Common criminals face anti-terror laws

PHILADELPHIA--In the two years since law enforcement agencies gained fresh powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells but on people charged with common crimes.

The Justice Department said it has used authority given to it by the USA Patriot Act to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden overseas by alleged bookies, con artists and drug dealers.

Federal prosecutors used the act in June to file a charge of "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction" against a California man after a pipe bomb exploded in his lap, wounding him as he sat in his car.

A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12-years-to-life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.

Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals.

Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of cases, and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the NationalAssociation of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

Prosecutors aren't apologizing.

Attorney General John Ashcroft completed a 16-city tour this week defending the Patriot Act as key to preventing a second catastrophic terrorist attack. Federal prosecutors have brought more than 250 criminal charges under the law, with more than 130 convictions or guilty pleas.

The law, passed two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, erased many restrictions that had barred the government from spying on its citizens, granting agents new powers to use wiretaps, conduct electronic and computer eavesdropping and access private financial data.

Stefan Cassella, deputy chief for legal policy for the Justice Department's asset forfeiture and money laundering section, said that while the Patriot Act's primary focus was on terrorism, lawmakers were aware it contained provisions that had been on prosecutors' wish lists for years and would be used in a wide variety of cases.

In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants told victims they would receive their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax on their winnings.

Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to retrieve the cash, deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, they simply seized it from assets held by those banks in the United States.

"These are appropriate uses of the statute," Cassella said. "If we can use the statute to get money back for victims, we are going to do it."

The complaint that anti-terrorism legislation is being used to go after people who aren't terrorists is just the latest in a string of criticisms.

More than 150 local governments have passed resolutions opposing the law as an overly broad threat to constitutional rights.

Critics also say the government has gone too far in charging three U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, a power presidents wield during wartime that is not part of the Patriot Act. The government can detain such individuals indefinitely without allowing them access to a lawyer.

And Muslim and civil liberties groups have criticized the government's decision to force thousands of mostly Middle Eastern men to risk deportation by registering with immigration authorities.

"The record is clear," said Ralph Neas, president of the liberal People for the American Way Foundation. "Ashcroft and the Justice Department have gone too far."

Some of the restrictions on government surveillance that were erased by the Patriot Act had been enacted after past abuses -- including efforts by the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators during the Cold War. Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said it isn't far-fetched to believe that the government might overstep its bounds again.

"I don't think that those are frivolous fears," Lynch said. "We've already heard stories of local police chiefs creating files on people who have protested the (Iraq) war ... The government is constantly trying to expand its jurisdictions, and it needs to be watched very, very closely."

Even blind old ladies terrify the cops

She was blind.

She needed her 94-year-old mother to come to her rescue.

And in the middle of the dogfight -- in which Eunice Crowder was pepper-sprayed, Tasered and knocked to the ground by Portland's courageous men in blue -- the poor woman's fake right eye popped out of its socket and was bouncing around in the dirt.

How vicious and ugly can the Portland police get? Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner. This 2003 case is so blatant, the use of force so excessive, the threat of liability so intimidating that the city just approved a $145,000 settlement.

But all those gung-ho fans of the cops can relax. Nothing has changed. Nothing will upset the status quo.

The cops aren't apologizing.

The cops aren't embarrassed.

The cops haven't been disciplined.

And the cops are still insisting, to the bitter end, that they "reasonably believed" this blind ol' bat was a threat to their safety and macho culture.

Eunice Crowder, you see, didn't follow orders. Eunice was uncooperative. Worried a city employee was hauling away a family heirloom, a 90-year-old red toy wagon, she had the nerve to feel her way toward the trailer in which her yard debris was being tossed.

Enter the police. Eunice, who is hard of hearing, ignored the calls of Officers Robert Miller and Eric Zajac to leave the trailer. When she tried, unsuccessfully, to bite the hands that were laid on her, she was knocked to the ground.

When she kicked out at the cops, she was pepper-sprayed in the face with such force that her prosthetic marble eye was dislodged. As she lay on her stomach, she was Tased four times with Zajac's electric stun gun.

And when Nellie Scott, Eunice's 94-year-old mother, tried to rinse out her daughter's eye with water from a two-quart Tupperware bowl, what does Miller do? According to Ernie Warren Jr., Eunice's lawyer, the cop pushed Nellie up against a fence and accused her of planning to use the water as a weapon.

Paranoia runs deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid . . .

Afraid and belligerent. "Cops have changed," Warren said. "When I grew up, they weren't people who huddled together and their only friends were the cops. You had access to them all the time. You weren't afraid of them."

What did Police Chief Derrick Foxworth have to say about the case? "This did not turn out the way we wanted it to turn out," Foxworth said Friday. "Looking back, and I know the officers feel this as well, they may have done something differently. We would have wanted the minimal amount of force to have been used. But I feel we need to recognize Ms. Crowder has some responsibility. She contributed to the situation."

Granted. But Eunice was 71. She was blind. That probably explains why a judge threw out all charges against her and why the city, in a stone-cold panic, settled ASAP.

"This was like fighting Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder," Warren said. "It wasn't a fair fight."

No, but it was another excuse to haul out the usual code words about the cops' "reasonable" belief that they were justified to use a "reasonable amount of force to defend themselves."

If you have a different definition of "reasonable," you just don't understand the Portland police. You need to remember the words of Robert King, head of the police union, defending Officer Jason Sery in the March shooting of James Jahar Perez:

"What sets us apart from people like most of you is that you'll never face a situation in your job where -- in less than 10 seconds -- the routine can turn to truly life-threatening," King wrote. "When that happens to us, when we have to make that ultimate split-second decision, we don't just ask for your understanding, we ask for your support."

She was 71 years old. She was blind. She was lucky, I guess, that these cops -- set apart from people like most of us -- didn't make the usual split-second decision and draw their guns.

Boy suspended for allegedly exposing teacher to allergy

SOUTH ORANGE, New Jersey (AP) -- A sixth-grader was suspended after school officials accused him of threatening to expose a highly allergic teacher to peanut butter cookies, the boy's father said Thursday.

Loubert Gabriel said his son, 12-year-old Jules, had been kept out of class since April 2, after a girl in his social studies class at South Orange Middle School told the teacher that Jules had made the threat.

The father said Jules was carrying a snack packet of Nutter Butter cookies and did make a comment about having "something dangerous" but never said he had a weapon. "They mishandled this," Gabriel said.

Gabriel said the boy has not been allowed to return to classes pending a May 13 hearing by the district. The family had believed the suspension would be for 10 days, he said.

School district officials declined to comment Thursday.

Ingestion of even a morsel of peanut can cause people who are allergic to suffer severe reactions, from throat irritation to death. Gabriel said the teacher was not exposed to the cookies and had no reaction.

Teacher accused of ordering student thrown from window

COVINGTON, Ga. (AP) — A teacher at a Newton County school has resigned after officials say she admitted she told two students to throw a 14-year-old girl from a classroom window.
The teacher, a 63-year-old Conyers resident, was not immediately arrested after the Monday incident, which took place at Sharp Learning Center. But the Newton County Sheriff's Office is investigating.

The student, whose name was not released, was taken to Newton General Hospital on Tuesday night for neck pains and cuts to her body, said Newton County Sheriff's Office investigator Marty Roberts.

According to an incident report by resource officer Brian Chiappetta, the incident took place in the morning during second period. The students were in class when the teacher took a photograph of some of the students, the report said. When the girl asked why the teacher had taken her picture, the teacher allegedly responded with a disparaging remark about the girl's appearance.

The girl became upset and began to use profanity and hit the office assist button on the classroom wall, the incident report said. The teacher then allegedly told two 14-year-old boys to pick up the girl and throw her out the window.

The two boys later told principal Kenneth Daniels that they threw the girl out the window because they did not want to be written up for disobeying a teacher.

The teacher resigned Wednesday, Roberts said.

Roberts said he has been told that the school board will leave it up to the girl's parents to pursue criminal charges against the teacher. But he said his investigation is ongoing.

"I've had incidents involving schools, but I've never heard of such a thing where the teacher instructs students like this," Roberts said.

No Privacy for the Poor, Homeless

BERKELEY, California -- Activists and computer industry folks at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference are paying $140 a night to stay at a swanky hotel in Berkeley.

But they started the conference hearing about a group not usually talked about in these circles -- the homeless. A panel examined how massive databases and computer algorithms are being used to track the homeless or discriminate against the poor who need insurance.

Birny Birnbaum of the Center for Economic Justice tried to persuade the audience that insurance companies use credit report data and data-mining algorithms to single out the poor for higher insurance rates.

Birnbaum called the practice 21st-century redlining, referring to a now-outlawed banking practice that discriminated against minorities by refusing to issue mortgages to people buying homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But the panel spent most of its time talking about a new homeless database system mandated by the federal government.

Across the country, homeless shelters and other service providers are scrambling to implement an electronic homeless-management system by an October 2004 deadline set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Those systems, according to HUD draft standards, will include information on homeless individuals' incomes, mental health histories, dates of birth and Social Security numbers. The databases would keep the information for seven years.

The impetus for the homeless-management system came from Congress, which told HUD to come up with a better way to count the number of homeless people.

Cindy Southworth, technology director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told conference goers that the mandated databases would endanger the lives of women fleeing a violent partner. She argued that there are simpler, cheaper and less-invasive ways to achieve the goal of a homeless census.

"What has ended up happening has been the development of massive database systems, county by county, state by state, that are putting together systems almost as invasive as sex-offender registries for domestic violence victims and other homeless folks who are using services," Southworth said.

"It is a fabulous tool for stalkers," she said. "We are taking the exact location and other information about a victim and sticking it in a central server that's not very secure."

Alameda County, which includes the city of Berkeley and has an average of 6,215 homeless people a week, has been wrestling with this dilemma for months.

Service providers hope the centralized information will supply useful information on a client's background. Meanwhile, clients are tired of filling out the same paper intake form multiple times, according to Megan Schatz, coordinator for Alameda County's Continuum of Care Council.

Schatz says the county has bought licenses for the ServicePoint system, which has layers of "locks" to keep sensitive information from being shared among and even within agencies.

"We are 100 percent committed to protecting the privacy of survivors of domestic violence," Schatz said.

But Southworth said many counties aren't as careful and are already demanding that shelters turn over detailed information on domestic violence victims to make funding sources happy.

Just across the bay from the conference, San Francisco shelters are using a centralized system that tracks homeless people using a digital fingerprint and photo.

Chance Martin, of the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, told the conference that the system was not helping the homeless get better care.

"The biggest feature of the database is billing and inventory control," Martin said.

The system also plays into the fears of mentally ill patients, military veterans and immigrants with "cloudy legal status," who fear, fairly or not, they are being spied upon by the government, according to Martin.

Southworth suggested several alternatives to massive centralized databases, including issuing smartcards to homeless people, or simply standardizing the day homeless shelters conduct bed counts to get an accurate estimate of the number of homeless people.

Kids Fingerprinted for Fla. School Bus Rides

For the past month, students in Lee County, Fla., have been thumbprinted every time they get on and off the school bus.

Lou Karnbach, director of the county's student transportation said the system is intended to keep students safe.

"This is a system that recognizes by numbers that somebody got on the bus ... when he got on the bus, and the location he got on the bus," she said.

The pilot program combines thumbprint tracking with global positioning systems that monitor driving habits like speed, stops and starts and overall safety.

But critics say thumbprinting school kids and putting them on what they call "Big Brother buses" is wrong.

"We're currently living in a surveillance society where every movement action and utterance is being tracked or correlated," said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union (search ). "It's not too late to put a halt to this. It's not too late to stop this growing monster."

In January, Karie Rathburn's son Todd was forgotten on a school bus before being found by another driver and taken to school . She's all for safety, but not fingerprinting.

"I feel it is a violation of the children's rights," she said.

New cars are getting too expensive to fix

Last fall, a brand new BMW 3-series car rolled into the Old Dominion Carstar Collision Center in Eugene, Ore. - literally. A teenager was "driving dad's car," says shop owner Patty McConnell, and rolled it over - with little apparent structural damage. The teen walked away, and normally the damage wouldn't have been hard to repair. But the BMW had so many air bags "it looked like a balloon," recalls Ms. McConnell. The new car, worth more than $30,000, was totaled.
Costly air bags, expensive electronics, and lightweight body materials are driving up the cost of fixing new cars. Not only do many more parts have to be replaced rather than repaired, but fewer and fewer body shops can afford the special equipment and training required to do the work."We're moving closer and closer to the disposable car," says Dan Bailey, an executive vice president at Carstar, the largest auto-body repair franchise in the United States.

Repairing a new car a decade ago, for example, cost an average of $2,578 per claim, while in 2003, the cost had ballooned to $3,681, a 43 percent increase that has outpaced inflation, says Kim Hazelbaker, senior vice president and head of loss claims analysis with the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) in Arlington, Va.

Normally it takes a lot of damage to total a brand-new vehicle. Insurance companies calculate the value of a car before the accident and subtract its value as scrap. As long as the result is more than the cost of repair, the car is worth fixing.

But many new cars today cost so much to fix that it's becoming harder to justify repairs. The BMW that hit McConnell's shop had dual front, side, and side- curtain air bags. Federal safety rules do not allow air bags to be reused. So each bag would have had to be replaced with a brand new one. The sensors and pyrotechnics that set them off also required replacement. Add the cost of labor, more than $1,000 for each air bag, and even more for the sensors, and the result is a totaled car.

Before the advent of air bags, only 8 percent of damaged cars were totaled. Today, the figure is nearly 20 percent and rising. "As they continue to put more air bags in these vehicles, the figure is going to continue to escalate," says Mr. Bailey of Carstar. Not only do the number of air bags (two in front have been required since 1996) increase costs, today's new "smart" air bags, with sensors that control whether they deploy and how hard, cost more than older bags. Seat belts, too, have "once-and-done" pretensioners that have to be replaced - even on unoccupied seats - after an accident.

"There are a lot [of electronics in cars] today that weren't there in the past," says Mr. Hazelbaker of HLDI. "And if they're damaged, they are going to have to be bought new. There's only one source, the automaker, so you're going to pay full retail price."

While air bags are the most expensive technology to repair after a crash, other high-tech items are also pushing up repair costs. For example, the world's bestselling vehicle, Ford's F150 pickup, uses a magnesium radiator mount - which gets crunched every time an F150 runs into anything. Magnesium is strong and light, but brittle. Even if it bends without breaking in an accident, a body shop can't bend it back. Like air bags, it has to be replaced at a cost of more than $300.

To meet fuel-economy requirements, automakers are using more lightweight parts. Magnesium, titanium, and carbonized plastic are among the rapidly expanding number of components found under the hood.

And then there's aluminum. At least five cars come with all-aluminum bodies and frames, including the Audi A8, Acura NSX, Honda Insight, Mercedes CL, and the new Jaguar XJ8. So far, few body shops are authorized to fix these cars. For example, only 13 body shops nationwide can do repairs on the XJ8. So if you wreck one in a remote area, insurance companies will factor in the cost of shipping it to an authorized shop.

Body shops that deal with aluminum have to wall off separate work areas and buy tools separate from those used on steel cars. That's because steel shavings can contaminate aluminum.

Because aluminum is difficult to weld, most parts are "bonded" (glued) and riveted together. A riveting tool to replace aluminum parts costs $10,000. Another tool to remove rivets runs $9,000. The total investment in training and tools to run an aluminum-body repair shop can run as much as $200,000.

"If we're going to keep up with changes in the industry in the next three to four years, it's going to take a bigger investment than we have ever seen," says Mr. Bailey. He predicts almost half of today's repair shops won't make that investment.

Even if your car remains accident-free, some of today's high-tech parts can leave you with big repair bills. The celebrated find for car thieves these days is xenon high-intensity-discharge headlights. They can cost up to $3,000 each. That's just for the part, not labor.

Stories of thieves ripping these headlights out of Audis and Nissans - and doing thousands more in body damage - are becoming legion in urban areas. Even when the lights aren't stolen, repairs can be expensive. One body shop that had to remove the lights from a new Audi A8 found they had to be sent back to the manufacturer to be reactivated; otherwise, they wouldn't work.

Now Nissan and other automakers have started using taillights with multiple LEDs rather than a single inexpensive light bulb. The LEDs light faster in a panic stop to give drivers following more warning, but they're also more expensive to replace.

From headlights to taillights, nothing is getting simpler in cars today. As a result, insurers are expecting higher premiums for these premium cars, says HLDI's Hazelbaker.

They've already raised rates on cars with xenon headlights. "Aluminum cars are too new to have reliable figures. And the companies are trying to stay competitive. But it will happen," he says of higher rates for aluminum cars.

To reduce costs, the repair industry is now pushing for measures that would allow body shops to use "preowned" never-used air bags from cars in junkyards. "That will have to come," says Bailey.

Meanwhile, the industry is bracing for more and more technology. "This is something the automakers have to do to meet their fuel economy requirements," says Bailey. "And we're going to have to learn to deal with it."

As cars get more complicated, fewer skilled technicians to repair them

If today's cars are harder to repair, the skills needed to repair them are also harder to come by.

Technicians - don't dare call them mechanics - often have to complete four years of school: two years of technical school and two more to obtain an associate's degree. After that, a student works as an apprentice for three years before being fully qualified.

Automotive technicians held about 818,000 jobs in 2002, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure is expected to increase by 10 to 20 percent annually.

"There's no shortage of general technicians, but there is a big shortage of qualified people to work on drivability and emissions issues," says Robert Rodriguez of Automotive Service Excellence. The Leesburg, Va., organization certifies repair shops and technicians.

These specialist technicians need advanced reading, problem-solving, and basic electronics skills, he says. "The best people to find are those who have worked in the IT [information technology] industry," he says.

Twenty years ago, repair manuals for certain cars were 100 or so pages long. Now, they hold over 1 million pages and are available only electronically, says John Paul, who handles repair-shop certification for AAA Southern New England.

Schooling at the Universal Technical Institute, a Phoenix-based network with several campuses in the US, costs up to $15,000, depending on proficiency. And technicians have to buy their own tools at a cost of $10,000 or more.

"We have to fight to get people who are bright and motivated," says Mr. Rodriguez. "There is tremendous pressure in society against letting little Johnny go into car repair," he says, adding, "I wouldn't want my kid to become a mechanic."

So recruiters are turning more to women and immigrants. More technical manuals are written in Spanish, says Rodriguez, who remains hopeful that the gap will be filled with time. "There are still a lot of these guys that have gas in their blood and all they want to do is work on cars," he says.

Shhh! The FBI's listening to your keystrokes

The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers of broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in backdoors for easy wiretapping.
That would constitute a sweeping expansion of police surveillance powers. Instead of asking Congress to approve the request, the FBI (along with the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration) are pressing the Federal Communications Commission to move forward with minimal public input.

The three agencies argue that the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) permits the FCC to rewire the Internet to suit the eavesdropping establishment. The bureau's not talking, but it seems to be all about ease of eavesdropping.
"The importance and the urgency of this task cannot be overstated," their proposal says. "The ability of federal, state and local law enforcement to carry out critical electronic surveillance is being compromised today."

Unfortunately for the three agencies, CALEA, as it's written, would not grant the request.

When Congress was debating CALEA, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh reassured nervous senators that the law would be limited to telephone calls. (CALEA was intended to let police wiretap conversations flowing through then-novel services like cellular phones and three-way calling.)

"So what we are looking for is strictly telephone--what is said over a telephone?" Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., asked.

Freeh replied: "That is the way I understand it. Yes, sir."

A House of Representatives committee report prepared in October 1994 is emphatic, saying CALEA's requirements "do not apply to information services such as electronic-mail services; or online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or Mead Data (Central); or to Internet service providers."

Freeh, who has a sincere appreciation for wiretaps, had included Internet services in an earlier version of CALEA--but Congress didn't buy it. "Unlike the bills previously proposed by the FBI, this bill is limited to local and long-distance telephone companies, cellular and PCS providers, and other common carriers," Jerry Berman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Congress during a September 1994 hearing.

But now that more conversations are taking place through audio-based instant-messaging and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, the FBI and its allies are hoping that official Washington won't remember inconvenient details. Louis Freeh reassured nervous senators that CALEA would be limited to telephone calls.
"These (wiretapping) problems are real, not hypothetical, and their impact on the ability of federal, state and local law enforcement to protect the public is growing with each passing day," the police agencies say in their proposal to the FCC.

It's true that the FBI has a difficult job to do, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, but is this proposal necessary, let alone wise?

Police have long been able to intercept Internet traffic. In 1996, then-Attorney General Janet Reno announced that investigators were successfully tapping the Internet without any problems. Even earlier, the Secret Service's "datataps" of Masters of Deception members helped bust that hacking group in 1992. Efficient Internet wiretapping is exactly what the FBI's Carnivore system, also called DCS1000, is designed to accomplish.

Then why is the FBI so emphatic? The bureau's not talking, but it seems to be all about ease of eavesdropping. Sorting through an intercepted stream of data is difficult and means that Carnivore must be updated to unpack the Session Initiation Protocol used to set up VoIP and instant-messaging conversations. Ordering those companies to include a backdoor for police is a lot easier.

It's worth noting that the FBI is hardly alone. The National Sheriffs' Association, the Police Executive Research Forum, the Illinois State Police and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation have petitioned the FCC to grant the FBI's request.

They're even sharing talking points: Each of the groups included an identical paragraph in its letter to the FCC. "State and local law enforcement do not have the financial or personnel resources to develop costly ad hoc surveillance solutions for each new communications service," their letters said.

Maybe they're right. New technologies do present police with new headaches, and perhaps that justifies additional wiretapping powers. But the question will be: Who gets to make that call--elected representatives in Congress or well-meaning but unelected bureaucrats at the FCC?

Friend or Foe? A Digital Dog Tag Answers

AS violence boils in Iraq, American troops and allied forces are in danger - not just from local insurgents and militias, but from their own side as well.

Despite precautions taken by the G.I.'s, despite the growing accuracy of bombs and other weapon systems, despite an ever clearer picture of the combat zone from surveillance drones and spy satellites, soldiers continue to be killed by fire from their own comrades.

But new technologies being tested by the American-led forces have the potential to prevent many of these accidental attacks. Using a combination of radio frequency transponders, laser sensors and microwave-like transmitters, the Defense Department hopes to give every allied soldier, tank and plane a unique identifier to distinguish friend from foe.

Traditionally, mistaken attacks - what the military calls friendly fire - account for 15 percent or more of combat casualties, said Pete Glikerdas, who manages combat identification programs for the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command. "Our goal is to bring the friendly fire problem down to less than 3 percent," Mr. Glikerdas said.

In Iraq, the majority of accidental casualties have been caused by air-to-ground attacks, said Lt. Col. Wayne Shanks of the Joint Forces Command. In April 2002, for example, an American F-16 pilot killed four Canadian soldiers and wounded eight when he dropped a 500-pound bomb on a group that was training near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Radio frequency tags - transponders about the size of a bar of soap - may help prevent such assaults.

From the grainy images produced by a fighter plane's sensors, it is often hard to tell what side a truck or a tank or a band of soldiers is on. When hit by a plane's radar signal, though, the radio tags send a signal back with additional information that identifies the equipment or person.

The most sophisticated of the tags sample the radar's waveform, like a recording engineer sampling a melody. To this, the tags "add a harmony, or even a counter-melody, with its own unique structure," said Jay Saffold, president of the Research Network, based in Kennesaw, Ga., which is evaluating combat identification systems for the Army. The new signal is returned to the aircraft, which then processes it and extracts the information sent by the tag.

Such transponders have been around in one form or another for decades. Yet increasingly powerful computer processors have allowed the tags "to go from suitcase or backpack size down to cigarette pack size," said Lt. Col Bill McKean of the Joint Forces Command. And that in turn is making the devices inexpensive enough for the Pentagon to start thinking about widely distributing them among troops.

The transponders are one of a number of identification technologies that American, British and French forces will test during combined exercises along the East Coast in June.

Mistaken attacks became a major issue for the Pentagon after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, when they caused 24 percent of the deaths of American soldiers.

But a comprehensive effort to reduce such accidents has been slow in coming. "I don't think we've made a lot of progress in the last 10 years," Brig. Gen. Robert W. Cone of the Army said at a briefing last October.

The American-led forces in Iraq today have tools for preventing such mistakes, but many of them are decidedly low-tech: reflective panels that show up in weapons systems' thermal sights, and hand-held strobe lights that are invisible to the naked eye but instantly recognizable to a soldier wearing night vision goggles.

More important, perhaps, are the new satellite-based systems for tracking allied forces. Every few minutes, vehicles outfitted with the Army's Blue Force Tracking system communicate their whereabouts to a central headquarters. There, a composite map of the battlefield is created, showing where all of the units equipped with such tracking systems are. That picture is then sent to the vehicles over an encrypted high-frequency satellite link.

Instead of the tracking system and other so-called passive approaches, which simply transmit units' whereabouts, Colonel McKean and others are working to develop "cooperative" identification programs like the radio frequency tags. These are systems that allow a shooter to, in effect, ask his target whether he is a friend or not and enable the target to reply instantly.

For tanks and armored vehicles, the military wants to use millimeter waves, a shorter cousin of microwaves, to make the queries. The Battlefield Targeting Identification Device system uses a shoebox-size transmitter to send such waves toward a target before the shooting starts. An encrypted reply can return from as far as four miles away in less than a second, Mr. Glikerdas said.

The system's 25-pound transmitters are too heavy for troops moving around a combat zone on their own two feet, however. So instead, the laser range finders on soldiers' rifles are being retooled to ask the question, "Friend or foe?" All soldiers would wear sensor tags that, when hit by a laser beam from a range finder, would generate a "friendly" signal transmitted by the soldier's radio.

This approach has shortcomings, Mr. Glikerdas admitted. Rain, fog and dust can disrupt laser beams. And not every soldier has a radio; those are usually saved for a squad's commander.

Ivan Oelrich, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' strategic security project, said he worried that the whole "cooperative" approach might be flawed.

"You run the risk of giving your own position away if you're sending out a signal," Mr. Oelrich said. "Even if your enemy can't figure out the code, he can at least figure out that you're querying him. And he can start shooting in your direction."

No technology, Colonel McKean acknowledged, will ever be able to flawlessly pick out friend from foe, much less civilian from combatant. But clearing away even some of a war's fog is worthwhile nonetheless, he said.

"Improving the capabilities is still worth the cost," he said, "because you're saving lives."

No Chip in Arm, No Shot From Gun

PALM BEACH, Florida -- A new computer chip promises to keep police guns from firing if they fall into the wrong hands.

The tiny chip would be implanted in a police officer's hand and would match up with a scanning device inside a handgun. If the officer and gun match, a digital signal unlocks the trigger so it can be fired. But if a child or criminal would get hold of the gun, it would be useless.

The technology is the latest attempt to create a so-called "smart gun" and could be marketed to law enforcement agencies within a year, according to Verichip, which has created the microchip.

Verichip president Keith Bolton said the technology could also improve safety for the military and individual gun owners.

"If you let your mind wander to other potential uses, you can imagine the lives that could be saved," he said.

Verichip, which has marketed similar microchips for security and medical purposes, announced Tuesday a partnership with gun maker FN Manufacturing to produce the smart weapons. The companies have developed a prototype and are working to refine its accuracy, Bolton said.

Similar developments are under way at other gun manufacturers and research firms. The New Jersey Institute of Technology and Australian gun maker Metal Storm Ltd. are working on a prototype smart gun that would recognize its owner's individual grip.

"We're at an interesting age where all sorts of science fiction is becoming real technology," said Donald Sebastian, NJIT vice president for research and development and director of the project.

The technology could also eventually have an even bigger impact on the illegal gun trade, Sebastian said.

The FBI estimated that 67 percent of the 16,204 murders in 2002 were committed with firearms.

"You have a long-term benefit of making it much more difficult for a handgun to have any value to anyone other than the original owner," Sebastian said.

But until the smart-gun technology is repeatedly proved to be reliable, some law enforcement authorities remain leery.

The scanning device could malfunction, the officer's hand with the computer chip could be smashed during a fight or an officer might need to use a partner's gun, West Palm Beach police training Sgt. William Sandman said.

"We have power outages, computers crash. Would you risk your life knowing all those things that could go wrong?" Sandman said.

Verichip's Bolton said those concerns already are being addressed. He said the guns can be designed to work for an officer, his partner and a supervisor. Departments could set routines where the scanning devices in guns could be checked before every shift.

The chip needs no battery or power source. It works much like those that have been implanted in pets over the past decade so they can be identified if they get lost. Verichip, a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions, developed a "more intelligent" version two years ago for humans and estimates that about 900 people worldwide have been implanted with them.

The chips can be used instead of security key cards at office buildings or to use global positioning satellites to keep track of a relative who might suffer from Alzheimer's. It can store medical information that emergency rooms could read or financial and identification information to prevent fraud.

The chip, about the size of a grain of rice, is inserted into an arm or hand with a syringe, much like a shot is given.

Bolton said the company has seen no medical complications and that the technology will only improve with time.

Once the technology is accepted, legislation could follow to encourage the use of smart guns. New Jersey already has passed legislation that will require smart-gun technology on all handguns sold -- three years after the state attorney general certifies that smart guns are available in the marketplace.

The National Rifle Association opposes the legislation because of potential problems with smart-gun technology, but gun safety advocates argue that the technology could encourage gun ownership with the newfound sense of security.

"It seems that guns are the only product that haven't followed a path of development that leads to greater safety for the user. The only real change we've seen is to make them more lethal and smaller so they can be more easily concealed," said Rob Wilcox, a spokesman for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "This is one of the steps that hasn't been taken, and we think this debate is one that needs to take place."

Cooperation Not Legislation To Control Violent Video Game Sales

A proposal by state Assembly member Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, to ban sales of violent video games to minors has this less-government-is-better proponent in a quandary. Too often, lawmakers at all levels of government write laws to make up for people's dumb choices and poor parenting. Unfortunately, we can't legislate stupidity out of the world.

But we also can't ignore the increasing violent nature of video games and the impact a steady diet of violence has on kids' mental health. Is it healthy for kids to play a game such as "Postal," in which the player roams through a town, gunning down unarmed citizens, including cheerleaders and the school marching band, as they beg for mercy? Absolutely not. Research shows that "playing violent video games appears to affect aggression by priming aggressive thoughts."

In addition, this potentially violence-inducing pastime is growing in popularity. Annual video-game sales now outpace revenue from movie tickets, and 90 percent of American children ages 2-17 regularly play video and computer games. According to an industry research group, the market share of games rated Mature, or M, more than doubled between 2001 and 2002 (the most recent information available). The same group reports that about 40 percent of those who play M-rated games are under 18.

While Yee's concern about the effect of violent games on youth is valid, his approach is wrong. Instead of turning to government regulation, the answer is a stronger partnership between the industry and parents.

Yee's legislation proposes to ban the sale of certain violent video games-- those involving acts that would be criminal in real life -- to minors. Unfortunately, the proposal creates a confusing new rating category that differs from the video-game industry's existing system.

Today, video games are rated according to those categorizations (much like the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system), which retailers voluntarily enforce. The ratings include Early Childhood (EC), Everyone (E), Teen (T), Mature (M) and Adult Only (AO). M-rated video games are meant for players 17 and up, and AO-rated games are for those 18 and older. The ratings include both age-appropriateness comments and 31 content descriptors (intense violence, strong sexual content, drug reference, blood and gore, etc.).

Even with the rating system in place, a 2000 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) "secret shopper" survey found that 85 percent of the time, teens directed by the FTC to deliberately attempt to purchase an M-rated game in order to determine whether they would be asked for identification managed to do so without being carded.

Yee wants to prohibit minors from buying a portion of the M-rated video games -- those involving acts that would be criminal in real life. (Just as not all R-rated movies are violent, not all M-rated video games portray violence.) The problem is that Yee has no feasible plan to help retailers understand which video products fall into his new category.

So, what would happen to retailers selling violent video games to minors if the law took effect but there were no clear guidelines about which games fall into the new state rating system? A Yee spokesman said lawmakers hoped to work with the industry to make it clear, but if the industry is not cooperative, he expects that the details would be worked out in court. In fact, Yee's spokesman added, the Assembly member expected that retailers would simply stop selling violent games rather than risk being held civilly liable under the proposed law.

That is just sloppy lawmaking. It isn't fair -- or competent -- lawmaking to put a vague law on the books and then expect retailers to sort it out.

Yee's staff point to the FTC secret-shopper survey as an example of how retailers do not take the rating system seriously, thereby creating the need for government regulation. But industry representatives argue that their voluntary rating system needs to be given a chance to work before the heavy hand of government is brought down.

The FTC survey on video games also documents that 30 percent of minors can get into an R-rated movie without being carded. Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association , believes his industry ultimately can do better than the movie industry, which has been rating movies for more than 35 years.

The video-game industry launched its rating system just 10 years ago. To educate parent and kids about the system, the industry created a "Check the Rating" public-education program, which includes public-service announcements starring Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter.

In reports issued in 2000 and 2002, the FTC has consistently called on the video-game industry to restrict sales of M-rated products to minors. In response, the nation's major video-game retailers last fall announced a national campaign to begin requiring identification before allowing purchase of an M-rated game. The Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association (IEMA) has promised that the new carding program will be in place by the 2004 holiday shopping season.

IEMA members include Best Buy, Blockbuster Entertainment, Circuit City, CompUSA, Electronics Boutique, Gamesource, Hasting Entertainment, Hollywood Video, KB Toys, K-mart, Meijer, Movie Gallery, Musicland, Shopko Stores, Target, Toys R Us and Wal-Mart.

Membership to this powerful association, whose members sell roughly 85 percent of all computer and video games purchased in the nation, will require participation in the carding program. The group says retailers will educate store employees about the importance of enforcing the carding program and will display signage and information about the rating system in member stores. As an added incentive, the association knows federal and state legislators such as Yee are itching to bring government into the picture if the carding system, once in place, is not seriously enforced.

But there is a missing component in this discussion about kids and violent video games: parents. The video-game industry and retailers can step up their efforts to limit minors' ability to purchase extremely violent or sexually explicit video games all they want, but if parents continue to allow their children to purchase and play these games, there is little government can do about it.

Those of us who believe extremely violent video games are harmful to children by promoting an acceptance of violence would like to believe young people are buying and playing the games without the full knowledge of their parents. The reality, according to the FTC, is that parents are involved in the purchase or rental of video games 83 percent of the time. The same report showed that parents are only nominally aware of the rating system and its age-based ratings and content descriptors.

New laws won't prevent young people from playing violent video games as long as their parents allow it. Parents, not government, need to be more involved in monitoring the media children are consuming.

Yee's concern about the impact of violent video games is understandable. But his energy would be better spent educating parents about the rating system and the dangers of allowing their children to play M-rated video games.

File-sharing to bypass censorship

By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind.
This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University's Professor Ross Anderson.

In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.

They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services, said Prof Anderson.

"Currently, only news that's reckoned to be of interest to Americans and Western Europeans will be syndicated because that's where the money is," he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.

"But if something happens in Peru that's of interest to viewers in China and Japan, it won't get anything like the priority for syndication.

"If you can break the grip of the news syndication services and allow the news collector to talk to the radio station or local newspaper then you can have much more efficient communications."

'Impossible to censor'

To enable this, Prof Anderson proposes a new and improved version of Usenet, the internet news service.

If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down

But what of fears that the infrastructure that allows such ad hoc news networks to grow might also be abused by criminals and terrorists?

Prof Anderson believes those fears are overstated. He argued that web watchdogs like the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors internet-based child abuse, would provide the necessary policing functions.

This would require a high level of international agreement to be effective.

"The effect of peer-to-peer networks will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible," said Prof Anderson.

"If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck".

Political obstacles

Commenting on Prof Anderson's ideas, technology analyst Bill Thompson welcomed the idea of new publishing tools that will weaken the grip on news of major news organisations.

Such P2P systems, he said, would give everybody a voice and allow personal testimonies to come out.

But the technology that makes those publishing tools accessible to everyone and sufficiently user-friendly will take longer to develop than Prof Anderson thinks, added Mr Thompson.

Prof Anderson's vision underestimates the political obstacles in the way of such developments, he said, and the question of censorship had not been clearly thought through.

"Once you build the technology to break censorship, you've broken censorship - even of the things you want censored," said Mr Thompson.

"Saying you can then control some parts of it, like images of child abuse, is being wilfully optimistic. And that's something that peer to peer advocates have to face."

The price of music...

Well, many online stores have been selling music for $0.99/track lately as a buffer zone against piracy. This seems like an appropriate price to us, based on a 5 minute song with decent airplay. The RIAA (villians that they are) are trying to increase that to 2 or more dollars.

There's another semi-related side to this issue, what about interlude tracks? Many albums have tracks that are little snippets of speech, or otherwise interspersed between the actual music. Should we pay the same buck for them? Of course not.

The solution is relatively simple. Full album prices should be set at a reasonable 10 to 15$, depending on the relative strength of the album. New releases from famous artists will cost more, and on down to about $5 for the lesser known and/or older works (and some should be less than that). If we let the record company decide these prices, but insist they cover the gamut, both they and we should be satisfied at the results.

Corrospondingly, individual tracks should be based upon their popularity by way of an automatic download/purchase tracker. The more people buy X, the more X costs, up to about 3 bucks or so. This allows the record companies to get the best price for their most important tracks (without going overboard) and lets us determine our own prices based on how much the music is actually worth to us. If we must have the latest thing, right now, we can pay extra. This is fair.

Consumers as a group will be able to determine the price for a given piece as well. If something is really good enough to warrant it, people will be willing to pay more and the price will rise. This also provides a de-facto rating system which could be used in all other sorts of ways to help guide music along the path where people wish to follow.

The record companies will have to set a base price on tracks, like a dime, to cover the actual distribution costs, but allowing cheap distribution for unknown tracks improves their bottom line for those tracks infinately (they get Nothing right now) and gives them the capability of rising through the ranks if they're really good.

Another good side-effect of this plan is to lessen the power of their publicity. When people can search by popularity, they're going to be more willing to look through the stacks to find out why their favorite artists other 8 songs off the album didn't make it to the top 500. In doing so, they'll be exposed to other music (and with a minor technical input, related sounding music of similar popularity).

In all, we wrestle with the record companies because we feel we have been overcharged for years. Buying an entire CD just because we like a couple of tracks on it is ludicrous. This solution may need a few bugs worked out, but has the best chance of balancing the interests of the RIAA, the artists, and ours as consumers, which are the most important of all.

Easter Greetings

It's Easter today, and Christians believe that Jesus died today to pay for our sins. Well, aside from the dubiousness of the whole concept that someone else dying could pay for our sins, and that we have sin harking back to a couple in the beginning of history who did wrong, it could be a good day to celebrate, in general, those who help you with your mistakes. The Christian concept of misplacing blame is the root of many of societies worst problems, but selfless goodness is one of the things we should most celebrate. In order to do this celebration, there are numerous movies which fit the theme. I won't list them here, but there are myriad movies about someone who goes out of their way to take someone off the beaten path and help them reach or realize their best potential. Have a happy Easter, all, Whatever it means to you...

Nude statues get clothes -- and sales

HARTSVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- A garden center's nude statues proved a bit immodest for some in this small town.

G & L Garden Center responded to complaints by covering up the classical-style statues with stylish, two-piece crimson velvet sarongs.

It turns out leaving a little to the imagination meant a lot more customers for the $99.95 ornaments. Six statues have sold in the past couple weeks alone, and the attempt at roadside modesty is stopping traffic.

"He wanted to stop when he saw the naked women and the bikinis," Joan Philpot said of her husband of 50 years, Bill.

And yes, some customers are peeking.

"They are pulling the tops and looking underneath," said G & L co-owner Angie Langford. "They wonder what we're hiding."

Langford doesn't know who made the anonymous calls complaining about the yard art in this town of 3,500 about 40 miles northeast of Nashville.

Workers across the street at Hartsville Gas didn't seem bothered by their full view of the statues.

"I guess some people just don't appreciate art," said gas technician Brad Smith.

Photo recognition software gives location

For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination.

You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, photograph the nearest building and press send.

For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination. That, at least, is what two researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK hope their software will one day be used for.

Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson have developed a program that can match a photograph of a building to a database of images. The database contains a three-dimensional representation of the real-life street, so the software can work out where the user is standing to within one metre.

This is far better than existing systems can manage. GPS satellite positioning is accurate to 10 metres at best, and can be useless in cities where tall buildings shield the user from direct line of sight with the satellites. And positioning using cellphone base stations has a precision of between 50 and 100 metres.

"Telling people 'You are in the vicinity of X' is no good to man nor beast," says John Craig of Cambridge Positioning Systems, a company that develops software for locating mobile phones.

Unlike the GPS or cellphone base station approaches, Cipolla and Robertson's software can tell which direction you are facing. So the service can launch straight into a set of directions such as "turn to your left and start walking", or give information on the building in the photograph.

When their system receives an image it begins by identifying vertical and horizontal lines. Next, it warps the image so that the horizontals are all parallel with each other, and the same for verticals. This transforms the picture into one that was taken square on, rather than at an angle.

The software then looks for useful features, such as the corners of windows and doors, and extracts the colours and intensities of the pixels around them. Next, it searches the image database for matching data, using the base station the cellphone's signal came from as a guide. Finally, it uses the differences between the two images to calculate the photographer's position.

The software can match two images even when they are taken at a different times of day, from different angles and with clutter such as pedestrians and vehicles in the way. "That's an easy problem for a human, but it's very difficult for a computer," says Robertson.

However, the system's commercial future is uncertain. "The question is: how much are people prepared to pay for it, and how often will they use it?" says Rob Morland, of technology consultants Scientific Generics near Cambridge. "That's a tough one."

For now, Cipolla and Robertson are optimistic. In March they received funding to start working on a prototype to cover all the buildings in Cambridge city centre.

U.S. Won't Let Company Test All Its Cattle for Mad Cow

The Department of Agriculture refused yesterday to allow a Kansas beef producer to test all of its cattle for mad cow disease, saying such sweeping tests were not scientifically warranted.

The producer, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to use recently approved rapid tests so it could resume selling its fat-marbled black Angus beef to Japan, which banned American beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington State last December tested positive for mad cow. The company has complained that the ban is costing it $40,000 a day and forced it to lay off 50 employees.

The department's under secretary for marketing and regulation, Bill Hawks, said in a statement yesterday that the rapid tests, which are used in Japan and Europe, were licensed for surveillance of animal health, while Creekstone's use would have "implied a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted."

Lobbying groups for cattle ranchers and slaughterhouses applauded the decision, but consumer advocates denounced it, saying the department was preventing Creekstone from taking extra steps to prove its product was safe.

Under the Virus Serum Toxin Act of 1913, the department decides where cattle can be tested and for what.

Consumer groups accused the department of bending to the will of the beef lobby, saying producers do not want the expense of proving that all cattle are safe or the damage to meat sales that would result if more cases of mad cow are found.

Creekstone said it was extremely disappointed and frustrated that the department had taken six weeks to decide and added that it might go to court to fight the decision.

Since December, Japan has demanded that producers who want to export there test each animal, as Japanese ranchers do. The American beef industry and the Bush administration have resisted, and negotiations have become increasingly tense.

Consumer groups were critical of the department's decision.

"It is ironic in the extreme that an administration that's so interested in letting industry come up with its own solutions would come down with a heavy government hand on a company that's being creative," said Dr. Peter Lurie, deputy director of the health research group at Public Citizen, a frequent food industry critic.

Dr. Lurie said, however, the Japanese demand for 100 percent testing was irrational because it included animals younger than 20 months. "But there is no shortage of irrational consumer demands — like cosmetic surgery or S.U.V's — that industry is only too happy to cater to," he said. "That's what capitalism does."

Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, another group often critical of the industry, said: "We're the ones who've been irrational on mad cow because of the foot-dragging and refusals to test, our head-in-the-sand attitude. And now that it's brought us to a crisis, American farmers have no way of protecting their market."

A spokesman for the Agriculture Department, Ed Lloyd, defended yesterday's decision, saying, "We're working very diligently to re-establish our markets."

The department recently changed its testing regimen to make a one-time effort, beginning in June, to test 201,000 cows with symptoms of nervous disease or that are too sick or injured to walk, and 20,000 healthy older ones. The regimen assumes that cattle born before 1997, when a ban was imposed on feeding bovine tissue to cattle, are most at risk.

The president of the American Meat Institute, which represents slaughterhouses, and the director of regulatory affairs at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which represents ranchers, praised the decision.

Gary Weber of the cattlemen's association called 100 percent testing misleading to consumers because it would create a false impression that untested beef was not safe. He compared it to demanding that all cars be crash tested to prove they are safe.

Asked if American beef producers were content to give up the $1.5 billion Japanese market, Mr. Weber said: "We're not going to give in to their demands. If that means in the short-to-medium term that we don't have that market, that's the price we'll pay. But in the long run, it means there's testing that's science based and that creates a level playing field."

Asked if beef producers did not want to be pressured to imitate Creekstone and pay for more tests, Mr. Weber said it was "absolutely not about the money."

Actors Whip Easter Bunny at Church Show

GLASSPORT, Pa. - It may not have been as gruesome as Mel Gibson's movie, but many parents and children got upset when a church trying to teach about Jesus' crucifixion performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs.

People who attended Saturday's show at Glassport's memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, "There is no Easter bunny," and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. "He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped," Salzmann said.

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn't meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

"The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter bunny, it is about Jesus Christ," Bickerton said.

Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, a community about 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

"It was very disturbing," Norelli-Burke said. "I could not believe what I saw. It wasn't anything I was expecting."

DVD player to edit movies: Technology allows viewer to bypass offensive content

Wal-Mart and Kmart, two of the nation's biggest retailers, are planning to sell a new DVD player that includes a technology that has riled Hollywood -- a controversial program that can automatically skip sexual content, graphically violent scenes and language deemed offensive.

The new DVD player, manufactured under the RCA brand by Thomson Inc., comes as public debate is heating up over whether the media have pushed the limits of decency, especially after too much of singer Janet Jackson was bared during this year's Super Bowl halftime show.

RCA plans to start shipping the DVD player in the next few weeks. It is scheduled to be on shelves at Wal-Mart and Kmart in the next two months at a suggested price of $79, said Dave Arland, Thomson's vice president of U.S. corporate communications and government relations. Wal-Mart's version will be black while Kmart's will be silver.

Both Thomson and filtering program developer ClearPlay Inc. say the time is ripe for such a DVD player.

"I think the American public is concerned and is looking for a solution, '' said Bill Aho, chief executive officer of ClearPlay Inc., the Salt Lake City firm that is one of several companies battling a lawsuit filed by the biggest movie studios and major directors like Steven Soderbergh, John Landis and Steven Spielberg. The suit claims that filtering technology such as ClearPlay's produces an unauthorized and illegal version of their artistic work.

"It's against the First Amendment to stop the media from providing content that's edgier and edgier. It's up to technology,'' Aho said during a recent stop in San Francisco.

But the Directors Guild of America disagreed.

"In the guise of making films 'family-friendly,' ClearPlay seeks to make whatever 'edits' they see fit to any material they don't like," the group said in a prepared statement. "By not seeking the consent of the director, whose name on the movie reflects the fact that the film comprises his or her work, or of the studio as copyright holder, they can and do change the very meaning and intent of films."

Thomson is watching the outcome of the lawsuit closely, but decided to go ahead with the ClearPlay-enabled DVD player because of keen interest from Wal- Mart Stores Inc., based in Bentonville, Ark.

"This was a major customer, Wal-Mart, expressing interest in the technology,'' Arland said. "It's another example of a way technology can be used by a parent to, at the very least monitor, if not control, what a child is seeing.''

A Wal-Mart spokesman had no immediate comment about its plans for the DVD player. Kmart representatives could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America declined comment, citing the pending lawsuit.

The ClearPlay system uses a set of programmed commands tailored to about 500 individual movies released on DVD. Not all movies are available, and Aho said ClearPlay won't even try if filtering would ruin the film.

The commands tell the DVD player when to mute dialog or skip segments that show 14 levels of violence, sex, nudity and profanity. The user can pick which filters to activate.

In "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,'' for example, the filter shows the title character -- played by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- squatting naked in the desert and starting to stand up, but cuts to a shot of him already standing and seen only from the chest up.

A team of ClearPlay employees screens films, which can be selected by the DVD owner. The directors and movie studios have argued that the ClearPlay system allows people who are not necessarily qualified to edit their films.

Aho responded, "The guys doing this are movie guys who have a passion for movies like nothing I'd ever seen. We think it's presumptive of the directors to want to follow movies into the home.''

German court: Pop-ups need permission

A European court has issued a preliminary injunction against Claria--formerly known as Gator--that prohibits the company's pop-up and pop-under ads from appearing over a German rental car Web site without the agency's permission.

The injunction, announced Friday by plaintiff Hertz Autovermietung, the German division of Hertz, is the latest victory for companies that oppose the unauthorized use of pop-ups on their sites.

The Court of First Instance in Cologne, Germany, ruled March 12 that Claria had violated sections of a German law against unfair competition. Claria and others, such as WhenU, distribute software commonly called adware or spyware that monitors Web-surfing behavior and delivers targeted ads that pop up as windows on the computer screen. The programs sometimes wind up on PCs without their users' knowledge, because they come bundled with other programs, such as file-swapping applications.

"Gator's unsolicited pop-up ads constitute an unwarranted intrusion that disrupts Hertz's ability to do business with online customers," Remy Keijzer, Hertz's general manager in Germany, said in a statement. "We are gratified that the court in Cologne has recognized that Hertz and its online customers are harmed every time these ads appear, often without the full knowledge and consent of individuals who may have inadvertently installed Gator's adware, or spyware, on their home computers."

When users clicked to Hertz's Web site, those that had Claria's adware installed would see pop-ups from Hertz competitors and other businesses, said Richard Broome, a Hertz spokesman.

In making its ruling, the court ordered Claria to immediately halt the placement of software-controlled automatic advertisements on Hertz's Web site without the Hertz's permission. Claria could face a fine of up to $302,325, or six months in jail, for each violation of the order.

Claria declined to comment.

Claria is not alone in facing court challenges. Last December, WhenU was hit with a preliminary injunction that barred it from serving up pop-ups to visitors of 1-800-Contacts' Web site. A U.S. District Court Southern District of New York judge cited trademark violations in handing down the ruling.

That marked a shift from earlier court cases, in which WhenU prevailed. In November, a federal court judge in Michigan dismissed Wells Fargo's lawsuit to block WhenU's pop-ups, noting that those users who received the ads had consented to have the adware installed on their computer, in exchange for free software from WhenU. And a similar situation occurred in September, in a case that pitted U-Haul International against WhenU. A Virginia U.S. District Court judge ruled in WhenU's favor.

Odds on that God exists, says scientist

A scientist has calculated that there is a 67% chance that God exists.

Dr Stephen Unwin has used a 200-year-old formula to calculate the probability of the existence of an omnipotent being. Bayes' Theory is usually used to work out the likelihood of events, such as nuclear power failure, by balancing the various factors that could affect a situation.

The Manchester University graduate, who now works as a risk assessor in Ohio, said the theory starts from the assumption that God has a 50/50 chance of existing, and then factors in the evidence both for and against the notion of a higher being.

Factors that were considered included recognition of goodness, which Dr Unwin said makes the existence of God more likely, countered by things like the existence of natural evil - including earthquakes and cancer.

The unusual workings - which even take into account the existence of miracles - are set out in his new book, which includes a spreadsheet of the data used so that anyone can make the calculation themselves should they doubt its validity. The book, The Probability of God: A simple calculation that proves the ultimate truth, will be published later this month.

Dr Unwin said he was interested in bridging the gap between science and religion. He argues that rather than being a theological issue, the question of God's existence is simply a matter of statistics.

"On arriving in America I was exposed to certain religious outlooks that were somewhat of an assault upon my sensibilities - outlooks in which religion actually competes with science as an explanation of the world," he said.

"While I could not be sure, having slept through most of the cathedral services I had attended during secondary school, this did not seem like the version of faith I had remembered. In many ways, this project was for me a journey home - a reconciliation of my faith and education."

Despite his findings, Dr Unwin maintains that he is personally around 95% certain that God exists.

However, Graham Sharp, media relations director at William Hill, said there were technical problems with giving odds on the existence of God. "The problem is how you confirm the existence of God. With the Loch Ness monster we require confirmation from the Natural History Museum to pay out, but who are we going to ask about God? The church would definitely confirm his existence."

Mr Sharp said William Hill does take bets on the second coming, which currently stand at 1,000/1. For this confirmation is needed from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"We do take bets on the second coming, whether that confirms the existence of God is up to the theologians to argue, most people wouldn't believe that, though."

< If you start without the assumtion that there's a 50% chance, you can get all the way up to 17%, which is based on a technique already show to be blatently biased... I have a hard time seeing how "goodness" vs. entropy can show anything at all. In all, for you non-logicians, this is a completely senseless argument, impossible to prove or challenge. In other words, fictional. >

Camera nabs 788 speeders in 2 days

The District's newest photo-radar camera in Northeast caught 788 speeding drivers in the first 48 hours of enforcement, generating at least $23,640 in fines, police said yesterday.
The camera on Sunday caught 504 cars speeding in the 600 block of Florida Avenue, where the speed limit is 25 mph. On Monday, it caught 284 cars traveling above the speed limit, police said.
"All we want it to do is detect those people who are speeding aggressively," said Kevin P. Morison, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department. "We hope it will result in lower speeds."
Mr. Morison said speeders made up 17.9 percent of the 2,900 vehicles passing through on Sunday. He said the highest recorded speed was 73 mph.
Speeding drivers made up 13 percent of the 2,200 motorists in the area Monday, he said. The highest recorded speed that day was 58 mph.
The fixed camera, which is the first of its kind in North America, is near the entrance of Gallaudet University, an area where speeding has been a problem. Since 1998, at least four persons have been killed in speed-related accidents in the area.
Mr. Morison said police are in the process of mailing out the tickets to the speeding drivers. Those motorists with the highest speeds would be required to pay as much as $200 for the violation. Others would be required to pay at least a $30 fine.
Photo-enforced violations, however, do not carry any points in the District.
Police started issuing tickets on Sunday, almost a month after they activated the camera and began warning drivers who were caught speeding on Florida Avenue.
Police said they mailed an average of 585 warnings a day to speeding drivers, or more than 20,000 notices during the 30-day warning period that began Feb. 27. The highest speed recorded in that period was 88 mph, Mr. Morison had said.
Now, registered owners of the vehicles caught speeding will receive notices of infraction, with photographs of their vehicle and license-plate number and the speed recorded by the radar.
Motorists caught driving up to 10 mph over the speed limit will be required to pay a $30 fine. Those caught driving 26 to 30 mph over the limit will be ordered to pay up to a $200 fine.
All motorists are given up to 30 days to pay the fines or adjudicate the citation. Police will double the fines and track down those owners who don't pay on time.
"At some point, we will turn it over to the collection agency," Mr. Morison said.
The camera on Florida Avenue is expected to generate millions in ticket revenue.
Since the District implemented red-light cameras in 1999 and speeding cameras in 2001, the automated traffic-enforcement program has generated more than $70 million in fines.
Red-light cameras at 39 city intersections have generated more than $23.5 million in fines since they were set up in August 1999. Fines from the speeding or photo-radar cameras total more than $45 million since August 2001, when they were installed.
Affiliated Computer Services of Dallas operates the cameras and goes through the 35-millimeter photographs each day to find violators. Police help ACS by matching license-plate numbers to vehicle registrations and the registered owners' home addresses.
ACS is paid $190,000 a month for the red-light cameras' operation and upkeep and $570,000 a month for the seven speed cameras. The District initially expected to pay ACS a percentage of the fines, but later agreed to pay a flat monthly fee.

Violent video games under fire in Assembly

Bill banning minors from buying M-rated volumes has its foes

Pick up a gun, shoot several people to death, watch blood spurt out of their heads, and then, for good measure, set the bodies on fire.

Or, take a gun to a police officer, and then beat the officer with a bat. Then set the whole scene on fire with a grenade.

These scenes in two popular video games -- Grand Theft Auto Vice City and Postal 2 -- are examples of what led Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, to propose bills restricting what kind of video game can be sold to minors.

But what Yee sees as a clear-cut case of protecting minors from harmful materials, opponents say is a violation of free speech and unconstitutional.

Faced with heavy lobbying by the entertainment and video game industry, Yee is organizing a series of news conferences throughout the state this week to draw attention to the issue.

"Here we have children playing these violent video games for long periods of time -- shooting, burning, maiming -- all of these heinous acts. I thought it was a slam-dunk bill," he said. "But all of a sudden, people are hesitant, wondering what is wrong with the current system."

Yee has introduced two bills on the subject, both of which face their first committee test on April 13. The primary bill would prohibit selling to minors any video game in which the player virtually commits realistic and serious criminal injury to human beings in a "manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel."

That includes any violence that would be considered crime in real life, Yee said. The second bill would require retailers to display any game with an "M" rating out of reach of children. Video games are rated under a voluntary system, including age recommendations and content descriptors.

Game designers and manufacturers said the voluntary system should work, especially since retail outlets are now being asked to check identification for those buying "M" rated games.

"We should be given a chance to operate in the same way film does, where it is voluntary and there is no state or government regulation," said Gail Markels, senior vice president and general counsel of the Entertainment Software Association.

But the equally important principal is the constitutional right of free speech, said Jason Della Rocca, director of the San Francisco-based International Game Developers Association.

"Games are an art form -- they are a form of expression," he said. "Any government legislation would be censorship, and would not be giving games the respect they deserve."

Della Rocca said games should be respected like music or literature.

Yee limited his bill to only those games where the violence is first- or third person, and only when humans are involved, in order to avoid possible legal action. Similar laws regulating video games have been struck down in other states.

That would eliminate games such as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which features California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is rated "T" for teen audiences. Schwarzenegger does not have a position on the bill, his office said.

Yee, a former child psychologist, said he thinks the governor would support his legislation.

"He was an actor when he did these violent video games," he said. "Now he is the governor, a leader in the area of healthy development of children."

Each side cites studies to back up its point of view. Yee said that according to the Federal Trade Commission, 40 percent of those who play mature- rated games are under 18, and 69 percent of unaccompanied minors who were age 13 to 16 were able to buy the games.

An American Academy of Pediatrics study also found that playing violent video games accounts for a 13 to 22 percent increase in adolescent violent behavior, according to Yee's office.

In contrast, the Entertainment Software Association points out that the average video game player is 29 years old and that in 2002, only 13.2 percent of games sold were rated "M" compared with 55.7 percent that were rated "E" for everyone.

Markels said that as a parent, it is her responsibility to monitor what her children see and play.

"Content should be restricted for children who may not be ready for it, but that is a judgment that is easier for a parent to make," she said. "I'd rather turn the TV off than have the government do it for me."

For Yee, however, it all comes down to common sense.

"Just imagine a child sitting in front of a computer for hundreds of hours, pushing a button on a joystick, killing, maiming, burning and mutilating an individual, and tell me that in itself isn't enough reason to vote for the bill," he said.

Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales

Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry's assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line.

Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.

"Consumption of music increases dramatically with the introduction of file sharing, but not everybody who likes to listen to music was a music customer before, so it's very important to separate the two," said Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of the study.

Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.

"From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales," said Oberholzer-Gee.

For albums that fail to sell well, the Internet may contribute to declining sales. Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf found that albums that sell to niche audiences suffer a "small negative effect" from Internet piracy.

The study stands in opposition to the recording industry's long-held assertion that the rise of illegal file sharing is a major cause of declining music sales over the past few years. In making its case, the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) (RIAA) points to data showing that CD sales fell from a high of more than $13.2 billion in 2000 to $11.2 billion in 2003 -- a period that matches the growth of various online music piracy services.

The RIAA has fought illegal music swapping by filing a raft of lawsuits against hundreds of individuals suspected of engaging in music piracy, as well as suits targeting companies like Kazaa and Grokster that make software or run Internet downloading services.

Wayne Rosso, president of the Madrid-based file-sharing company Optisoft, said he hoped the study would spur the RIAA to abandon litigation and look for ways to commercialize file sharing. "There's no question that there is a market there that could easily be commercialized and we have been trying for years to talk sense to these people and make them see that," he said. Rosso formerly ran the Grokster file-sharing service.

Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, an Atlanta company that tracks file-sharing activity, said the findings match what his company has observed about the effect of file sharing on music sales. Although the practice cannibalizes some sales, it may promote others by serving as a marketing tool, Garland said.

The RIAA questioned the conclusions reached by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf.

"Countless well respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs," RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said.

Weiss cited a survey conducted by Houston-based Voter Consumer Research that found those who illegally download more music from the Internet buy less from legitimate outlets. Of respondents ages 18-24 who download, 33 percent said they bought less music than in the past year while 21 percent bought more. Of those ages 25-34, the survey found 25 percent bought less and 17 percent bought more, Weiss said.

Larry Rosin, the president of Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Media Research, said it was absurd to suggest that the Internet and file sharing have not had a profound effect on the music industry.

"Anybody who says that the Internet has not affected sales is just not paying attention to what is going on out there," he said. "It's had an effect on everything else in life, why wouldn't it have an effect on this?"

Edison Media Research has done a series of surveys for a music industry trade publication to track the effect of online file sharing on music sales. Rosin said while file-sharing networks can generate advertising value for some CDs, the net effect of file sharing on music sales has been negative.

The Harvard-UNC study is not the first to take aim at the assertion that online music piracy is the leading factor hurting music sales. In two studies conducted in 1999 and 2002, Jupiter Research analyst Aram Sinnreich found that persons who downloaded music illegally from the Internet were also active purchasers of music from legitimate sources.

"While some people seemed to buy less after file sharing, more people seemed to buy more," Sinnreich said. "It was more likely to increase somebody's purchasing habits."

The 2002 Jupiter study showed that people who traded files for more than six months were 75 percent more likely than average online music fans to spend more money on music.

Sinnreich, no longer with Jupiter, has appeared in court as an expert witness on behalf of Grokster, a popular music downloading site that was sued by the recording industry for facilitating music piracy. In that case, a judge ruled that Grokster and several other services that distribute peer-to-peer software could not be shut down just because the software was used to violate intellectual property rights.


In a related article:

A Heretical View of File Sharing

The music industry says it repeatedly, with passion and conviction: downloading hurts sales.

That statement is at the heart of the war on file sharing, both of music and movies, and underpins lawsuits against thousands of music fans, as well as legislation approved last week by a House Judiciary subcommittee that would create federal penalties for using what is known as peer-to-peer technology to download copyrighted works. It is also part of the reason that the Justice Department introduced an intellectual-property task force last week that plans to step up criminal prosecutions of copyright infringers.

But what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales?

It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.

"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The industry has reacted with the kind of flustered consternation that the White House might display if Richard A. Clarke showed up at a Rose Garden tea party. Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America sent out three versions of a six-page response to the study.

The problem with the industry view, Professors Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf say, is that it is not supported by solid evidence. Previous studies have failed because they tend to depend on surveys, and the authors contend that surveys of illegal activity are not trustworthy. "Those who agree to have their Internet behavior discussed or monitored are unlikely to be representative of all Internet users," the authors wrote.

Instead, they analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.

"While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing," the professors wrote.

In an interview, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said that previous research assumed that every download could be thought of as a lost sale. In fact, he said, most downloaders were drawn to free music and were unlikely to spend $18 on a CD.

"Say I offer you a free flight to Florida," he asks. "How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free." If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but "it doesn't mean that these people would buy CD's at $18," he said.

The most popular albums bought are also the most popular downloads, so the researchers looked for anomalous rises in downloading activity that they might compare to sales activity. They found one such spike, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said, during a German school holiday that occurred during the time they studied. Germany is second to the United States in making files available for downloading, supplying about 15 percent of online music files, he said. During the vacation, students who were home with time on their hands flooded the Internet with new files, which in turn spurred new downloading activity. The researchers then looked for any possible impact in the subsequent weeks on sales of CD's.

Professor Oberholzer said that he had expected to find that downloading resulted in some harm to the industry, and was startled when he first ran the numbers in the spring of 2003. "I called Koleman and said, 'Something is not quite right - there seems to be no effect between file sharing and sales.' "

Amy Weiss, an industry spokeswoman, expressed incredulity at what she deemed an "incomprehensible" study, and she ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could shed light on the universe of activity.

The industry response, titled "Downloading Hurts Sales," concludes: "If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"

Critics of the industry's stance have long suggested that other factors might be contributing to the drop in sales, including a slow economy, fewer new releases and a consolidation of radio networks that has resulted in less variety on the airwaves. Some market experts have also suggested that record sales in the 1990's might have been abnormally high as people bought CD's to replace their vinyl record collections.

"The single-bullet theory employed by the R.I.A.A. has always been considered by anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge to be pretty ambitious as spin," said Joe Fleischer, the head of sales and marketing for BigChampagne, a company that tracks music downloads and is used by some record companies to measure the popularity of songs for marketing purposes.

The industry response stresses that the new study has not gone through the process of peer review. But the response cites refuting statistics and analysis, much of it prepared by market research consultants, that also have not gone through peer review.

One consultant, Russ Crupnick, vice president of the NPD Group, called the report "absolutely astounding." Asked to explain how the professors' analysis might be mistaken, he said he was still trying to understand the complex document: "I am not the level of mathematician that the professors purport to be."

Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas, author of an essay cited by the industry, said the use of a German holiday to judge American behavior was strained. Professor Liebowitz argued in a paper in 2002 that file sharing did not affect music sales, but said he had since changed his mind.

The Liebowitz essay appeared in an economics journal edited by Gary D. Libecap, a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, who said that his publication was not peer reviewed, though the articles in it were often based on peer-reviewed work. Professor Libecap said he attended a presentation by Professor Strumpf last week, and said the file-sharing study "looks really good to me."

"This was really careful, empirical work," Professor Libecap said.

The author of another report recommended by the industry said that the two sets of data used by the researchers should not be compared. "They can't get to that using the two sets of data they are using - they aren't tracking individual behavior," said Jayne Charneski, formerly of Edison Media Research, who prepared a report last June that she said showed that 7 percent of the marketplace consists of people who download music and do not buy it. That number is far lower than the authors of the new study estimated. "There's a lot of research out there that's conducted with an agenda in mind," said Ms. Charneski, now the head of research for the record label EMI.