CRYPT NEWSLETTER 37

May - June 1996



Editor: Urnst Kouch (George Smith, Ph.D.)

Media Critic: Mr. Badger (Andy Lopez)

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Ŀ

 Contents: Crypt Newsletter #37      





 THIS ISSUE



BOOKS

"Breakthrough:" The words of prophets aren't written on the walls of

CompuServe

"American Extremists:" More words on Lyndon LaRouche

"The Future Does Not Compute:" One author's image of the Inferno

Mars attacks: Los Alamos guru featured in "Washington Babylon"

NEWS

Myth builders: GAO hackers report breaks wind

Some comments on NCSA Virus Prevention Con '96

Kevin Mitnick plea bargains

The endless river of H/P/A/C/V and you

MISCELLANY

  Letters page

  Crypt Newsletter Hypertext

  Crypt Masthead Info

  Credits/Acknowledgment











THE BUILDING OF MYTHS THROUGH CAREFUL STUDY





          "It is a great art to know how to sell wind."

                             -- Baltasar Gracian





The beginning of Summer has delivered a box load of public

announcements on the growing horror of ill-defined hacker menace.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has been

madly casting about for new enemies to take the place of the old

bogeymen in the Politburo.  At various times Third World nations

have been suggested. However, U.S. citizens are uninterested in

thugs from Somalia or Balkan butchers.  They are loutish, messy,

and lacking in ICBM fields, B-52s or other obvious means of

projecting power or violence beyond their territories. Terrorist

groups domestic and international have been sought, too.

Unfortunately, the Japanese cult of nerve gas manufacturers has

proven unstable as have the U.S. militias. The militias also have

had the gall to hole up in isolated farm houses while surrounded

by regiments of FBI agents.  The pictures at ten fail to move the

populace to panic, instead provoking laughter and ridicule or the

vague suspicion that government employees are overdoing it.



However, bands of hackers have proven far more durable

and roadworthy. This is because they are being cleverly sold as

capable of raping and pillaging the archdukes of capitalism simply

by pushing a few buttons from the refuge of a faraway land or county.

It is the closest anyone has been able to come to the symbolism of

ICBMs and computerized launch codes.



Hackers are good at making mechanisms, too.  Small boxes utilized

for the purposes of defrauding everyone's nemeses, the telephone

companies, are now metamorphosing into bigger boxes.



The recent issue of FORBES ASAP featured a number of menacingly

posed fellows on its cover who consented to be avuncular bogeymen for

a roundtable of editors. They spoke of weaponry like remote mass

automatic garage door openers, HAM and short wave radio snoopers which

allow one to eavesdrop on and speak through fast food restaurant

drive-up speakerphones or those small walkie-talkie systems sold as baby

monitors in catalogs like THE SHARPER IMAGE.  Electronic death ray

projectors called HERF guns were discussed.  No one seems to have

actually seen a HERF death ray but few people ever got to see a real

ICBM or a shell loaded with sarin, either, so the point Crypt

Newsletter attempts to make is probably moot.



The Senate subcommittee on investigations was also hard at work

this month publicizing a 63-page Government Accounting Office

report entitled "Information Security: Computer Attacks at Department

of Defense Pose Increasing Risks" on the threatening world of computer

saboteurs and hacks on DoD networks.



But the Government Accounting Office's report (GAO/AIMD-96-84)

promised a lot more than it delivered. Disappointingly, Crypt noted it

proved to be an extremely general discussion of hackers leavened with

a lot of unsupported conjecture.  A look at it convinced Crypt that

anyone wishing to know anything real about computer hacking incidents

would be better served by going to a good bookstore and purchasing

copies of "The Hacker Crackdown," "The Cuckoo's Egg" and "Firewalls

and Internet Security."



Long segments of the GAO treatise also retold -- much less effectively --

news stories that have appeared in the media in the last five

years.  For no apparent reason other than to provide "what-if's,"

the GAO republished the tale of a scary Rand information warfare

gaming exercise reported in a August 21, 1995 cover story for TIME

magazine. It read as fiction. The GAO paper also anonymized and

failed to properly cite the perfectly precise and specific story of

Bill Cheswick and Steve Bellovin's tangle with the Dutch hacker

"Berferd" in 1991 (and published in their book, "Firewalls and

Internet Security.")



In the report, much is also made of a two year old incident

at the Air Force Material Command facility in Rome, New York.

Although the republic was not harmed, GAO and the military assessed

the difficulties caused by the hack to have set the Department of

Defense back $500,000.



Jack Brock, the congressional General Accounting Office's point man

on its hacker report, said in related congressional testimony:

"Terrorists and other adversaries now have the ability to launch

untraceable attacks from anywhere in the world. They could infect

critical systems with sophisticated computer viruses, potentially

causing them to malfunction."



Yes, and it is easy to imagine that this statement would come as a

very bitter surprise to Christopher Pile, a real British hacker who

cast his SMEG viruses into the computer underground.  Of course, he

turned out to be far from "untraceable" and is now serving a year and

a half jail sentence on charges having to do with his comings and

goings in cyberspace.



The GAO reports DoD computers "may" have been the target of assaults

in the last year.  Later on in the text, it is cited that there

were 559 "officially reported" incidents in 1995. Very little meaning

can be extracted from these figures since no real methodology on their

derivation is presented.  For example, would 250,000 assaults

include Crypt Newsletter using telnet to bring up a network address

reprinted in a nonfiction book on UFO's and finding that it was

PENTAGON-AI.ARMY.MIL, a restricted site?



A recent Washington Post article on the GAO/hacker/DoD congressional

hearings also mentioned other reports which have built scenarios for

effect. To wit: although FAA traffic control computers are safe

because they are old, complicated and rickety, it is theoretically

possible that future replacements would prove to be playgrounds for

malicious but invisible hackers.



The metaphor of the popular movie was also used to make a point: In

"The Net" a hacker changes the medical records of the Secretary

of Defense at the Bethesda Naval Center.  Readers are asked to

think of this as real.



Work published by the Computer Security Institute projects the

hacker menace onto US corporates, too. Forty two percent of 428

respondents to a poll insist they've been hacked within the past year.

The respondents are invisible.  Always shielded by layers of

confidentiality and anonymity we do not grant victims of sex

offenders, corporate victims are said to speak of computer evil-doers.

Science Applications International Corp., a giant think tank

and Pentagon contractor pulls out of Congressional hearings on criminal

hacking.  "We have non-disclosure agreements with our clients and we

were not given clear and absolute assurances that under questioning

we wouldn't be expected to violate those nondisclosure agreements,"

said a mouthpiece for the organization.



Many, many foreign countries -- "more than 120" -- appeared to have

hackers whom at one time or another try their hands on Department of

Defense systems, Mr. Brock said. According to the news, he added the

National Security Agency knew which countries these were but this was

classified information. Secret. None of your business even though you

paid for it. Invisible.



Crypt phoned Mr. Brock in an effort to shed more light on the data

in his report but he said he couldn't discuss anything about it with

anyone, particularly over the telephone.  Mr. Brock said the NSA had

presented the data to him but had sworn him not to talk of it.  Crypt

felt sorry for questioning Mr. Brock because his style made it clear he

was a little bit frightened of the mandarins at the NSA.  One received

the distinct impression that Mr. Brock felt that even if the simple words

"hacker" or "computer virus" were mentioned on an open line too many

times a bad thing might happen.  It was like the reading of a horror

novel by H. P. Lovecraft. If the wrong word were invoked an unspeakable

creature might be summoned from the Arkham of Ft. Meade, one that could

mutate the careless utterer of it into a many tentacled fish-frog.



In seriousness, perhaps a bad thing could occur.  A career could be

smudged over something as simple as candor in a three minute phone

chat.



Mr. Brock also said a number of odd things.  He said that there

had been information presented by the NSA of varying sensitivity and

there had been no decision on how it should be classified. So no blanket

classification had been made but still no one could speak of it.



"I'm not a good source," said Mr. Brock.  Then he repeated it: "I am

not a good source."  What? But if not the GAO investigator, then who?

Of course, the answer is a circular argument.  The NSA was the final

source -- that's who.



Well, Crypt Newsletter readers no longer believe the standard

bromides delivered by intelligence agencies. They know that

excessive classification or gag orders are an indication of someone

wishing to hide data that qualifies the publicized announcement, to

disguise plagiarism from open sources, or cover up incompetence and

outright fraud.



Wrestling with invisibles, or symbols, was always what the Cold War

was about. No one except an obscure lunatic named T. K. Jones in

the Reagan administration really thought that either U.S. generals

or their Soviet counterparts would call down the wrath of 10,000

nuclear warheads.  Yet the symbol of the nuclear-tipped missile

remained the stone tablet of the religion of geopolitics, a totem

that could be successfully shaken at newspapers, Congressional

meetings and international summits.



Hackers are a totem of great power, too.  For a short period of

time, Kevin Mitnick became the 1995 equivalent of Muammar Ghaddafi, at

least in newspapers and on TV. Unknowable and unknown, his image - that

of a menacing-looking cypher in thick glasses - was an appropriately

fearful symbol to some. When the Mitnick-Ghaddafi turned out to be

normal looking months later, no one cared anyway. Tsutomu

Shimomura, like US F-111s, had already been dispatched to banish the

Mitnick-Ghaddafi to the trashpits of Gehenna -- in this case

city jails in North Carolina and Los Angeles. Shimomura, it

turned out, appeared to have missed the real target but the F-111s sent

to mail the Ghaddafi menace C.O.D. to Allah missed, too, and media

history has been kind to both affairs.



The Mitnick-Ghaddafi, said those with the loudest voices, at one

point in the dim past might have been able to start World

War III by diddling computers in Cheyenne Mountain. They were confused

by Hollywood and appeared to believe that a teen movie called "Wargames"

actually featured the Mitnick-Ghaddafi. Since the Mitnick-Ghaddafi had

neither a press agent or a constant address he was certainly hard

to find and not in much of a position to clarify matters.  This worked

against him and for the forgers of symbols and the tellers of tales.  If

Mitnick had possessed the wit to walk into a TV studio the day

after his face showed up on the front page of The New York Times or to

spend $500 dollars for a couple of news releases on the PR Newswire, his

career as a religious totem used to scare and thrill the citizenry

would have been over long before media momentum and book sales

transformed him into a myth.



From virus writers to Internet marauders the average computer d0od

who fancies himself a successful hacker has never understood the

mechanisms of media symbolism.



Invariably, the hacker can always be lured into exaggerating his

impact upon the republic by appropriate blandishments from reporters

in the mainstream media. In need of a malevolent sounding man to portray

as a dangerous computer-master weirdo?  Place a query on the Internet

and the editorial phone will ring off the hook.



From the perspective of the hacker this  seems like an attractive deal.

He gets to tweak the nose of suits, make Congressmen scurry about at the

behest of the NSA and cause the neighbors to keep the cat in at night.

Power! Celebrity! The euphoria lasts until the inevitable story is

published and a couple hundred thousand people read it. The reality of

this leaves the interviewed computer jockey feeling nervous and cheated.

He has been cast as a hideous but banal carnivorous ogre, not a cool

clove cigarette-smoking anti-hero. If a photo is published it will

invariably be the one that was the product of an atrocious camera angle,

the one that made him look like a creepy slug or Doctor Octopus. Locals

may be sufficiently frightened by this image to consider mustering a

party to slay the ogre. Instead of getting on the cover of People, it has

become time to lay low at the job, to change one's phone number or to ask

the parents to fund a sojourn at an anonymous state university. The

hacker so treated finds his life transformed as if by a philosopher's

stone. But instead of being transmuted from lead into gold, the media

has cruelly turned him into just a different isotope of lead -- that of

the pariah.



Malicious hackers are a fact of life. Some of them break into systems

or write viruses that spread around the world. Some of them get away

with a lot. But the lesson to be learned is not that they can smash

the republic or loot corporate treasure. Rather the lessons are the

stories of Kevin Mitnick, James Gentile, Chris Pile, Kevin Poulsen,

Phiber Optik or whomever is the newest flavor of the week in the myth

business. One can count on, at the least, family embarrassment and the

inability to conduct one's future affairs in private or, at worst, a

criminal record based, in part, on wind and an image that becomes a

radical millstone in conservative times.





Notes:  



1. The quote from Science Applications was taken from a

story in the June 6 issue of the Washington Post: "U.S., Private

Computers Vulnerable to Attacks by Hackers, Study Says" by

Elizabeth Corcoran.



2. More on the GAO's "untraceable" hackers who were into Air Force 

Material Command computers in Rome, New York:



On Monday, June 23, Reuters reported that one 21-year-old Mathew Bevan, 

a computer technician, had been charged with conspiracy to gain 

unauthorized access to computers and conspiracy to cause unauthorized 

modification to computers." 



Further, one Richard Pryce was previously charged with using a 

computer in his bedroom in north London to tap into several

U.S. Department of Defense systems over a period months. 

  

Reuters reported Pryce and Bevan were arrested after a lengthy 

search initiated by the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special 

Investigations. 







"BREAKTHROUGH": THE WORDS OF THE PROPHETS AREN'T WRITTEN ON THE

WALLS OF COMPUSERVE



Whitley Strieber wrote the ultimate book of alien encounters in

1987. Called "Communion,"  it was a perplexing story regardless of its

veracity.  Strieber recounted a number of alien experiences

that were ghastly but eventually enlightening. Many readers became

completely entangled in its web of alien visitation/UFO hallucination

and the hardback quickly rose to the top of the bestseller lists.



Predictably, media reaction to "Communion" was violent and negative.

"Report on 'Communion'" by Texas reporter Ed Conroy attempted to

redress the imbalance by researching Strieber's background.



Conroy portrayed Strieber as a thoughtful man of letters

whose childhood was typified by an extremely vivid imagination and

a boyish sense for practical jokes. In "Report on Communion" Conroy

produced debunkers and friends and expounded on the history of fairies

and other legends.  By the end of the exhausting read Conroy

mentioned that as a result of his work he was also convinced he had

been an abductee. In Strieber's book, the author mentions Conroy

suffered professionally for admitting this.



In "Breakthrough" (HarperCollins Spotlight), Strieber reiterates

the image and character of the aliens evoked in "Communion."

Strieber has always been a fine writer and the book's strongest

parts are weird, sometimes gripping excursions into the nature of

reality and the author's visitors.  The book is divided into three

sections which discuss further visitations, Strieber's ride in a flying

saucer and an outline of UFO lore. Area 51, sightings, the alien autopsy,

the giant face on Mars -- all are there and jive with the themes beloved

by viewers of the "X-files" (it's no accident  "X-files" merchandise and

books are advertised in the paperback's ad pages) and alien/Pentagon

conspiracy literature.  Strieber claims, too, that intelligence agencies

have been out to harass him for his writings.  His house in upstate New

York, he says, was broken into and his computer sabotaged with a virus.

Near the end, Strieber veers from unbelievable stories of alien visits

for a moment to make an impassioned argument against excessive

classification and secrecy practiced by the federal government.

"There are so many nooks and crannies, so many power centers, so many

secrets," he writes.



Strieber laments that the literature on UFO's and aliens is rife

with disinformation.  Ironically, this got Crypt's attention but

probably for the wrong reasons if one looks at it from the perspective

of the true believer.



Strieber published an electronic document in "Breakthrough" called

"hacker.txt" which purports to be a list of secret military Internet

sites involved in hiding information on UFO's and alien visitors.

It is common in cyberspace, Strieber says, and can be retrieved from

CompuServe's NewAge and UFO forums (this is accurate, I found a copy

there).  Originally published in Computer underground Digest 5.13 as

an example of the type of literature, it is plainly a hoax, in style

much like things like the "Good Times" virus.



The meat of it is a list of Internet sites, classified according

to Strieber, that divvy up into Pentagon, Utah, Nevada and

California locations.  It took about five minutes of work to

blow a hole in its tissue of electronic phlogiston and Crypt

wonders why editors at HarperCollins Spotlight, "Where Nonfiction

Shines," didn't help out a little on the original manuscript for

the sake of a reputation.  Moreover, why couldn't Strieber have

figured this out for himself?



For example, the "Sensitive Compartmented Information Network" --

a top secret site, corresponds with a computer at Boston University.

I talked to a nice lady network administrator there and she laughed

and assured me BU hadn't opened any branch campuses near Area 51 or

Wright-Patterson AFB. On a slow Friday afternoon, she was amused

to find BU computers as bit players in a book on alien visitation.



A long list of "military Internet sites" purported to be part

of a "top secret network" in Nevada are really in Deutschland:

at the University of Stuttgart, the Berufsakademie Mannheim, the

Hessian center for "Datenverarbeitung" in Wiesbaden, a

"Fachhochschule" on Jakob Street in Albstadt and assorted computers

in Berlin.



Someone should please tell HarperCollins that the words of prophets

aren't always written on the walls of CompuServe.



More recently, Streiber held an on-line conference on the commercial

network where he spoke of alien implants. There was brief discussion

on whether civilian discovery on the true nature of these devices might

trigger extraterrestrial retaliation. "Breakthrough's" author mentioned

we might already be subjugated and the US government was hiding the fact.

Strieber indicated he was moving to San Antonio where he planned to

have an implant of his own removed by surgeons. Streiber was going to

attempt to have it analyzed and report his findings in the coming year.





Additional notes:  In "Breakthrough," Strieber infrequently mentions

being treated hatefully by journalists.  One anecdote involves

a free-lance writer whom Strieber says mailed him a set-up

concerning alien visitation as part of a muckraking project and

then accused the author of being a cult leader. Strieber subsequently

sued him for defamation.



It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out Strieber is referring

to Stuart Goldman, a southern California-based writer who broke into

the national news prominently when he became embroiled in a criminal

investigation over an inept hacking incident at Fox Television.



In March of 1990 Goldman was arrested and arraigned in federal court

in Los Angeles after his apartment in Studio City had been searched and

his computer seized.  Charged in California and New York, an affidavit

filed on him by federal prosecutors said Goldman had made several

attempts -- at least one of them successful -- to enter Fox computers

and download files regarding news stories worked upon by Fox TV's

journalists.



Goldman had worked previously as a free-lancer for Fox's "A Current

Affair" according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.



Fox employees in New York discovered in 1989 that someone had been

trying to access their computers and complained to the US Secret

Service. The Los Angeles police became interested after the Secret

Service became involved.  Around the time of his arrest, Goldman had

been pitching an expose on the tabloid news show he worked on to

the Los Angeles Times.



As the case unfolded in newspapers, Goldman claimed Fox was trying

to silence him for threatening to expose its tabloid news show's

journalistic methods.  Fox retaliated by claiming Goldman had been

trying to sell story ideas purloined from Fox computers to

other outlets.  Part of this proof was alleged to be a computer file

on Ron Reagan, Jr's "lover" which Fox claimed had been planted

as part of the investigation to ensnare Goldman.  Goldman was

said to have attempted to sell the story idea to the Boston Globe.



Fox claimed Goldman had been using the password of an "A Current

Affair" employee named Riva Dryan.  Subsequently, computer activity

at the network was monitored. Intrusions on Dryan's password were

observed for a period of time, telephone traces made and the calls

traced to Goldman's apartment in Los Angeles.



The Los Angeles Times reported that investigators claimed Goldman

had copied the bogus Ron Reagan, Jr. tip to his own computer.



The story was complicated by the fact that Goldman had worked for

"A Current Affair" and split acrimoniously with the show over its

handling of a segment he was working on for it concerning

Whitley Strieber's UFO abductee followers.  Goldman battled with

Fox over the segment -- which never aired -- and then took the scoop

to rival "Hard Copy." "Hard Copy" ran a segment based on the UFO

story which, in turn, triggered a Goldman debate with Strieber on

CBS's "Good Morning America."  On the show, Goldman likened Strieber

to Guyana cult leader Jim Jones. Strieber protested and then

filed his defamation suit. Ironically, Ted Kost, the private detective

hired by Strieber to serve Goldman process papers wound up being

hired by Goldman to investigate the LAPD's case against the reporter

after Strieber dropped his defamation charge.



In 1991, Goldman pleaded no contest to the felony charge of

unauthorized access to a computer system.  He was placed on five

years probation and ordered to pay $90,000 to Fox, reduced to

$12,000 on Goldman's plea that he was "indigent."



Deputy District Attorney Richard Lowenstein asked for dismissal of

four additional counts of unauthorized computer entry and Los Angeles

Superior Court judge Richard Neidorf warned Goldman that if he

continued to use computers to get himself into trouble he would wind

up in court again.







LYNDON LAROUCHE, REVISITED:  BLAME IT ON BRITISH SPYMASTERS AND

JEREMY BENTHAM



Those who tuned into Crypt's last offering recall our brief

jaunt to Lyndon LaRouche's Web site on the Internet. Drawn to it

by a 30-minute prime-time broadcast on CBS earlier this year, "the

world's foremost economic theorist" and Presidential candidate commented

on economic doom, called Newt Gingrich and his followers "Hitler-type

criminals" and drew them all into a hard to follow warren of malevolent

conspiracy linking Wall Street bond marketeers, members from the Bund of

the media elites, powermad elements said to be lurking in British

intelligence and Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles.



LaRouche's antipathy toward the British was also in high evidence

on his Web page. He claimed they were responsible for a large

portion of the bad taste rampant in the western world!  And, of

course, it is impossible to forget the LaRouche tenet that

Queen Elizabeth was a "drug pusher."



Crypt found some of this difficult to grasp but a new book by

John George and Laird Wilcox, "American Extremists" (Prometheus

Books), sheds some light on the issue in a chapter on the LaRouche

network.



"LaRouche's animus against the British greatly stems from his

view that Aristotelianism (as advocated by the British

[empiricists . . . John Locke, Jeremy Bentham . . .] is responsible

for many of the ills of society.



By applying Aristotelian thought to ethics, says LaRouche, one gets

moral relativism -- the idea that one system belief is as valid

as another.  This is anathema.



Further, "according to LaRouche, the 'oligarchs,' the wealthy British

families are disciples of Aristotle and his intellectual tradition.

They use his methodology in a conspiracy to keep the masses

uninformed about the true nature of reality and helpless against

their nefarious machinations."



"I see," said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.



Anyway, ""American Extremists" is a tremendous book.  It explains

the impenetrable metaphysics of many fringe Americans from the far

left and right.  As well as being extremely detailed and expert, it's

also greatly entertaining in its chatty tales of unusual people.

The lives of the extreme tend to be, uh, extreme and it's difficult

not to break a smile while reading the history of them.



Turning back to LaRouche, we find that he is one of the most

sophisticated of American extremists.  If his writings are to be taken

seriously, his philosophies are mercuric amalgams of the left

and right. Wilcox and Laird write -- by way of George Johnson's book

"Architects of Fear" -- that this fusion stems from LaRouche's unusual

conspiracy beliefs:



"[LaRouche's] politics are so complex that he has been simultaneously

accused of being funded by the CIA and KGB.  LaRouche counts among

his enemies not only international bankers, the Federal Reserve System,

and the Trilateralists, but also Ken Kesey, Bertrand Russell, Playboy

magazine, Isaac Newton, the Nazis, the Jesuits, the Zionists, the

Socialist International and the Ku Klux Klan."



Followers of LaRouche have a history of being very loyal to

the man. Many of them are still with him, even after he changed

abruptly and swung hard right from early days as a Trotskyist.

LaRouche runs a headquarters in Leesburg, Virginia, where computers

whir behind locked doors and bulletproof glass.



From Leesburg, LaRouche works on a plan to install a new world order

based on the views of LaRouche.



LaRouche's Schiller Institute promotes the view held by him and his

wife that classical German culture is superior. LaRouche offices

feature a piano room with music from German composers and German

posters.



In early writings, LaRouche speaks of the wide-ranging role he plays in

followers' lives. He warned them as far back as 1973 that devotion to

him would involve some stress.



"In respect of the mental processes, absolutely nothing is secret;

there is merely blindness. . . . In Germany I am Der Abscheulicher (the

abominable one); I shall soon be regarded similarly here," he said.



In "The Politics of Male Impotence" in 1973, LaRouche said that he had

set up a European base "on the premise that our growing importance in

the world would close borders to me very soon."



According to an article in the Los Angeles Times in which the prior

anecdote appeared, "All Germany is a heaving mass of sexual impotence,"

LaRouche wrote.



When federal agents raided his Leesburg compound in 1986 prior to

a lengthy trial that eventually put him in jail on fraud charges,

LaRouche claimed that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had called

for the raid as a precondition for a superpower summit that had just

been concluded. According to LaRouche, the demand included a plan

to kill him.



"This is the truth, and anything contrary to what I have just stated

is false," LaRouche wrote. "The man with the mark of the beast on his

head, [Mikhail Gorbachev], has demanded my elimination."



More on the swizzled politics and activities of Lyndon LaRouche is

left for another day.  However, those unwilling to wait can satisfy

themselves with "American Extremists."





"THE FUTURE DOES NOT COMPUTE": ONE AUTHOR'S IMAGE OF THE INFERNO



In 1984 the pungent Lewis Lapham wrote a parable about the age

of high tech wrapped around the story of the Turkish sacking of

Constantinople in 1453. ". . . the Byzantine emperor Constantine

Palaeologus, accompanied by priests and a choir of the faithful,

made a solemn embassy to the church of Saint Theodosia to pray to

the martyr whose relics were believed to contain the powers that

subsequent generations have learned to attribute to the hydrogen

bomb [or the computer.]  Having assigned his kingdom to the bones

of a saint, the emperor died the next morning with those few

of his followers who took the trouble to meet the Turks on the

city walls.  Most of the emperor's subjects chose to remain in one

of the city's churches, trusting to the miracles of religion

rather than to the force of their own courage and arms.  When the

Turks broke down the doors of Saint Sophia, they found 10,000

people earnestly praying in a sanctuary sweet with the smell

of incense and fear."



The Turkish story lent itself, he wrote, to the mania surrounding

high tech, the desire to put oneself blindly in the trust of a

totem -- the computer chip.  If a school administrator is shown to

order computers for a few classrooms, the students are

automatically deemed educated. If the business guru utters any

"holy words" that rhyme with "onics" or "echnics," the unwashed

recipient of the wisdom is "ushered into paradise."



It has been a source of continued aggravation to Crypt Newsletter

to find that this type honest, lacerating appraisal and criticism

of the cult of information comes only from outsiders to it. Painfully,

there has never been a corresponding shortage of Alvin Tofflers or

like-minded lieutenants. Crypt suspects this probably has something

to do with the reality that most people in computing who are capable of

writing with some degree of acumen on the subject are so in fear of

being reduced to a gaberlunzie by the wrath of a patron or boss that

they can never see clear to take on such a project.



This brings us to Stephen L. Talbott's "The Future Does Not Compute:

Transcending the Machines In Our Midst" (O'Reilly & Associates).

Talbott is an editor for O'Reilly and as an insider he's done

such a commendable job that he will never again have to worry about

being in the bibliographies of the Nick Negroponte's of the world.



"Does Not Compute" is a considered discussion that bravely

publishes crushers like "our rush to wire the world will some day be

seen to have spawned a suffering as great as the world's greatest

dictators." Presented only as one nugget from as thorough a book as

DNC, Crypt imagines the sentence bugging typical Net surfers mightily.

Of course, the easily bugged aren't this book's audience.  For that

matter, neither are the  oceans of lip-readers found on on-line

services.



However, DNC is a pearl of great price. Talbott's vision of a

future where not firmly coming to grips with computing technology

as it relates to actual need and essential human concerns results

in being communally roasted slowly in the pit for it can already be

seen in many areas of American society, particularly corporate culture.

"A global electronic culture can, in one sense or another, bring about

a union of peoples," Talbott writes. "The question is whether this

union only offers a less visible . . . communal dissociation . . ."







NCSA VIRUS PREVENTION CON '96: ASSORTED COMMENTS



At a recent meeting of computer security gurus in Washington,

D.C., one prominent anti-virus software developer and researcher

surprised competitors by claiming the industry and its products

would have trouble remaining afloat in the next five years. Too much

time had been poured into designing software to detect thousands of

computer viruses that existed only in research labs or the hands of

a few obscure hackers. Users had been sold on the idea that only numbers

mattered. The more crazily named computer viruses claimed

detected, the better the software.  However, a funny thing had

happened on the way to this goal. Instead of technology developing

to improve performance, programs had become harder -- even an

annoyance -- to use, less effective, slower.



Joe Wells, the keeper of the computer virus WildList presented

these claims in an interesting paper published at the National

Computer Security Association's Virus Prevention conference on

April 2.



Called: "Reality Check: Stalking the Wild Virus," the paper

begin with three questions that were quite critical of current trends

in the industry.



1. Has the anti-virus industry done users a major disservice?

YES, wrote Wells. It did itself a similar disservice by pouring to

much time, effort and money into products that could be smaller

faster, more useful and -- better.



2. Is the industry trapped in a mire of its own making?

YES, again, said Joe.  "Having trouble staying afloat," he writes

sardonically.  The numbers game of viruses has created a mire

that has ensnared vendors, users, product reviewers - but it

was created by vendors.



3. Can the a-v industry handle what's ahead?



"NO WAY" wrote Wells!  Not unless major changes were instituted.



Wells explained that about five years Central Point and Symantec

kicked off a numbers game for virus detection and that it evolved

into marketing claims prominently displayed on store boxes for the

purpose of hyping products.



The spiral went out of control with most vendors following suit

even though it was known in the early part of the decade that

only a small percent of known computer viruses were in the wild.



Further, Wells started up the WildList to put some kind of

scientific sense and systematology into computer virus incidence

reporting.



Wells maintains that no viruses have become common going straight

from virus exchange BBSes to international threat.  Further, he

argued, the current institutions for tracking and solution by

vendors is appropriate for the way viruses _do_ emerge in the wild.



The problem arises, he continued, when vendors were and are faced

with the decision of trying to cover all potential viruses - all

known viruses, he calls it - from virus exchanges or Internet sites.



The choice to cover all known viruses has put products into the mire.

As exceptions, Wells wrote that IBM's memory resident virus filter

only concentrates on common viruses and that a component of the Norton

Anti-virus TSR has discarded signatures, too.



Wells writes that "reviewers tend to force developers to respond by

proclaiming that products that don't detect some new advanced

polymorphic virus must have incompetent research departments.



"Interestingly, I was recently taken aback when one reviewer told me

why he includes such zoo viruses [weird examples never expected to

be in the wild like Cruncher or Uruguay].  He said that this was

the only way he could differentiate products.  It was the only

way he could rate them."



One of the final notes of the paper is that product developers

should "stop wasting time on this useless numbers game."



Surprisingly, during the presentation Wells never really got around

to covering everything in the paper.  Quite a few people started

asking questions about the methodology that went into WildList virus

reporting. The discussion bogged down and chose to focus on the

unusual: freak appearances in the wild of the Lehigh virus traced

to an anonymous crazy laboring to place it on a public library PC

in the Philippines every three months, like clockwork.



Also on hand at the NCSA Con was the head of Microsoft's Word

development arm.  Presented as a member of the Anti-virus Product

Developer's Consortium during the conference keynote meeting,

Crypt almost laughed out loud when the Microsoft man exclaimed,

"I don't know anything about computer viruses."



A number of real anti-virus product developers present at the

meeting seemed plainly bugged by the Microsoft employee and

began questioning him in an increasingly hostile manner.  Most

of the queries revolved around the accusation that Microsoft

was making it difficult or impossible to write disinfection

routines for Word macro viruses by refusing to relinquish sufficient

detail on the structure of Word documents.  If the line of questioning

had been allowed to proceed, the anti-virus interlocutors would have

doubtless disemboweled the man from Microsoft. However, the NCSA

stepped in and administered some diplomatic balm by suggesting the

conversation be carried on elsewhere.



In further news and idiosyncrasy, the NCSA found itself awkwardly

positioned on sale of Rune Skardhamar's "Virus Detection and

Elimination" book. For those who remember, "VD&E," contains

computer viruses, some of which appear to have been cribbed from

the casebooks of the virus-writing group, phalcon/SKISM.

Convention speakers, once they noticed, found the sale of the

book . . . indiscreet. Apparently, the book's title was sufficiently

rational to avoid arousing suspicion and the NCSA placed it in their

convention bookstore before reading closely.



About a week or so after the convention, Ken Bechtel of NCSA said

that the offending volume had been dropped from the organization's

bookstore.









THE ENDLESS RIVER OF MAIL ORDER H/P/A/C/V AND YOU



Crypt Newsletter is never surprised to receive mail catalogs

from eccentrics, fringe characters and victims of frank mental illness.

In fact, Crypt Newsletter welcomes such trash, finding it more

stimulating reading than the usual professional-looking paper from

politicians, the pharaohs of industry and wealth, assorted yuppie

trinket direct mail pamphleteers and Web browser demonstration

diskettes and/or ad blurbs for Netcom, America On-Line and CompuServe.



And so it's also diverting to see yet another enterprising

bulletin board system operator devoted to "anarchy" choosing to

get down to brass tacks by stuffing the sham  of "Information wants

to be free" and printing his own "I'm a menacing weirdo so look

what I can do"-type files into hard copy for a few slices of pie

at the plate of Mammon.



In Hurst, Texas, the enigmatically named "The Information Center"

forgoes the usual orthodoxy of the CD-ROM of superficially

menacing looking shovelgoods. Instead, the new information vendors

opts for self-published pamphlets and memo sheets.



Crypt excerpts a handful of the more interesting cliches-as-titles:



15. FREE LONG-DISTANCE TELEPHONE CALLS  "Change a Radio Shack

tone dialer into a [1994 Red Box] . . . " $8.00



17. MONITOR CELLULAR TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS ". . . Listening

to cellular phone conversations is a lot of fun . . . You will

hear people talking about sex, you will hear drug dealers

making deals . . . IT IS UNLAWFUL TO MONITOR CELLULAR

TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS . . . if caught . . . "  $5.00



73. COKES AND CASH!!  "Obtain as many [free] sodas and change

as you like!  FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLLY [SIC]!" $5.00



[Hammer not included.]



90. MAKE A COMPUTER DESTROYING DISK "Detailed instructions

on how to make a computer destroying disk . . . Their computer

will melt!" $5.00



[Optional propane torch not included.]



103. THE ASSASSIN BOX  "It is made to scare or hurt your enemy

by sending a shock of electricity right down his ear . . .

he will get a very bad shock! Do Not Do This!" $6.00 cheap



125. CIA BRAINWASHING  $7.00



The usual disclaimers concerning freedom, unusual entertainments

and the unassailable verities of scientific research -- in style

reminiscent of recitation in the high, piping voice of a small

child -- are peppered throughout the catalog.



Since 1992, Crypt has noticed a big upswing in the merchandising of

what, for want of a better description, might satirically be dubbed

"high school truant terrorist orthodoxy."  The surge has converged

precisely with pandering government oligarchs, their ambitious

fluglemen in the mainstream media and concerned hand-wringers to

ensure menacing-appearing, trivial anarchy files will remain a niche

growth industry for the remainder of the decade.









MARS ATTACKS: LIQUOR IN THE FRONT, POKER IN THE REAR OF THE

FLYING SAUCER ACCORDING TO NATIONAL LABS WEAPONS GURU IN

"WASHINGTON BABYLON"





"The truth is out there.  Trust no one."



                      --- currently popular Friday evening

                      bromides taken from US primetime TV







In book stores now, Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein's "Washington

Babylon" (Verso) is a savagely written expose of the carbuncle of naked

avarice, swindle, institutionalized deceit and brain disease that is US

politico-military leadership in the last decade and a half.



Making a star appearance is national weapons laboratory non-lethal

weapons guru John Alexander who is described as something of a

demonical lunatic.



Crypt Newsletter readers will remember Alexander from a February 1994

article entitled "Non-lethal Weapons: Quark, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

& Charm."



Excerpted from it:



John Alexander's name crops up infrequently as Los Alamos National

Laboratory's director of non-lethal weapons programs.



In mainstream media sources like the Los Angeles Times, he has

occasionally appeared delivering reasonable sounding statements

about the suitability of non-lethal weaponry [glue guns, sonic

bombardment designed to induce loss of bowel control and emesis,

microwave brain melt, laser blinding, etc.] in international

peace-keeping.



However, a there is another side to Alexander which has been covered

in Crypt and now in "Washington Babylon."



For example, in 1980 Alexander wrote that 'there are weapons systems

that operate on the power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has

already been demonstrated' [in] 'The New Mental Battlefield: Beam

Me Up, Spock,' Military Review, Dec. 1980 . . . In that side-splitter,

Alexander addressed out-of-body experiences, psychokinesis, and

telepathic behavior modification. 'There is sufficient concern about

psychic intrusion to cause work to begin on countermeasures such as

bioenergy detectors,' he advised . . . 'The information presented here

will be considered by some to be ridiculous since it does not conform

to their view of reality, but some people still believe the world is

flat.'"



Alexander's background, self-described, is that of a mercenary and

"thanatologist" who earned a doctorate under Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross,

an academic who gained a great measure of popular repute for her

writings on the psychology of death.



Alexander is also credited as a "Special Forces A-Team commander

in Thailand . . . and a [student of] meditation in Buddhist

monasteries . . ."



A 1993 edition of the Albuquerque Journal credited Alexander

as the organizer of a national conference in Santa Fe for

"researching reports of ritual abuse, near-death experiences, human

contacts with extra-terrestrial aliens and other so-called 'anomalous

experiences.'"



In October of the same year, Alexander popped up in an issue

of the Australian new age magazine, Nexus. According to the magazine,

Alexander was a captain in  the infantry in 1971 and went diving

in the Bimini Islands searching for the lost continent of Atlantis.

"He was an official representative of the Silva mind control

organization and a lecturer on protocataclysmic [?] civilization . . .

[he helped] perform ESP experiments with dolphins."



As s read that contains more savagely critical put-downs and character

slurs than a whole year of Crypt Newsletters, "Washington Babylon"

recounts all this and more including Alexander's belief -- expressed

in the previous Albuquerque Journal article -- that aliens have been

diddling American women.







MITNICK ENACTS PLEA BARGAIN



In July 1995, Crypt reported hacker Kevin Mitnick had bargained

his infamous cross-country hacking and media jaunt earlier that year

into a sentence that would commit him to about eight months in prison,

according to John Yzurdiaga, his attorney. The legendary hacker was

to plead guilty to possessing stolen cellular phone numbers, one of twenty

three federal charges - all concerning cellular phone fraud - against him.

The remaining charges were to be dropped.



On Monday, April 22, Mitnick enacted his plea bargain, admitting to

illegally possessing cellular telephone programming numbers and

violating conditions of his probation.



Mitnick was on probation from a hacking conviction in 1988.



In return, the U.S. Attorney's office agreed to drop 22 other fraud

charges against him stemming from an indictment handed down in

Raleigh, N.C., in February of 1995.



However, U.S. attorney David Schindler said that the dropping of

the fraud charges in North Carolina did not close the case.



Widely reported throughout the media, Mitnick was the target

of a publicized cyber-crusade led by the Internet's well

known Gangster of Love, Tsutomu Shimomura. Shimomura was on the scene

when federal agents arrested Mitnick in Raleigh.



Shimomura, according to media reports and his book, "Takedown"

(Hyperion), had taken up the case as a matter of honor when

Mitnick allegedly broke into his computer in San Diego over

Christmas of 1994.



On hand for the plea were Mitnick's father and grandmother, as well

as two cousins, according to the Los Angeles Times.  "He did a

crime. He did his time," said Reba Vartanian, Mitnick's grandmother.

This in reference to the one year Mitnick has already spent under

arrest while awaiting case resolution and sentencing.



Mitnick remains in jail at the Los Angeles federal Metropolitan

Detention Center.









THE LETTERS PAGE: CRYPT READER WALKS THE LINE SOMEWHERE

DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS





Crypt:



Good to see your bird's eye view of reality hasn't yet been clouded

by advanced age or anything else to which one's bird's eye view of reality

too often succumbs.



Quasi-amusingly, in the last month or so we here deep-inna-hart-a Texas

have been quite troubled by both Natas and Monkey viruses.



It seems that Monkey is coming from the local technical college  --

which in completely irrelevant news, is closely associated

with Chrysler Technologies which itself is the aircraft maint'nence

depot of for the Sultanate of Brunei. Natas virus is coming from the

local junior college.  However, the big university is squeaky clean

because Jayzuss died onna crawss so that the faculty and

students alike could be pompous and wealthy. They, of course, could

never be bothered by mere viruses,  binary or otherwise.   Unfortunately,

they haven't the slightest concept of data security, either.



Paradoxically, out of this grows my latest and much-needed employment

campaign.



I've been listening to Johnny Cash far, far too much lately.





Cory in Waco, Texas



[Crypt replies:  Proximity to Baylor is making you crabby.  We recommend

wearing a Faraday cage on your head while going virus punching until you

become fully acclimated to the vibes of Baylor brethren.]





ANKLE-BITER #3,421

==================





Dear Crypt:



Can you send something on virus creation and hex editing? I am too

lazy to read books.



The Goof, somewhere in Malaysia



[Try GAO Hacker Information Source at 1-202-512-6240.]





EN PASSANT

==========



Crypt:



Pas de questions . . . juste pour dire un ptit bonjour en

passant . . .



Pierre Gladu







CEASE LEFT WING RANTING

=======================



["GAO report on hackers breaks wind" was also published in Computer

underground Digest.  The following came to Crypt in response to it.]



Response to CUD #8.48: GAO hacker report: selling wind



You recently quoted something called the "Crypt Newsletter" on the

subject of computer-related yellow journalism & governmental

scare-mongering on the threat to national security from "hackers".



While I certainly am concerned about the characterization of "hackers"

as the lepers of the 1990s, I am very disappointed that CUD would

publish such a blatantly partisan, left-wing rant, as news.  Do you

intend CUD to become a forum for left-wing demagogues?  I should hope

that you will continue to provide a balanced forum for discussing issues

of interest to all of us in the Net community, and that you will in

future at least insert a disclaimer before reprinting material of

such material.  Otherwise, CUD will cease to be a forum

for intramural discussion of serious issues, and instead become merely

a mirror of the moderators' apparently left-wing political views.

What a shame, indeed.



I am a conservative, and I would like to point out to your

readership that it is a left-wing, liberal Democratic Administration

which has foisted the entire Clipper/Capstone/EES thing on us, and

which has consistently violated the rights of individuals and groups

in their quest to establish the Nanny State (Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc.).

In fact, Republicans in the House & Senate have been vociferous in both

opposing EES and in watering down the more heinous provisions of Mr.

Clinton's so-called "anti-terrorism" legislation.  The very

sinister Filegate incident, which is far beyond any "enemies list" kept

by the Nixon Administration, clearly shows the arrogance of liberals

who think that government (i.e., themselves) always know best, and

that their good intentions render them above the law.



Remember, Chuck Colson went to jail for possessing one (1) FBI "raw"

file; the Clinton White House had at least 408!



>No one except an obscure lunatic named T. K. Jones in the Reagan

>administration really thought that either U.S. generals or their Soviet

>counterparts would call down the wrath of 10,000 nuclear warheads.



Whoever wrote this must be either extremely stupid or willfully ignorant.

Weapons are made to be used, and the strategic arsenals of both the

U.S. & the U.S.S.R./Russia, while serving as a deterrent against a

general conventional war, are indeed capable of being launched if

National Command Authority so decides.  All one has to do is look at the

Cuban Missile Crisis or the Soviet's panicky launching of Project

RYAN during the 1980s to see that there was (and still is, in my opinion)

a real danger of unleashing Armageddon.  That's why SDI was, and

continues to be, as issue of vital import.



In closing, I would like to compliment CUD for providing a (generally)

balanced and informative resource on public policy issues such as Internet

regulation. While it is very easy to criticize from the peanut gallery, I

hope that my comments and suggestions are received not as churlish

sniping, but as advice from a devoted reader who only wishes to assist

in making CUD that much more appealing to us all.





Roland Dobbins, Bell Atlantic Network Integration

Consulting Services Group





-=The Crypt Newsletter welcomes thoughtful mail from readers at

crypt@sun.soci.niu.edu. Published letters may be edited for length

and clarity or anonymized to protect the naive from themselves.=-







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If you quite enjoy the Crypt Newsletter, editor George Smith's book,

The Virus Creation Labs: A Journey Into the Underground,"  will

really flip your wig. In it Smith unravels the intrigue behind

virus writers and their scourges, the anti-virus software

developers and security consultants on the information highway.



What people are saying about THE VIRUS CREATION LABS:



     "I couldn't stop reading it . . . As hype continues to

     build about security on the Internet and movies like

     _Hackers_ ooze the real hackers into the mainstream arena,

     this book is definite apropos material for the time.

     Read it! A+"

                      ---The Net magazine, February 1996





     "[VIRUS CREATION LABS] is informative and stunningly

     incisive . . . "

                      ---Secure Computing, October 1995



     "George Smith . . . takes a look at the world of virus writers

     and anti-virus software vendors in a style similar to that

     of 'Cyberpunks' -- anecdotal, humorous and revealing . . . a

     lucid and entertaining read."



                      ---Computer Security Journal





     "There are relatively few books on the 'computer underground' that

     provide richly descriptive commentary and analysis of personalities

     and culture that simultaneously grab the reader with entertaining

     prose. Among the classics are Cliff Stoll's 'The Cuckoo's Egg,'

     Katie Hafner and John Markoff's 'Cyberpunk,' and Bruce

     Sterling's 'The Hacker Crackdown.'  Add George Smith's

     'The Virus Creation Labs' to the list . . . 'Virus Creation

     Labs' is about viruses as M*A*S*H is about war!"



                       ---Jim Thomas, Computer underground

                       Digest 7.18, March 5, 1995



     "THE VIRUS CREATION LABS dives into the hoopla of the Michelangelo

     media blitz and moves on to become an engaging, articulate,

     wildly angry diatribe on the world of computer virus writers . . .

     Expert reporting."

                      ----McClatchy NewsWire





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Acknowledgments:  This issue Crypt is indebted to the NCSA for

hosting the interesting and informative Virus Prevention Con '96.

Crypt also gives a hearty thanks and tip o' the hat to Glenn Jordan

and S&S International's representatives for hours of avuncular

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-------------------------------------------------------------

George Smith, Ph.D., edits the Crypt Newsletter from Pasadena,

CA. Media critic Andy Lopez lives in Columbia, SC.



copyright 1996 Crypt Newsletter. All rights reserved.

