FC: White House stops drug-cookie tracking; NSA to use Canadian crypto

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

*********

> Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 21:28:27 -0700
> From: Lizard <lizard () mrlizard com>
> Subject: Government tracks users...
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/22net.html
>
> Remember -- this is the government Lawrence Lessig says is our last, best, 
> hope against those evil privacy-destroying corporations!
>
> A friend of mine has a .sig file which seems to be relevant here:"If the 
> government wants us to obey the law, it should set a better example!"

*********

> Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 21:32:45 -0700
> From: Lizard <lizard () mrlizard com>
> Subject: A chicken in every pot head...or something.
>
> BTW, I tested the anti-drug ad links. I went to Alta Vista and typed in "A 
> chicken in every pot", a reasonable query for anyone studying the 1920s, 
> and, sure enough, was rewarded with an anti-drug ad.
>
> Your tax dollars at work!!!

*********

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/22net.html

Drug Office Ends Tracking of Web Users
White House Admits Privacy Concerns
By MARC LACEY

WASHINGTON, June 21 -- The White House
conceded today that it might have violated
federal privacy guidelines, and it ordered its
Office of National Drug Control Policy to stop using
a software device that tracks computer users who
view the government's antidrug advertisements on the
Internet.

To monitor traffic on its Internet sites for children and
parents, the White House's drug policy office has
employed computer files known as cookies, which
are placed in computers electronically -- usually
without the knowledge of users -- to monitor their
Internet travels.

The software is widely used by commercial Web
sites to record information about the shopping habits
and other interests of their users. But White House officials said they saw
a distinction between companies tracking customers and the government
doing similar monitoring.

"People shouldn't have to worry when they're getting information from the
government that the government is getting information from them," said an
administration official who worked on the matter.

The firm that installed the devices, DoubleClick, a New York advertising
company that specializes in the Internet, said it used the monitoring
software to measure which ads were most effective in sending computer
users to the drug office's Web sites.

[...]

John D. Podesta, the White House chief of staff, sent a firmly worded
letter to the drug office today asking officials to explain how they had
reached such arrangements.

[...]

*********
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 16:07:41 -0700
From: Bill Stewart or other lab user <billstewart () att com>
Organization: AT&T Technical Marketing
To: cypherpunks () cyberpass net
Subject: NSA Buying Canadian Hard Drive Encryption Software

From the "Export Jobs, Not Crypto" front and the "Crypto Laws Weaken
National Security" branch of People Exporting Tasty Algorithms .org....

[...snip...]

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2122967.html

Canadian encryption experts to guard secret U.S. data
By Reuters
June 21, 2000, 2:15 p.m. PT

TORONTO--Canada's Kasten Chase has been given the
exclusive go-ahead by the U.S. National Security Agency to
safeguard top-secret government data, which could make the
recent theft of computer hard drives laden with nuclear secrets
from Los Alamos National Laboratory a nonissue in the future.

Toronto-based Kasten Chase became the first company to be
endorsed by the security agency to encrypt the hard drives, not
just the data, the company said today.

"If those (Los Alamos) devices had our media encrypter, when
they were switched on by anybody that had stolen them, they
would have been absolutely useless," Kasten's chief executive
Paul Hyde told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The only thing preventing the breach of a hard drive today is the
operating system's initial passwords, said Hyde.

"With our system, you could rip that thing to shreds and you
couldn't get to it. There is no way that data would be
accessible," he added.

Kasten Chase's RASP Secure Media system is "necessary and
sufficient" to encrypt military, police and intelligence agencies'
mission-critical information to the "classified secret" level, said
Michael Flemming, chief of the National Security Agency's
Information Assurance Solutions Group.

[...]

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