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RAIN 11/12: Weekend Update Part 1



There are 15 stories in this posting.


Washington Post 11/09/01
Editorial: A flawed approach on records
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64939-2001Nov8.html

PRESIDENT BUSH has issued a new executive order revamping the process by which the White House handles public requests for the records of past presidents. Under law, many presidential records remain secret for 12 years after a president leaves office. Then they become available upon request, subject to national security and other concerns -- and to whatever privilege claims the former and current presidents assert. The 12-year time period has now lapsed for President Reagan, so the White House needed to figure out how to handle pending requests from historians for tens of thousands of documents.


Washington Post 11/09/01
Amid war, GAO puts legal fight with Cheney on hold
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64520-2001Nov8.html

by Michael Grunwald and Ellen Nakashima
This summer, the General Accounting Office was spoiling for an unprecedented legal and constitutional clash with Vice President Cheney.
Cheney had refused to turn over records from his energy task force, and the GAO, the 80-year-old investigative arm of Congress, was preparing to sue a federal entity for the first time. Comptroller General David M. Walker described the fight as a direct threat to the GAO's reason for being, a separation-of-powers issue that would determine whether the legislative branch could exercise the oversight role envisioned by the founding fathers.


New York Times 11/09/01
Black Photographers who are trying to get blackness right
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/arts/design/09BOXE.html

by Sarah Boxer
"Reflections in Black: Smithsonian African-American Photography" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, organized by Deborah Willis, is a mind-bendingly big show with a big thesis: that African-Americans used photography to define themselves. The exhibition, divided into two sections, "The First Hundred Years," which runs from 1842 to 1942, and "Art and Activism," which runs from the 1950's to the present, includes hundreds of photographs by and mostly of African-Americans.



Boston Globe 11/08/01
Federal agents seize City Hall documents
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/312/region/Federal_agents_seize_City_Hall:.shtml

by Adam Gorlick
Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) Federal agents seized documents from four municipal offices Thursday as part of a probe into possible public corruption.
Armed with search warrants, FBI agents took stacks of paperwork from the city auditor and community development offices in City Hall. They also used search warrants to seize documents from the economic development office and the Hampden County Employment and Training Consortium office in downtown Springfield.


Washington Post 11/08/01
Bush adviser frowns on U.S. ID card
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011108/aponline113026_002.htm

by May Wong
AP Technology Writer
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The president's adviser on cyberspace security is discouraging the idea of a single national identity card to guard against terrorist attacks.
The Bush administration has yet to take a formal position on the cards, but Richard Clarke said he does "not think it's a very smart idea." He said most federal officials he's spoken with agree.



Washington Post 11/09/01
CACI, Aspen Systems share big Justice Dept. contract
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9-2001Nov8.html

by Ellen McCarthy
CACI International Inc. and Aspen Systems Inc. wereawarded a five-year contract by the Justice Department that could be worth as much as $950 million.
Under the contract, CACI, of Arlington, and Aspen Systems, of Rockville,will help the department organize and manage documents used in federal legal cases through 2007.



CFO.com 11/09/01
Doing eBay's bidding
http://www.cfo.com/Pge_Channel_Article_Detail/1,4635,87|88|AD|5704,00.html

The Economist
To most punters, the thrill of an auction lies in its unpredictability. But auctions are meant to set prices efficiently, which ought to mean that, in an open auction, similar items fetch similar prices. This is especially true for goods with a published "book value", such as old coins and stamps.



Chicago Tribune 11/09/01
Travelers may shed privacy to speed screening
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0111090366nov09.story?coll=chi%2Dnews%2Dhed

by Mike Dorning
Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Airline passengers soon may face a choice between their fear of Big Brother and their loathing of long lines.
As federal officials and airline executives grapple with how to improve airport security without unduly inconveniencing travelers, they are considering a proposal that would allow faster security screening for passengers with special identification cards.



CNET.com 11/09/01
IE security hole leads to cookie jar
http://investor.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-7828689-0.html?tag=ats

by Stefanie Olsen
Microsoft has warned that versions of Internet Explorer can expose consumers' personal data contained within cookies.
The vulnerability exists within IE 5.5 and 6.0, but earlier browser editions "may or may not be affected," according to a security bulletin posted to Microsoft's Web site Thursday. The security flaw allows an outsider to break into cookies--tiny electronic files used by Web sites to file account information or personalize pages--through a specially crafted Web page or e-mail. A person could then steal or alter data from Web accounts, including credit card numbers, usernames and passwords.



The Winston Salem Journal 11/09/01
County may add to online features
http://www.journalnow.com/wsj/news/MGB9LEYKTTC.html

by Michael Biesecker
In the not-so-distant future, Forsyth County residents may be able to use their home computers to do everything from paying their taxes to looking up a birth certificate.
A committee of county officials has completed a report that recommends using new technologies to make dozens of things that are now available only by mail or at a government office accessible on the Internet.



New York Times 11/09/01
Court says France can't censor Yahoo site
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/technology/09YAHO.html

by Lisa Guernsey
In a decision that is being applauded by Internet companies and civil liberties groups, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the United States Constitution's protections of free speech trumped a French order requiring Yahoo (news/quote) to remove Nazi materials from its Web site.



The Globe and Mail 11/09/01
Museums are for the living
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/GIS.Servlets.HTMLTemplate?tf=tgam/common/FullStory.html&cf=tgam/common/FullStory.cfg&configFileLoc=tgam/config&vg=BigAdVariableGenerator&date=20011109&dateOffset=&hub=headdex&title=Headlines&cache_key=headdexComment&current_row=2&start_row=2&num_rows=1

by Mark Starowicz
Whatever flaws our irritating American cousins may have, forgetting their dead is not one of them. The most moving battlefield I ever stood on was Gettysburg. It is there that the tide of the Civil War turned in favour of the Union in 1863, on this vast Pennsylvania landscape. It is the birthplace of the American Union, the bloody cauldron of the Republic, where Abraham Lincoln delivered a startlingly short three-minute address -- which everyone thought banal and unremarkable at the time -- as the founding ideal of the American nation.



New York Times 11/09/01
HP: employee sabotaged Superdome tests
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_0-1003-200-7821341.html?searchpv=cnet

by Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com
Hewlett-Packard filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that a former employee sabotaged performance tests of its top-end Superdome Unix server, crippling sales of the key product.
The Palo Alto, Calif., computing giant said in the suit that Hock-Beng Lim admitted in a meeting with HP that he sabotaged Superdome systems used in performance tests by sending reset commands, reformatting disks and cutting cables of computers involved in the tests. Lim was fired in October, HP said.



Government Technology 8/2001
Ending the pawnshop paper trail
http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.phtml?id=3030000000002482

by Jim McKay
When police in Pasadena, Calif., finally solved the murder of an 89-year-old woman several years ago, they had spent hundreds of hours reviewing stacks of paper pawn slips - the forms pawn dealers are required to fill out with every transaction. From the pawn slips, police eventually tracked several items stolen from the home during the robbery/murder and located the perpetrator who sold the items to pawn dealers.



Government Technology 11/2001
States, Cities sanitize Web sites
http://www.govtech.net/news/features/news_feature.phtml?docid=3030000000003610

by Steve Towns
SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah is joining the list of states that are deleting content from their Web sites in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
Utah's Department of Environmental Quality Web site no longer identifies where toxic substances are stored throughout the state, and Utah is part of a growing number of government jurisdictions that are rethinking the type of information they provide online.


Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
pakurilecz@aol.com
Richmond, Va