 2001 attacks. Government agencies often turned to their most familiar contractors, including Northrop Grumman, Boeing and SAIC, a technology giant based in San Diego. The agencies bought devices from those companies, at times without competitive bidding or comprehensive testing.

Documents prepared by customs officials in an effort to purchase container inspection equipment show that they were so intent on buying an SAIC product, even though a competitor had introduced a virtually identical version that was less expensive, that they placed the manufacturer's brand name in the requests. The agency has bought more than 100 of the machines at $1 million each. But the machines often cannot identify the contents of ship containers, because many everyday items, including frozen foods, are too dense for the gamma ray technology to penetrate.

'Continually Upgrading'

The federal government will likely need to spend as much as $7 billion more on screening equipment in coming years, according to government estimates.

"One department charged with coordinating efforts and setting standards will result in far better and more efficient technologies to secure the homeland," said Mr. Roehrkasse, the Department of Homeland Security spokesman.

Some experts believe that this high-priced push for improvements is necessary, saying the war against terrorism may require the same sort of spending on new weapons and defenses as the cold war did.

"You are in a game where you are continually upgrading and you will be forever," said Thomas S. Hartwick, a physicist who evaluates aviation-screening equipment.

But given the inevitable imperfection of technology and the vast expanse the government is trying to secure, some warn of putting too much confidence in machines.

"Technology does not substitute for strategy," said James Jay Carafano, senior fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It's always easier for terrorists to change tactics than it is for us to throw up defenses to counter them. The best strategy to deal with terrorists is to find them and get them."

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting for this article.

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