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China Detains U.S. Sect Member, Frees Australian
January 30, 2003 | adminChina has detained an American follower of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, accusing him of sabotaging television and radio broadcasting systems on the mainland, the U.S. embassy said Thursday. But an Australian member of the sect detained a week ago in southwestern China had been freed and was on her way home, an Australian embassy spokesman said. U.S. citizen Chuck Lee was taken into police custody in the southern city of Guangzhou on January 22 and transferred two days later to the eastern city of Yangzhou, where he was accused of sabotaging broadcasting systems, an embassy spokeswoman said. A U.S. consular official visited Lee, who appeared to be healthy, she said. No other details were available. Full Story
Homeland Security 2004 Budget $41.3 Billion
January 30, 2003 | adminPresident Bush will request $41.3 billion in the fiscal 2004 budget, which he will submit next week, to fund domestic homeland security efforts, a U.S. official said on Thursday. The budget figures include $36.2 billion for the newly created Department of Homeland Security. This compares to an overall homeland security budget of $37.7 billion in 2003, $33 billion of which was earmarked for the department, spokesman Gordon Johndroe said. Full Story
U.S. Consulate in Berlin Closes After Warning
January 30, 2003 | adminThe consular section of the U.S. embassy in Berlin was closed on Thursday after police reported receiving a warning of possible terrorist attacks on both the Israeli and the U.S. embassies in the German capital. “We had to take some security-related precautionary measures,” a spokeswoman for the embassy said, confirming the consular section of the embassy would be closed. It would remain closed on Thursday and Friday, the embassy’s Web site stated. A German security source told Reuters earlier the threat stemmed from a letter sent to the U.S. embassy in the Syrian capital Damascus. U.S. diplomats passed the information to Israel’s Berlin embassy, the source said. Full Story
Shoe-Bomber Set to Be Sentenced in U.S.
January 30, 2003 | adminRichard Reid, a British-born follower of Osama bin Laden, will learn on Thursday how many years he must spend behind bars for trying to bring down a transatlantic flight with explosives stuffed in his shoes. Despite a last-ditch attempt by Reid’s lawyers to delay his sentencing, Chief U.S. District Judge William Young was still scheduled to proceed with a sentencing hearing beginning at 2 p.m. EST. Reid, 29, a petty criminal who converted to Islam while in a British prison, faces between 60 years and life in prison after he pleaded guilty to trying to bring down American Airlines Flight 63 on Dec. 22, 2001, as it flew to Miami from Paris. Full Story
U.S. Says It Would Help Saddam Find Place of Exile
January 30, 2003 | adminThe United States said on Wednesday it would help Iraqi President Saddam Hussein find a place to go into exile if he left the country to avoid war. “If he were to leave the country and take some of his family members with him and others in the leading elite, … we would I’m sure try to help find a place for them to go,” Secretary of State Colin Powell told a news conference. “That certainly would be one way to avoid war,” he added. Powell, speaking after talks with Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, declined to speculate on whether Saddam and his followers could have immunity from prosecution, saying it was not just a matter for Washington. Full Story
D.I.Y. Tools That Leave Spam D.O.A.
January 30, 2003 | adminThe trickle of unsolicited commercial e-mail that started a few years ago had long since become a tsunami, but I realized that my problem had reached an absurd extreme when I got the spam about stopping spam. Scrolling through my various mail accounts, I routinely waded through countless unwanted messages advertising pornographic Web sites, and dozens upon dozens of missives trying to tempt me into clicking for loans, credit cards, inkjet cartridges, miniature race cars and opportunities to enlarge body parts that I don’t even have. Buried in the mess were one or two messages I actually wanted or needed to read, but I could barely find them amid the dross. When I accidentally deleted a message and new-baby picture attachments from an old college roommate, though, I knew it was time to take out the trash. Full Story
In Net Attacks, Defining the Right to Know
January 30, 2003 | adminAs electronic sieges go, the so-called Slammer worm that attacked the Internet last weekend fell short of calamitous. Although the rogue program hit tens of thousands of computers and clogged parts of the network all over the world, Slammer paled in comparison with Code Red, the worm that attacked the White House Web site in 2001. By Monday, most of the patching of systems had been accomplished and few traces of Slammer remained. Yet some companies were hit worse than others, notably Bank of America, which discovered that thousands of its ATM’s could not dispense cash. And when bank officials disclosed hours later on Saturday that Slammer had created the problem, it highlighted an old debate in the world of computer crime: to tell or not to tell. Full Story
City Offers New Spying Rules in Exchange for More Leeway
January 30, 2003 | adminIn a last-minute proposal to settle a dispute over spying on terror suspects, city officials said in federal court yesterday that the police would promise to adopt new guidelines to protect civil liberties if the court lifted a 20-year-old order that limits police surveillance and undercover operations. But, in final arguments before Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. of United States District Court in Manhattan, civil liberties lawyers rejected the offer, calling it an empty gesture. “What they say they will do is entitled to no consideration in this matter,” Jethro M. Eisenstein, one of the lawyers, told the judge. The arguments came on a motion by the city to do away with most of the provisions of a consent decree that ended a 1971 suit over harassment of political advocacy groups by the Police Department’s “red squad,” as it was then known. The judge gave no timetable for his decision. Full Story
Indonesia Clears Top Islamic Militant in Attacks on Christians
January 30, 2003 | adminAn Indonesian court acquitted a prominent Islamic militant leader today on charges of inciting Muslims to attack Christians on the religiously divided Maluku Islands. The cleric, Jaffar Umar Thalib, the head of a paramilitary group called Laskar Jihad, walked free to chants of “Allahu akbar!” (God is great!) from his followers. In contrast, two Christian separatist leaders were each sentenced two days ago to three years’ imprisonment for subversion during the violence on the Malukus, in which thousands of people have been killed. The verdict could give renewed vigor to Islamic radicals who have been on the defensive in Indonesia since the terrorist blast in Bali last October, analysts said. Full Story
Security Officials Considering Plan to Combine Terror Forces
January 30, 2003 | adminMoving quickly on President Bush’s plan to create a national terrorism threat center, national security officials said today that they were considering moving all counterterrorism operations at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. into the same building. The idea goes beyond the concept Mr. Bush announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address for creating a national terrorism threat center, and it would carry tremendous symbolic weight for two agencies often at odds in coordinating operations. “There are obviously advantages to having two of the main agencies in the fight against terrorism being located together,” a government official said. “There will be meetings and discussions to determine if that makes sense.” Officials emphasized that the idea was in the discussion stage, but they said that George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, had talked recently about whether it could work. Under one plan, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. would move their counterterrorism operations — and their several thousand employees — to Northern Virginia to help create the terrorism center. Full Story