[66791] in Cypherpunks
Internet 'terrorism' newsclips [CYPHER, but news]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Donald Weightman)
Sun Sep 29 16:14:13 1996
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 16:03:26 -0400 (EDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Donald Weightman <dweightman@radix.net>
From today's PARADE magazine, that valuable source for insight into the
popular heart and mind, "explaining" why "we" haven't been able to catch
Iranian terrorists:
>Thanks to the highly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, American
>intelligence agencies have intercepted enough telephone messages from Iran,
>ordering acts of terrorism, that Iran's terrorist network stopped using the
>phone. Reportedly this has caused them to start using codes on the Internet
>that are "practically" impossible to track and isolate.
>"Just when we thought we had outsmarted them, they caught on and started
>using codes on the Internet", an expert in international terrorrism tells
>us. "There's so much crazy srewball stuff on the Internet that it's
>practically impossible to track down and isolate the terrorists. No
>government can analyze those millions and millions of messages."
And from another piece of hard-hitting quote-the-official-source journalism
in PARADE, "A New Worry: Terrorism in Cyberspace"
>The danger of computer-based "cyper" attacks is second only to that posed by
>nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, says CIA's Director, John
>Deutch. He expects the threat to grow as we rush to connect the world on the
>Internet.
<SNIP>
>There were more than 250,000 attacks on Department of Defense computers last
>year, and 65% were successful. Little is known about who launched them,
why, or
>what they found. In a recent test, Defense Department "red teams" admit to
>intentionally hacking into 18,200 systems, with only 5% of the attacks
>detected; only 27% of those attacks were reported.
Wonder if the timing of these stories has anything to do with the end of
term legislative push on wiretapping.
Don Weightman
dweightman@radix.net
