Internet Movie Download Case to Be Prosecuted

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swedish prosecutor has charged a man with making a movie available for download from his computer, the first such case in the Nordic country as it clamps down on sharing copyrighted material over the Internet.

The case follows a raid earlier this month by Swedish bailiffs and police on Internet firm Bahnhof, in search of pirated music and films, which drew applause from Hollywood but sparked fierce debate over confidentiality rights and file sharing.

The prosecutor in the town of Upplsala, 35 miles north of Stockholm, said Andreas Bawer had made the Swedish youth movie Hipp Hipp Hora accessible to the public.

"The reason for this prosecution is that (the movie) has been downloaded one time," prosecutor Chatrine Rudstrom said.

Bawer could be fined or receive a suspended prison sentence.

"It feels like they picked someone completely at random, but I don't want to talk any more about this," he told Reuters.

In Sweden it is legal to download copyrighted movie and music files, but making them available for sharing is illegal. The legal loophole, however, is about to be closed.

The Justice Ministry has just proposed a law to make both illegal, bringing Sweden into line with the rest of the EU.

Henrik Ponten, a lawyer representing the Antipirate Bureau, said the film and game industry in Sweden loses around 750 million Swedish crowns ($107 million) a year from piracy.

Pirates "are part of a hidden society," he told Reuters.

The Anitpirate Bureau, which represents the music and game industry in Sweden, lodged complaints with the police in both the Bawer and Bahnhof cases.

The raid on Bahnhof was hailed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents Hollywood's big studios, as a major blow to European piracy of movies and music on the web.

Rudstrom said Bawer's case would set a precedent in Sweden and that she had received 10 or more similar complaints.

It was not immediately clear when the court proceedings would start.

< And why shouldn't this be the case? Providing a market for something doesn't harm, getting something in the best available way only spurs competition and quality. The actual harm in the issue comes from those who provide material someone else should be getting paid for without paying them. This seems a common sense way to try to punish the ones doing actual harm while not punishing those who happen to be part of an issue which could go either way depending on how the companies holding copyrights choose to disseminate their product. >

Utah governor signs Net-porn bill

Utah's governor signed a bill on Monday that would require Internet providers to block Web sites deemed pornographic and could also target e-mail providers and search engines.

The controversial legislation will create an official list of Web sites with publicly available material deemed "harmful to minors." Internet providers in Utah must provide their customers with a way to disable access to sites on the list or face felony charges.

Technology companies had urged Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman not to sign the bill (click for PDF), saying it was constitutionally suspect and worded so vaguely its full impact is still unclear.

The measure, SB 260, says: "Upon request by a consumer, a service provider may not transmit material from a content provider site listed on the adult content registry." A service provider is defined as any person or company who "provides an Internet access service to a consumer," which could include everything from cable companies to universities, coffeeshops, and homes with open 802.11 wireless connections.

"I am having a hard time seeing how this law will survive a constitutional challenge, given the track record of state anti-Internet porn laws--which are routinely struck down as violating the First Amendment and the dormant Commerce Clause," Eric Goldman, a professor at the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wis., wrote in a critique of the law.

Spokesman Tammy Kikuchi said Monday that Huntsman "doesn't have a concern about the constitutional challenge."

Supporters of the Utah bill, such as advocacy group Citizens Against Pornography, had pressed for the measure as a way to give parents more control of their home Internet connections.

Also targeted are content providers, defined as any company that "creates, collects, acquires or organizes electronic data" for profit. Any content provider that the Utah attorney general claims hosts material that's harmful to minors must rate it or face third-degree felony charges.

Lobbying group NetCoalition, whose members include Google, Yahoo and News.com publisher CNET Networks, had written a letter to the Utah Senate saying the legislation could affect search engines, e-mail providers and Web hosting companies. "A search engine that links to a Web site in Utah might be required...to 'properly rate' the Web site," the letter warned.

A federal judge struck down a similar law in Pennsylvania last year.

< Isn't it funny how there is absolutely no danger in showing someone something as natural as breathing and eating, and we're sending people to jail for it? >

Utah Internet Porn Law May Face Challenge

SALT LAKE CITY - Internet service providers that operate in Utah must offer customers a way to block porn sites under a law signed this week. ISPs complained that the law adds nothing to the fight against pornography, and said a legal challenge is likely.

"The market has already responded to this issue," said Pete Ashdown, president of Salt Lake-based XMission. "We have for many years provided an optional filter for our customers that they can turn on in Internet browsers."

The law requires ISPs to offer customers free software for blocking porn sites on a list maintained by the attorney general.

Republican state Rep. John Dougall said the measure he sponsored should help parents overwhelmed by advancing technology.

"Kids are much more savvy about what's going on than their parents," Dougall said.

An earlier version of the bill would have required ISPs to block sites based on numeric Internet addresses, but ISPs argued that approach would block benign sites as well because they often share addresses. A federal court has struck down a 2003 Pennsylvania law that took that approach.

Though the Utah law is watered down, it still "will very likely lead to a costly litigation," said the Washington D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology.

"We've been down this road in Pennsylvania," said Dave Baker, vice president for law and public policy at EarthLink Inc. "And if that law can be struck down on constitutional grounds, this one will almost certainly face challenges."

The Utah law also requires companies that build and maintain pornographic sites to label the content "harmful to minors." Failure to comply is punishable by one year in prison and a $2,500 fine.

IMAX theaters reject film over evolution

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (AP) -- IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.

"We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it," said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. "Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution."

The film, "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.

Buzzelli doesn't rule out showing the movie in the future.

IMAX theaters in Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas have declined to show the film, said Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for Stephen Low, the film's Montreal-based director and producer.

"I find it's only in the South," Serapiglia said.

Critics worry screening out films that mention evolution will discourage the production of others in the future.

"It's going to restrain the creative approach by directors who refer to evolution," said Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and a former director of an IMAX theater. "References to evolution will be dropped."

?Easter Bunny? hops straight into Iowa jail

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa - The Easter Bunny in Council Bluffs, Iowa, has hopped his way to jail and is facing two counts of harassment, police said.

Authorities received a call Saturday afternoon about a man dressed as the Easter Bunny who was causing a disturbance at a local mall.

Police said the 36-year-old man told officers he was working at the mall?s picture-taking area when someone threw water at him.

Police say the man left the area, changed clothes and came back to tell a fellow employee he was leaving.

The employee said she became frightened when he started yelling at her. Police said the "bunny" also threatened another person to get out of his way.

At a Suit's Core: Are Bloggers Reporters, Too?

Not all blogs are equally influential and not all blogs even try to report, in the usual sense of cultivating sources, actively gathering information and then organizing and presenting it to the public, Mr. Balkin added. "There are millions and millions of blogs, and most of them are for gossip."

Many states have privilege statutes like the one in California, and others may consider enacting them. To determine who should be able to claim any kind of privilege against disclosing news sources, he said, courts and lawmakers should look at exactly what the would-be reporter does.

"It should be extended on a functional basis," he said. So a blogger who interviews people and spends significant amounts of time gathering and organizing information could claim the privilege; a blogger who wrote about good and bad recipes, and who one day stumbled onto a copy of the Pentagon papers and printed them, might not.

Such a functional definition could prove elastic, and an enterprising blogger would have every reason to assert any available privilege. Mr. Balkin - asked whether he would assert the privilege if a former student leaked information to him about a Supreme Court justice that then appeared on his Web site - did not hesitate to claim it for himself.

"I would be willing to claim that if you look in my blog, what I'm doing is so similar to what Lewis or Krugman or Safire do," he said, referring to Anthony Lewis, Paul Krugman and William Safire, current and former columnists for The Times, that "although it's done more informally and it's about a much narrower area, that I could claim that I was in the functional definition. That's what happens when you start taking a functional approach."

Mr. Friedman, the blogger, said that ultimately, bloggers' role as purveyors of important information that traditional news organizations might ignore made online journalists more important than before, and so more deserving of protection.

"As the mainstream media has become more and more corporate and more and more like the governmental and corporate bodies that mainstream journalists used to report on," he said, "a lot of this stuff has fallen now to the bloggers - to do what mainstream folks used to do. It's still serving the exact same purpose: keeping the bad guys honest."

In the physical world, being labeled a journalist may confer little prestige and may even evoke some contempt. But being a journalist can also confer certain privileges, like the right to keep sources confidential. And for that reason many bloggers, a scrappy legion of online commentators and pundits, would like to be considered reporters, too.

A lawsuit filed in California by Apple Computer is drawing the courts into that question: who should be considered a journalist?

The case, which involves company secrets that Apple says were disclosed on several Web sites, is being closely followed in the world of online commentators, but it could have broad implications for journalists working for traditional news organizations as well.

If the court, in Santa Clara County, rules that bloggers are journalists, the privilege of keeping news sources confidential will be applied to a large new group of people, perhaps to the point that it may be hard for courts in the future to countenance its extension to anyone.

"It's very serious stuff," said Brad Friedman, who describes himself as an investigative blogger (his site is bradblog.com). "Are they bloggers because they only publish online? I think you have to look at what folks are doing. And if they're reporting, then they're reporters."

Apple has long had a devoted following, and leaked information about new Apple products has appeared on Web sites for years. To combat this, the company filed the suit late last year against the sources of these leaks - people the company assumes are employees or contractors.

Apple has asked the court to compel the Web sites that displayed the product information to disclose their identity. Bloggers are fighting Apple's efforts, which it has focused on three Web sites - Thinksecret.com, Appleinsider.com and PowerPage.org.

The judge in the case, James Kleinberg, is required only to interpret a California statute that recognizes a privilege protecting reporters in keeping news sources confidential. A ruling could come as early as this week.

On its face, the lawsuit brought by Apple has to do with theft of trade secrets. But Susan Crawford, a law professor at Cardozo law school of Yeshiva University (and a blogger herself), says that the steps Apple has asked the court to take open a broader question.

"Under what circumstances should an online forum be forced to disclose a source behind information that they're posting?" Ms. Crawford said. "There is no principled distinction between a New York Times reporter and a blogger for these purposes. Both operate as news sources for wide swaths of the general public."

Blogs, she added, are already becoming more and more powerful, and some have readerships that exceed those of small-town newspapers. "We've seen it with Rather being brought down by bloggers," she said, referring to the CBS news anchor, who came under intense scrutiny by bloggers after a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment on President Bush's National Guard service was broadcast .

Judge Kleinberg is likely to try to decide the case on the narrowest possible grounds, perhaps reading the text of the California law at issue to cover only people who work for traditional newspapers and magazines or television news programs, and to avoid deciding if bloggers are indeed journalists, Ms. Crawford said.

Whatever the judge's decision, it is all but certain to be appealed. But the question of who is a journalist is to many a matter of deeper concern.

Some bloggers want any protection available to journalists at traditional media companies to also be available to them, and journalists at those companies want to make sure that the reporter shield privilege is preserved.

Yet if recognizing a privilege for bloggers means that everyone online can maintain that they are journalists, judges may conclude that rather than giving everyone the privilege, no one should have it. That possibility worries reporters, who could find themselves at new risk for what they write or broadcast.

Apple has not sued the Web sites for damages for publishing the trade secrets, but it could try, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at U.C.L.A. He is considering filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on the side of the bloggers, saying that the privilege should extend to them.

"This turns out to be an unresolved question of First Amendment law," Mr. Volokh said, referring to the issue of liability for the Web sites.

Attempting to draw a distinction based on the medium used by the blogger or reporter is misguided, said Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School (also a blogger). "In 15 years, there may be no clear distinction between reporters on the one hand and bloggers on the other," he said. "It won't just be an either-or, where you have a reporter for The Chicago Tribune on the one hand, and a guy sitting in his pajamas drinking beer on the other."

Firms taking action against worker blogs

NEW YORK -- Flight attendant Ellen Simonetti and former Google employee Mark Jen have more in common than their love of blogging: They both got fired over it. Though many companies have Internet guidelines that prohibit visiting porn sites or forwarding racist jokes, few of the policies directly cover blogs, or Web journals, particularly those written outside of work hours.

Simonetti had posted suggestive photographs of herself in uniform, while Jen speculated online about his employer's finances. In neither case were their bosses happy when they found out.

"There needs to be a dialogue going on between employers and employees," said Heather Armstrong, a Web designer fired for commenting on her blog about goings on at work. "There's this power of personal publishing, and there needs to be rules about what you can or cannot say about the workplace."

On blogs, which are by their very nature public forums, people often muse about their likes and dislikes -- of family, of friends, of co-workers.

Currently, some 27 percent of online U.S. adults read blogs, and 7 percent pen them, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project.

With search engines making it easy to find virtually anything anyone says in a blog these days, companies are taking notice -- and taking action.

"Because it's less formal, you're more likely to say something that would offend your boss," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a workers' rights group.

Armstrong, who wouldn't name the company that fired her in 2002, said some of her bosses took issue with such posts as "Comments Heard In, Around, and Consequent to the Company Christmas Party Last Evening."

Soon after she was sacked, sympathizers coined the term "dooced," meaning "to have lost one's job because of one's Web site," in her case dooce.com.

In 2003, a Microsoft Corp. contractor was fired after posting photographs of computers from rival Apple Computer Inc. at a loading dock. Because Michael Hanscom had described a building in his posting, Microsoft said he had violated security, he said.

Last fall, Simonetti posted photographs of herself posing in a Delta Air Lines uniform inside a company airplane, her bra partly revealed in one. She was fired weeks later.

And in January, Jen was fired by Google over a blog that discussed life at the company, even though he said "it's all publicly available information and my personal thoughts and experiences."

Upon reflection, Jen said, he understood Google's concerns, given readers' tendencies to read between the lines and draw conclusions based on "random comments I made."

He said he hoped his case would prompt workers to "talk to their managers at length about blogging before they begin."

Simonetti said she still doesn't know what she did wrong, saying that plenty of employee Web sites and dating profiles identify Delta and include photos in uniform.

"If there is a policy against this, why weren't all these people punished before?" she said.

Delta and Google officials would only say that Simonetti and Jen no longer worked for them.

In 1997, blogging pioneer Cameron Barrett lost a job at a small marketing firm in Michigan after co-workers stumbled upon "experimental" short stories from his creative writing class on his site. Now, he's much more cautious, and he suspended his blog while campaigning for Wesley Clark during the Democratic presidential primaries.

"I knew that everything I wrote would be scrutinized at (a) microscope level by the other campaigns and their supporters," Barrett wrote in an e-mail.

Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often "don't realize the First Amendment doesn't protect their job."

The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.

A few companies actually do encourage personal, unofficial blogs and have policies defining do's and don'ts for employees who post online. They recognize that there can be value in engaging customers through thoughtful blogs.

"There's always a risk, but you always have that risk anytime you put an employee on the phone," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said.

Sun Microsystems Inc. encourages blogging, offering server space for personal blogs but warning bloggers not to reveal secrets or make financial disclosures that might violate securities law. Sun also offers advice on how to keep blogs interesting.

Only in rare cases are employees "unofficially asked to soften some wording," said Tim Bray, the Sun policy's chief architect. Rather, he said, the policy creates a structure for discussions between employees and their managers.

Jeff Seul, general counsel at Groove Networks Inc., said the policy he wrote for his company aims to tolerate dissent but not disrespect.

Microsoft refused to comment on Hanscom's case, but pointed out that it encourages blogging and has more than 1,500 unofficial bloggers -- the bulk on Microsoft's official Web sites.

Christopher Cobey, an employment lawyer at the Littler Mendelson law firm's Silicon Valley office, said publicity over recent blog-related firings has prompted increased inquiries from companies about developing policies.

But some experts question whether a separate blogging policy is needed at all, given more general employment guidelines and common sense.

Anil Dash, vice president at blog software developer Six Apart Ltd., said publicized firings have been generally not over blogging but over other violations that happened to be done through blogging.

Mark Dichter, chairman of labor and employment at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, said policies can tie the hands of employers.

"It requires you to anticipate and draw lines," he said, "and once you set policies then you get into litigation into which side of the line it fell."

If video games kill, what about the Bible?

Back in the early days of film, there was just no telling what damage the celluloid appearance of sulky Swede Greta Garbo might be inflicting on America's impressionable youth.

So it was that in 1931, some 40 religious and educational groups pressed Uncle Sam to regulate the film industry and thus protect minors from damage they might suffer from being exposed to "harmful" content.

Skip forward to 2005, and you can't mistake the echo of that familiar argument in the push by legislators and private interest groups to get government to do something about violent video and computer games--the only difference being the particular object of society's collective ire. Back then it was Hollywood hotties; these days it's digital psycho-droids. What exactly should be done remains as unclear and contentious as ever.

In the last century, each wave of new media technology has been met by hand-wringing and more. When television emerged as a mass medium at midcentury, some critics complained about its supposed role in the increase in juvenile delinquency rates and the vulgarization of the culture--and this was years before "Desperate Housewives!"

There's little doubt the introduction of interactivity has attached a heightened sense of urgency to the debate. However, I can't say it's generated a heightened sense of clarity. If anything, it's just the opposite.

The widespread use of personal computers by minors certainly raises legitimate questions about what makes for proper content. But it's hard to escape the feeling that many politicians and advocacy groups are just grandstanding for the cameras.

Each wave of new media technology in the last century has been met by hand-wringing and more.
A recent piece on CBS' "60 Minutes" explained how the video game "Grand Theft Auto" supposedly inspired an Alabama teen to murder three police officers. Interesting hypothesis, but how about this alternative: Sometimes stupidity is the best explanation. Instead of blaming the tragedy on the video game publisher, the CBS producer might have done well to examine whether this kid was simply a sociopath in the making.

Even when lawmakers are driven by good intentions, you run into problems when they spell out the details. Consider, for example, a recent push by Washington state legislator Mary Lou Dickerson that targets manufacturers and retailers of violent video games whose products wind up in the hands of minors.

Dickerson's bill would allow for wrongful death or personal injury lawsuits if "the game was a factor in creating conditions that assisted or encouraged the person to cause injury or death to another person."

That's a mouthful, and don't you know a good defense attorney could drive a truck through the holes in that argument. For starters, how do you define "factor?" Or how does a prosecutor prove that repeated exposure to games such as "Quake" and "Doom" encourages someone with an otherwise normal (or even borderline) personality to start blasting away in a school lunchroom? Easier said than done.

Dickerson's is only one of several proposals making the rounds these days. But as long as the nation's punditry is intent on examining causes and effects that contribute to aberrant behavior, why stop with computer and video games? Page through the Bible sometime. Not only do you have your pick of X-rated segments--a parent should serve as chaperone when tender young readers get to the recounting of all that "begetting"--but the good book is also chockablock with tales of one neighbor smiting the next.

Maybe it's coincidence, but religion figured prominently in recent national news stories about shooting incidents.
Maybe it's coincidence, but religion figured prominently in recent national news stories about shooting incidents. Terry Ratzmann, the Wisconsin gunman who last month went on a shooting rampage, regularly attended services at the Living Church of God in Brookfield, Wis. "We believe that the motive has something to do with the church and the church services more so than any other possible motive," the Associated Press quoted a Brookfield police captain as saying.

And what should we make of Dennis Rader, a man who was president of his church council and described as a faithful Christian? These days he's in custody and accused of being the notorious BTK killer.

You get the point.

I'm not looking to let the cybergame industry off the hook for its sundry stupidities. (Do we really need a game re-enacting JFK's assassination?) But laying blame for the coarsening of society and the desensitizing of so many of our youth at the doorstep of the game-development community is a cop-out. It's too pat and avoids the complicated truth that the potential for good and evil coexists in everyone.

Girl, 5, Cuffed, Arrested, Thrown in Police Car

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. ? A 5-year-old girl was arrested, cuffed and put in back of a police cruiser after an outburst at school where she threw books and boxes, kicked a teacher in the shins, smashed a candy dish, hit an assistant principal in the stomach and drew on the walls.

The students were counting jelly beans as part of a math exercise at Fairmount Park Elementary School (search) when the little girl began acting silly. That's when her teacher took away her jelly beans, outraging the child.

Minutes later, the 40-pound girl was in the back of a police cruiser, under arrest for battery. Her hands were bound with plastic ties, her ankles in handcuffs.

"I don't want to go to jail," she said moments after her arrest Monday.

No charges were filed and the girl went home with her mother.

While police say their actions were proper, school officials were not pleased with the outcome.

"We never want to have 5-year-old children arrested," said Michael Bessette, the district's Area III superintendent.

The district's campus police should have been called to help and not local police, he said.

Bessette said campus police routinely deal with children and are trained to calm them in such situations.

Under the district's code of student conduct, students are to be suspended for 10 days and recommended for expulsion for unprovoked attacks, even if they don't result in serious injury. But district spokesman Ron Stone said that rule wouldn't apply to kindergartners.

"She's been appropriately disciplined under the circumstances," he said.

The girl's mother, Inda Akins, said she is consulting an attorney.

"She's never going back to that school," Akins said. "They set my baby up."

Lawmaker Seeks to End Sexy Cheerleading

AUSTIN, Texas - The Friday night lights in Texas could soon be without bumpin' and grindin' cheerleaders. Legislation filed by Rep. Al Edwards would put an end to "sexually suggestive" performances at athletic events and other extracurricular competitions.

"It's just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they're shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down," said Edwards, a 26-year veteran of the Texas House. "And then we say to them, 'don't get involved in sex unless it's marriage or love, it's dangerous out there' and yet the teachers and directors are helping them go through those kind of gyrations."

Under Edwards' bill, if a school district knowingly permits such a performance, funds from the state would be reduced in an amount to be determined by the education commissioner.

Edwards said he filed the bill as a result of several instances of seeing such ribald performances in his district.

J.M. Farias, owner of Austin Cheer Factory, said cheerleading aficionados would welcome the law. Cheering competitions, he said, penalize for suggestive movements or any vulgarity.

"Any coaches that are good won't put that in their routines," he said. And, most girls cheering on Friday nights were trained by professionals who know better, he said.

"I don't think this law would really shake the industry at all. In fact, it would give parents a better feeling, mostly dads and boyfriends, too," Farias said.

Although cheerleaders must meet the same no-pass, no-play academic requirements of athletes, cheerleading is not a competition sanctioned by the University Interscholastic League, the governing body of Texas high school sports.

The UIL also does not have performance regulations for squads who cheer for their teams at state championships, said Athletic Coordinator Peter Contreras.

"I think it should have been cut out a long time ago," Edwards said. "It surely needs to be toned down."

Pay up, you are being watched

Would you donate more to charity if you were being watched, even by a bug-eyed robot called Kismet? Surprisingly perhaps, Kismet's quirky visage is enough to bring out the best in us, a discovery which could help us understand human generosity's roots.

Altruisim is a puzzle for Darwinian evolution. How could we have evolved to be selfless when it is clearly a costly business? Many experimental games between volunteers who have to decide how much to donate to other players have shown that people do not behave in their immediate self-interest. We are more generous than necessary and are prepared to punish someone who offers an unfair deal, even if it costs us (New Scientist, 12 March 2005).

To some, this is evidence of "strong reciprocity", which they believe evolved in our prehistoric ancestors because kind groups did better than groups of selfish individuals. But others argue that altruism is an illusion. "It looks like the people in the experiments are trying to be nice, but the niceness is a mirage," says Terry Burnham at Harvard University, US.
Future gifts

He and Brian Hare pitted 96 volunteers against each other anonymously in games where they donate money or withhold it. Donating into a communal pot would yield the most money, but only if others donated too.

The researchers split the group into two. Half made their choices undisturbed at a computer screen, while the others were faced with a photo of Kismet - ostensibly not part of the experiment. The players who gazed at the cute robot gave 30% more to the pot than the others.

Burnham and Hare believe that at some subconscious level they were aware of being watched. Being seen to be generous might mean an increased chance of receiving gifts in future or less chance of punishment, they will report in Human Nature.
Deep-seated response

Burnham believes that even though the parts of our brain that carry out decision-making know that the robot image is just that, Kismet's eyes trigger something more deep-seated. We can manipulate altruistic behaviour with a pair of fake eyeballs because ancient parts of our brain fail to recognise them as fake, he says.

He believes that strong reciprocity is an illusion because even though volunteers are told they will never meet the other players again, our brains are not geared up for that degree of anonymity because humans evolved in small groups. Altruism expert Daniel Fessler at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, agrees. "Our mental architecture is just not used to the modern environment."

Charities and taxmen could even exploit the Kismet effect. Next time you click on a charity's gift page you may just see Kismet's dopey eyes staring back at you as you are overwhelmed by an uncontrollable urge to give.

Castle Rock v. Gonzales: Making the Court's Protection Real

On March 21, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Castle Rock, Colorado v. Gonzales, a case that will determine the accountability of local law enforcement for failing to enforce court orders that protect victims of abuse by a spouse or acquaintance.

The case stems from a lawsuit filed by Jessica Gonzales, who charged that police repeatedly failed to enforce a restraining order against her violent husband, who kidnapped and murdered their three young daughters in 1999.

The ACLU Women's Rights Project, which works regularly to protect the rights of domestic violence survivors, coordinated nine friend-of-the-court briefs on Jessica's behalf.

In 1999, a court granted Jessica Gonzales a protective order barring her estranged husband Simon from contact with her and her three daughters, ages seven, nine and ten. The court order also required the police to enforce its terms by arresting her husband if he violated the order.

Simon abducted the young girls a month after the court order, and Jessica immediately called the police. The police told Jessica there was nothing they could do, and said she should call back if the girls did not turn up. Jessica called the police six times that night, and eventually drove to the police station to plead for help in person. The police refused to take action and enforce the court order.

Later that night, Jessica's husband Simon drove up to the police station and opened fire with a gun purchased that day. He was killed in the gun battle that followed. Afterwards, police discovered the dead bodies of Jessica's three daughters in Simon's truck.

Jessica took a moment to speak with the ACLU about her story and her case.

ACLU: It has been five years since you first filed this lawsuit. This must have been a difficult process for you.

Jessica: It has been a long and difficult process. It's very hard to try and put your life back together when you're working on a legal case that stems from the most horrible thing that you - that any mother - could go through. And Castle Rock has certainly not made this easy for me. They have dragged their feet on this, taking every possible extension allowed, and waiting until the last minute before filing briefs.

ACLU: Why put yourself through it all?

Jessica: Because I want to make sure that no parent ever has to go through the pain that I went through. I want to make sure that police are ultimately accountable for doing their jobs. We rely on the courts and the police for protection against violence. A restraining order is the only legal alternative offered for protection against domestic violence. Supposedly, police function is to serve and protect. If the law's claimed purpose to protect is a fraud, we should know that. If the police will take no action to enforce an order of protection, then women need to know this before we go through the process and make our stalker or abuser even angrier.

ACLU: Do you believe that court orders of protection are a bad idea in a domestic violence situation?

Jessica: In my case, it definitely was. My daughters are dead. But I really believe that they could have been saved if the Castle Rock police actually bothered to enforce the court order. I called the police repeatedly that night. The police knew that I had a restraining order against Simon. It was their department that served him with that order. Orders of protection can only protect you if the police are trained on how to handle these calls and actually take measures to enforce the orders. That's why I filed this lawsuit.

< This is a bit pulled from an ACLU newsletter. In general, we support the ACLU as the only bastion of freedom left, particularly in this country, however, there are a few issues here with which we must take exception. First of all, they go too far with women's rights anyway. Like the reverse discrimination that has made it into our schools as the racial quota system. While diversity is a right and worthy goal of an educational institution, they get it at the expense of people who should have been getting the education not getting it, often to have it awarded to someone who is simply not worthy. In women's rights, they don't override Other People's rights, such as in abortion at the point when the fetus is obviously a person, or in child custody where the Mother's Wants are often taken over the Father's Needs.


In this particular case although they are specifically correct, they are in general wrong. Already, all a woman has to do to get a restraining order (and thereby fuck up a man's life) is say she wants one. Women almost automatically get custody in a divorce, and other injustices. Since there can be no way of knowing whether a restraining order is proper (the issue doesn't even get examined for up to months after the order is issued), there is no way to say that the police Should try to enforce it. As long as "women's rights" are supposed to take precidence over those of others, there is naught but injustice in them and they should be ignored and disallowed. Women have the same rights and protections granted to them against bodily harm, for freedom, etc, as everyone else! If a seperate type of need can be demonstrated for women (which is pretty obvious in cases like this) *AND* it can be balanced out with the needs and rights of others, THEN it is appropriate to have a seperate category legislated in. >

Creative Commons Is Rewriting Rules of Copyright

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- When Chuck D and the Fine Arts Militia released their latest single, "No Meaning No," several months ago, they didn't try to stop people from circulating free copies on the Internet. They encouraged it.

They posted the entire 3-minute, 12-second song and its various vocal, drum and guitar components online and invited everyone to view, copy, mix, remix, sample, imitate, parody and even criticize it.

The result has been the creation of a flood of derivative work ranging from classical twists on the hip-hop piece to video interpretations of the song. The musicians reveled in the instant fan base. They were so pleased that they recently decided to publish their next entire album, due later this spring, the same way, becoming the first major artists to do so.

"No Meaning No" was released under an innovative new licensing scheme called Creative Commons that some say may be better suited to the electronic age than the hands-off mind-set that has made copyright such a bad word among the digerati.

So far, more than 10 million other creations -- ranging from the movie "Outfoxed" and songs by the Beastie Boys to the British Broadcasting Corp.'s news footage and the tech support books published under the O'Reilly label -- have been distributed using these licenses. The idea has even won the support of Hilary Rosen, formerly of the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites), and Jack Valenti, the past head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who became known for their aggressive pursuit of people who share free, unauthorized copies via the Internet.

Interest in Creative Commons licenses comes as artists, authors and traditional media companies begin to warm to the idea of the Internet as friend instead of foe and race to capitalize on technologies such as file-sharing and digital copying.

Apple Computer Inc. gave many reason to be optimistic. Music lovers who once spent hours scouring the Internet for free, pirated copies of songs are now showing they are willing to pay for online music; the company says it is selling 1.25 million songs, at 99 cents a track, each day.

Rare is the consumer electronics company or music label that is not experimenting with something similar. Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, EMI and Warner Music Group, for instance, inked deals to distribute songs on a fee-based download service run by Wurld Media, a Saratoga Springs, N.Y., peer-to-peer software company.

At the same time, many of the innovators who touched off the file-sharing revolution are seeking to win corporate support for their work. Shawn Fanning, who as a teen developed Napster (news - web sites), is now working on software that would let copyright holders specify permissions and prices for swapping. Vivendi Universal is a backer.

Perhaps the most significant cooperative effort, however, is the set of innovative new licensing schemes under which "No Meaning No" was released.

The licenses are the brainchild of online theorist Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor.

Lessig argues that the current system of copyright laws provides little flexibility -- either you give up all permissions for use of your work or you withhold everything. He proposed a solution: a set of copyright licenses that would allow artists to choose to keep "some rights reserved" rather than "all rights reserved."

They could, for instance, choose to allow their works to be enjoyed and copied by others for any purpose, restrict such activity to non-commercial use or allow use of portions of the work rather than all of it. To that end, Lessig co-founded the nonprofit Creative Commons, whose aim, as he describes it, is to "help artists and authors give others the freedom to build upon their creativity -- without calling a lawyer first."

What began as an offbeat legal experiment is now prompting people to reconsider the notion of copyright.

"What we're doing is not only good for society but it's good for us and our business because we get our music out," said Brian Hardgroove, 40, the co-founder of Fine Arts Militia and the band's bass player.

The way Lessig sees it, art has always been about stealing, recycling and mixing: Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were said to borrow from each other's brushwork. The 1990s hit "Clueless" with Alicia Silverstone was a modern-day adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma."

Technology has given the world an unprecedented ability to digitize works, copy them, take them apart and put them back together again. But Lessig said he worries that the extension of copyright laws is keeping many works out of the public domain, hampering creativity. When the Constitution was written, copyrights covered 14 years, extendable to 28 years. Now, with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, these rights last until an author's death plus 70 years.

Lessig's goal with Creative Commons was to create a body of digital work, which he calls "artifacts of culture," for the public domain, accessible to all.

In the year since the licenses were unveiled, a steady stream of works beyond popular music and videos has joined the Creative Commons public domain archive: material for more than 500 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) classes, audio of every U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) argument since 1950 from the Public Library of Science, the archives for Flickr's photo-sharing site, and Cory Doctorow's futuristic novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom."

The book's first hardcover run was a sellout -- 10,000 copies in all -- in bookstores, but the number of free electronic copies distributed was much greater. Half a million copies of the science fiction novel were downloaded.

"There is this weird sense that the Internet is broken because it lets people make easy copies. . . . The Internet is a machine for making copies, and artists need to come to grips with that," Doctorow said.

Doctorow's experiment with his first novel went so well that he released his second one, "Eastern Standard Tribe," under a Creative Commons license and hopes to publish a third this spring the same way.

"At every turn in history we see this new model of distribution that people say is going to destroy art itself," Doctorow said. But, he said, such fears been proved wrong time and time again.

Fritz Attaway, Washington general counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America, said work licensed under Creative Commons licenses and those released under traditional copyright restrictions can coexist.

"I think it's helpful to educate consumers that there is a place like Creative Commons where one can access intellectual property that has been freely made available to the general public without compensation and that that should be distinguished from sites that are permitting access to infringing material," he said.

Still, even the most optimistic say that Creative Commons will be only part of the solution to ending the long-running battle over copyright. Attaway said he doubts the major movie studios or record labels would ever license large quantities of their work for distribution using Creative Commons licenses because they make plenty of money off the current system.

Hollywood producers Robert Greenwald and Jim Gilliam are among those challenging such assumptions. They released their movie "Outfoxed" under a Creative Commons license. Their controversial documentary accused Fox News of being a propaganda machine for the Republican Party. Just weeks after it was released in theaters, the producers posted 48 minutes of original interviews from the work online.

Gilliam credits the Internet with boosting interest in the movie because it reached a wider audience than it could in theaters alone. He said many of those who viewed parts of the work online ended up ordering a $9.95 DVD.

"This isn't necessarily just some altruistic thing," Gilliam said. "You can make money off of this, too."

It is not always easy for consumers to know when a work is protected by a Creative Commons license. If the work does not identify itself as such, online users can go to CreativeCommons.org and search its archives. In a few months, the developers behind the new Mozilla Firefox browser plan to release an update designed to allow people to search the Web for works of art licensed by Creative Commons.

John Buckman, an entrepreneur from Berkeley, Calif., has used the Creative Commons licenses as the foundation for his new online record label. All artists who sign with his company, Magnatune, must agree to allow free use of their work for non-commercial purposes. The site features 326 albums by 174 artists in six different genres, including classical and heavy metal. He said the company makes 50 percent of its money from downloads and 50 percent from licensing fees.

He said his label's songs are attractive because cash-strapped filmmakers can use the songs as they like for free and have to pay only when they start making money. "As much as musicians are having a hard time making a living, filmmakers and other creative people are having a hard time finding music to use in their works," he said.

And the start-up is making money, he said -- possibly as much as $2 million this year.

British Firm Breaks Ground in Surveillance Science

MALVERN, England (Reuters) - The "suicide bomber" clips a shrapnel-filled belt around his waist and buttons up his jacket to conceal it.

As he turns back and forth in front of a semi-circular white panel, about the size of a shower cubicle, a computer monitor shows the metal-packed cylinders standing out clearly in white against his body.

This is no real security alarm: it's a demonstration at the British technology group QinetiQ of a scanning device that sees under people's clothes to spot not just metal but other potential threats like ceramic knives or hidden drugs.

The electromagnetic technology, known as Millimeter Wave (MMW), is just one aspect of a potential revolution in security screening being pioneered at QinetiQ, formerly part of the research arm of the British defense ministry.

"Actually, detecting a suicide bomber in the lobby of an airport is not a great thing to happen," Simon Stringer, new managing director of QinetiQ's security business, says with British understatement.

"It's slightly better than having him do it in the departure lounge or perhaps on the plane, but you're still doing to have to deal with a significant problem."

That's why, he says, the trend for the future will be to move the scanners outside the terminal building and operate them in "stand-off mode" -- checking people from a distance before they even set foot inside.

The advantage is obvious: to spot potential attackers without alerting them to the fact, and gain precious seconds for security forces to prevent an attack.

ARE YOU SWEATING TOO MUCH?

Another prospect in store for air travelers is "hyperspectral sensing" that will check for chemicals called pheromones, secreted by the human body, which may indicate agitation or stress.

"People under stress tend to exude slightly different pheromones, and you can pick this up ... There are sensing techniques we're working on," Stringer said.

The stress may have an innocent cause, such as fear of flying, but could also betray the nervousness of a potential attacker. The point is to alert security staff to something unusual that may need further investigation.

As with MMW, the technology could function at a distance and without the need for people to wait in line. By conducting such checks while people are approaching the airport and moving through it, authorities could avoid bottlenecks and queues.

SUSPICIOUS MOVEMENTS

As the passenger proceeds through the terminal, the next layer of surveillance could be carried out through "cognitive software" which monitors his or her movements and sounds a silent alarm if it picks up an unusual pattern.

"Someone who's been back in and out of the same place three times or keeps bumping into the same people might be something that's worthy of further investigation ... I think that's really the sort of capabilities we're going to be looking at," Stringer said in an interview.

While many of these technologies are still under development, others have already been rolled out to clients by QinetiQ, which made group operating profit of 28 million pounds ($53.9 million) in the six months to last September.

Millimeter wave, for example, has been tested at airports and, in a different application, is being used by British immigration authorities and Channel Tunnel operator Eurotunnel to detect illegal immigrants trying to enter the country as stowaways in the back of trucks.

Stringer says the potential market for MMW runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars and goes well beyond the transport sector.

"We're spending quite a lot of time talking to multinationals who want to establish perimeter security systems around plant, installations and buildings," he said.

QinetiQ -- owned 30 percent by private equity group Carlyle and 56 percent by the British government -- expects rapid growth for its security business as it gears up for a stock market launch.

BIG BROTHER?

But how will ordinary people embrace the prospect of surveillance technology that sees through their clothes, checks how much they're sweating and tracks their airport wanderings between the tax-free shops and the toilets?

Stringer acknowledges that some might see this as George Orwell's Big Brother come true. "There are always going to be issues of privacy here and they're not to be belittled, they're important."

But he says smarter technology will actually make the checks less intrusive than those now in standard practice, such as being searched head to foot after setting off a metal detector alarm.

"Personally I find that more irritating than the idea of someone just scanning me as I walk through," he said.

"You're under surveillance in airports anyway. What you're looking at here is just being applied more intelligently."

Sexy Moans for Mobile Phones

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Adult film company New Frontier Media has something new for cell phones: ring moans.

Wireless content company Brickhouse Mobile on Tuesday said that under an agreement with New Frontier it would begin offering ring tones for mobile phone users featuring porn stars making groaning and moaning noises from the suggestive to the positively tantalizing.

The company said it would also begin offering sexually explicit "wallpaper" for cell phone screens and adult videos for download on mobile phones under its brand The Erotic Network, the television subsidiary of New Frontier Media Inc.

Brickhouse and New Frontier signed their five-year deal in January but did not disclose full terms of the program until Tuesday. Users will be able to buy individual items or take a monthly subscription.

The two sides said they would also work together on age-verification schemes to ensure that minors were not purchasing inappropriate content. Much of the more explicit content will be available internationally at first.

Video game ban moves forward in Illinois

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's proposal to bar stores from selling violent and sexually explicit video games to children unanimously passed a state House committee Wednesday, despite concerns that it might be unconstitutional.

Under the proposal, which now goes to the House floor, any store that violated the ban could face misdemeanor charges and fines of up to $5,000.

Blagojevich has been pushing the idea for several months, arguing in town hall meetings and national interviews that the games desensitize children to violence. He says they can lead to anti-social behavior and even obesity.

On Wednesday, he applauded the House civil law committee for approving the "sensible and necessary legislation."

But courts have struck down similar laws in Washington, Missouri and Indiana as too broad and in violation of free speech.

Even some lawmakers who voted for the bill said they were concerned it is too vague.

"This bill does not have clear standards to the people that need to know what the standards are ? the parents, the kids, the clerk, the manager at Best Buy," said Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie. "These are people that will not have a clear standard under this bill as to what is or is not OK."

The legislation requires stores to label violent or sexually explicit games with black-and-white stickers reading "18." Stores would have the burden of figuring out which games could legally be sold to minors and which couldn't.

David Vite, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, said the legislation's restrictions on games depicting "human on human violence" could mean that stores can be fined for selling football games to teenagers.

He also questioned the sincerity of the bill's supporters, suggesting they fear that voting against the measure would hurt them in future elections.

"It's pandering, and it's wrong," he said.

Harvard University professor Michael Rich argued Blagojevich's position before the committee Wednesday, saying the law is necessary because kids may act out in real life the violent or sexual behaviors they practice in virtual reality.

"Children are learning from video games," Rich said. "The question is: what are they learning?"

< It's debatable whether free speech or child protection should win here, what is not debatable is that they will take this misdemeanor and turn it into a felony. Imagine getting tossed in jail for selling a video game... >

Judge Tosses Out Teen's Homework Lawsuit

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A judge has tossed out a Wisconsin high school student's lawsuit asking for summers free of homework and may order him to pay the state's costs, court officials said on Wednesday.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Richard Sankovitz on Tuesday called 17-year-old Peer Larson's suit frivolous and said his complaint should be directed at the school board.

The Wisconsin attorney general's office may ask the judge to order Larson to pay the state's court costs.

Larson, of Hales Corners, Wisconsin, had asked that the state schools superintendent on down to his local school district and math teacher be barred from assigning homework over the summer.

Larson and his father said the problem arose when he was given three assignments just before the start of summer vacation to prepare for an advanced precalculus class that began last fall.

The younger Larson said he failed to get all the work done because he had a summer job as a camp counselor.

< Another tale of schools trying to overstep their bounds and infiltrate every part of their student's lives. Ordinarily we'd consider schools one of the less corrupt parts of government but we're beginning to reconsider. If you have a tale about how your school is corrupt, please Contact Us >

Moving to ban eyeball bling

A House committee last week approved legislation 11 to 4 that would criminalize the practice of inserting jewelry into the surface of the eyeball, according to an Associated Press report. Yup, you read that right--eyeball piercing.

The nascent procedure--which is performed with a local anesthetic--involves making a tiny slice in the mucous membrane covering the eyeball and slipping in a small, heart- or half-moon-shaped piece of metal called a JewelEye. As a result, the white of the eye assumes a new gleam.

The Illinois proposal, sponsored by Democratic state Rep. Kevin Joyce, would make performing the 15-minute eyeball procedure a felony punishable by up to three years in prison. Joyce was put off by reports of eyeball piercing in the Netherlands and wanted to prevent such body mods on his home turf. Not that the technique is sweeping the Midwest or anything (as far as we know).

"I don't think anybody should be messing with the eyeball," Joyce said.

A Google search reveals that Illinois is home to numerous venues for laser eye surgery.

Gerrit Melles, director of the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery in Rotterdam, says he hasn't seen complications or side effects associated with eyeball piercing, which so far has been performed on just a handful of people. "It is a bit of a fun thing and a very personal thing for people," the physician, who helped pioneer the technique, has been quoted as saying.

Safety concerns aside, Democratic State Rep. Constance Howard, one of four lawmakers who voted against the Illinois measure, questioned whether the prohibition infringes on people's rights.

"I don't want people to get earrings on their tongues and navels and all that stuff, either," she said, "but why is it my business where they want to put jewelry?"

&lg Let's see, spending our tax dollars on time and resources (not to mention their paychecks) to ban something that is no harm to anyone, and is only done to yourself. Hmm... I'm thinking they are assholes. >

Wounded man crashes trying to get help

Monday wasn't Augustus Petro's night.
The 49-year-old New Windsor man stabbed himself in the chest during a fight with his wife, then raced along Route 17K, illegally passing cars in the process, trying to get to the hospital, police said.
His run for help ended when he sideswiped a Toyota Tercel he was trying to pass, police said.
Petro's wife, Bernice, 44, at first said she was driving the car, but changed her story after witnesses came forward, police said. Police said they found an illegal handgun and illegal Vicodin prescription painkillers in the car.
Petro was treated at the scene by Mobile Life Support Services and at the Cornwall campus of St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital and released.
Petro was charged with driving while intoxicated and reckless driving, misdemeanors, and also ticketed for unsafe passing and failure to keep right.
He and his wife were charged with seventh-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, and Bernice Petro was charged with second-degree obstructing governmental administration, all misdemeanors. They were released on their own recognizance, pending future appearances in Town Court.

< OK, regardless of whatever else happened, arresting someone while trying to get to the hospital is, under any circumstances, totally fucked up. >

Security door blocks portly police

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Portly Swedish police have a new reason to work out thanks to a new security entrance at the National Police headquarters that won't let them in if they weigh too much.

A construction error in the recently remodeled security entrance, which has a built-in scale designed to only let one person at a time pass through the door, has caused some embarrassing moments for officers who may not have spent enough time exercising.

Those weighing more than 230 pounds (105 kilograms) who try to pass through the entrance are greeted by a recorded voice telling them: "Stop! One at a time!" and are not let through, police spokeswoman Linda Widmark said.

She said the scale is supposed to be adjustable to let people weighing up to 160 kilograms (350 pounds) pass through, but an apparent construction error is playing tricks on those with ample girth.

"We'll have to get that fixed," Widmark said. "We've got some big strong men around here."

The security entrance is mainly for visitors and police denied entrance can use other doors.

"There are other options for them," she said.

< Imagine police being required to be in shape... >

District settles 'egg-shooter' case for $10,000

Montgomery ? Last June, a Valley Central High School student blasted a frozen egg through the windows of a school bus using a high-powered spud gun.
Glass showered students on the bus. One boy was sent to the hospital.
Now, in a turn of events that has some parents steaming, the school district is paying $10,000 to cover the young egg-shooter's attorney's fees.
The school board decided early this week to settle a federal case filed by the shooter's father rather than go to court. The case charged the school district with trampling the student's rights by suspending him from school.
That's because after the shooting, the 17-year-old student ? whose name is being withheld because of his age ? was arrested by Montgomery police and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He agreed to pay restitution and do community service.
But the school superintendent also dealt punishment, suspending the student for five months even though the boy was not on school grounds when he shot the egg.
Fair?
The boy's father didn't think so. Neither did attorney Michael Sussman, who represented him in the dispute.
"The (family's) principal objective was to have (the boy) come back into school and continue his wrestling career to gain a college scholarship," Sussman said, adding that the district didn't have a policy dealing with students who attack school property while off school grounds.
"If you get in fight at the mall," Sussman said, "that doesn't mean the school can be involved" in doling out punishment.
A judge in January ordered an injunction that permitted the boy to return to school a month early. Sussman said the judge believed the student did not intend to shoot the bus.
So rather than dish out more money to fight in court, the school board settled, agreeing to let the student stay in school and to pay $10,000 for the boy's attorney's fees. (The district will actually pay $2,500; the district's insurance will pay the rest.)
School board President Robert Santo, who has heard the complaints from taxpayers, said it was a money issue.
"Sometimes pragmatism wins over your morals," he said.

< A blow against totalitarianism. Damned right the school doesn't have the right to mete out it's own punishment for non-school activities. The person who raised, maide, and carried out his suspension should be suspended. >

In the ID Wars, the Fakes Gain

EARLY last month, after being shut down by the police for two days for serving underage drinkers, the owners of the West End, a Manhattan bar and restaurant near Columbia University, deployed a new weapon in their continuing battle against fake ID's: an E-Seek scanner, a high-tech age-verification device designed to tell a real driver's license from a fake in a simple swipe.

But if the arrival of this fake-ID devourer - its manufacturer makes a similar hand-held model called the Buster - was supposed to strike fear in the hearts of aspiring beer guzzlers in the freshman and sophomore classes at Columbia, it hasn't had quite that effect.

"Within a week I could be beating the West End no problem," said a Columbia student who claims to have forged over 400 driver's licenses but said he stopped for fear of being arrested (and wanted his name withheld for the same reason). "If you know how to use Photoshop and a simple Epson printer, you can print ID's in your dorm room."

The age-old battle of wits pitting police officers and bar owners on the one hand against under-age drinkers on the other is as lively as ever, though it has entered a new technologically advanced phase. Gone are the days of the art major down the hall who was a wizard with an X-Acto knife, a stencil and some super glue. Using Internet resources and sophisticated computer graphics software, college students are forging drivers' licenses of startlingly good quality, complete with shimmering holograms, special inks and data encoding that can fool the police and even occasionally the latest generation of scanners. To hear law enforcement officers tell it, in the fake-ID arms race the kids are winning.

"They're definitely a step ahead of us," said Steven Ernst, the district administrator in San Diego for the California Alcoholic Beverage Control Department. "In terms of the color, the typeset and the hologram they're real, real good. Most can't be picked out by the naked eye."

While getting a fake ID is a right of passage for many young people who want no more than access to the occasional six-pack or campus pub, the potential security threat posed by forged drivers' licenses - most prominently, the threat of access to commercial airliners - has cast the old barroom conflict in a new light.

"People think of fake ID's for buying beer or cigarettes when you're 19," said Sgt. William Planeta, who runs the New York Police Department's document fraud squad. "But it has a lot of different implications in a post-9/11 world. You can use that fake ID to do all sorts of things."

In an effort to catch up with counterfeiters, therefore, the government and a growing document verification industry are turning to both legislation and technological innovations. "We're going to give the fake ID a run for its money," said James E. Copple, the director of the nonprofit International Institute for Alcohol Awareness at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, with headquarters in Maryland, which studies public health.

They are having some success, at least with clumsily forged ID's. With help from his Intelli-Check scanner, Paul Barclay, 48, the owner of a Boston club called the Rack, confiscated 600 fake ID's last year, including 13 in a single weekend night. Mr. Barclay said he pays his bouncers $20 for each fake they bring in.

"It's a full-blown war at this point," he said. "We've come across amazing ones, where they've impregnated the back with legitimate data from someone else. The kids have gotten a lot more clever."

Scanners, though, are rare, and word quickly circulates when a bar gets one. Web sites like www.hotspotboston.com rate bars and clubs by the strictness of their ID policies, so under-age drinkers know which ones to avoid.

When it comes to getting a fake ID, students can be as discriminating as they are about the music on their iPods. Students shy away from fake licenses from nearby states because bouncers and bartenders are so familiar with the authentic versions. They also avoid certain licenses, like one older type from New Jersey, that are so easy to tamper with that no bouncer worth his black light would let one pass without a thorough going-over.

"ID's made by students tend to be much better than ID's you buy in the Village or Times Square," said a 19-year-old Columbia sophomore who has a fake driver's license and asked not to be identified for fear of the police. As for the importance of having a fake ID, she said: "All of my friends have fake ID's, everyone I know from high school and all my friends at school. It's definitely a necessity."

THE nation's fixation with security cards and ID systems has also been a boon for manufacturers of fake ID's. The widespread use of corporate ID's has created a large pool of people who know the inner workings of the security features in the cards. In online chat rooms dedicated exclusively to the manufacture of fake ID's, unscrupulous members of this pool - including some drivers' license bureau workers, the police say - share or sell information about security features and even run a black market in the more sophisticated components of ID's.

"There are guys online who manufacture the bar codes and holograms," said the Columbia student who made fake ID's. "The hologram like on a Texas will glow. I can order that."

Some ID mills are offshore and sell online. Many sites purporting to sell fake ID's are scams set up to take advantage of gullible under-age drinkers, but Michael Cawthon, the special agent in charge of the Nashville district of the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission, said that others offer forgeries of drivers' licenses. Mr. Cawthon said some offshore counterfeiting outfits solicit students to market for them on campuses and even conduct background checks on their American liaisons to make sure they are not the law.

"The Internet stuff is beginning to kill us," he said.

For students who prefer to make their own ID's, the Web offers all the raw materials. High-quality graphics templates for most state drivers' licenses - with accurate renderings of intricate background patterns and color schemes - can be found online. High-tech driver's license plastics and laminates that were once available only to drivers' license bureaus are now easily available online as well at legitimate office supply sites and specialty sites.

Once counterfeiters have compiled the necessary raw materials for a convincing fake, they get photographs from their customers, which are easily taken in a dorm room with a Web cam. Then they fill in the personal information on the template with a computer, assemble the pieces and laminate them. High-quality fake ID's can cost $50 to $200. Once college students have gone through all this trouble for a fake ID, they seldom make just one.

"It's not unusual to bust a counterfeiter who has made over 10,000 falsified documents," said Maj. David Myers of the Florida Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco Division.

From the under-age drinker's point of view - and, the police would add, the terrorist's - the holy grail of fake ID's is an authentic driver's license issued to someone presenting a bogus or borrowed birth certificate or Social Security card. Short of that, discriminating buyers of fake ID's want forged licenses that are properly encoded and can pass muster with a scanner.

Licenses store information in two formats: magnetic stripes like those on credit cards, and two-dimensional bar codes, strips of small dots arranged to convey information in a kind of graphic Morse code. Magnetic stripes can be erased with a magnet and reprogrammed with, say, a new birth date, using basic ID-making equipment, and bar codes can be photocopied or transferred from a legitimate ID to a fake one.

While a careful bouncer or police officer might figure out such ruses by comparing the information from the data strip to that on the front of the ID, most don't bother. Instead, scanners search the encoded strips for a birth date and issue a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on whether the cardholder is the legal drinking age.

"All it tells you is if the age is older than 21 or not," said the former ID maker at Columbia. "You just have them all programmed over 21."

PENALTIES for possessing and making fake ID's vary from state to state. In New York possession of a fake driver's license is a felony punishable by up to seven years. Often when the police encounter a fake ID these days, they are more interested in getting information on who made it than in prosecuting the under-age user.

That was the case in Louisiana in late 2003, when a 19-year-old L.S.U. student named Corey James Domingue died of acute alcohol poisoning after using a fake Texas driver's license to buy four fifths of liquor from a local Winn-Dixie supermarket. By questioning Mr. Domingue's roommate and friends with similar forged ID's, Louisiana authorities were able to unravel a high-tech ring that had issued thousands of counterfeit licenses.

"These kids built their own computers from scratch," said Steven E. Spalitta, the enforcement director of the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control, who handled the case. "We learned the ID's were not just perfect but they were encoded. There's almost no way you can tell it's a fake with the naked eye."

In all, five people pleaded guilty to forgery and a sixth is facing trial. Using computer records Mr. Spalitta's agency also tracked down and issued hundreds of criminal citations to students who bought fake ID's from the ring.

Mr. Spalitta said that finding the violators was easier than he had anticipated. "The students used their personal information" on the fakes, he said. "The only thing they changed were their addresses and their dates of birth."

Mr. Copple, of the Pacific Institute, said that in the coming year a variety of changes could make getting away with a fake ID tougher.

Some states will begin using new watermark technology akin to that used on currency for drivers' licenses next year. This spring the United States Senate is expected to vote on a bill already passed by the House that would require states to standardize the format of the data encoded on the backs of drivers' licenses, making it easier to scan them. Software companies are rushing to develop verification programs for scanners that can be updated in real time, not unlike antivirus software, in response to evolving forgery techniques.

While the backers of these efforts say they herald the demise of the fake ID, officers on the beat have doubts.

"They find a loophole and exploit it," said Sergeant Planeta of the New York document fraud squad, which has arrested 90 people for faking documents since its formation last year. "We plug it, and they find their way around it. And it goes back and forth."

Swiss driver rapped for nighttime speeding spree

The 19 year-old had removed his number plates to avoid being identified as he repeatedly drove through two fixed speed traps near the Swiss capital Bern at speeds up to 40 kilometres per hour (27 miles per hour) above the limit.

However, a policeman who had dealt with him a day earlier recognised the car on the speed trap photographs, which included snaps of passengers making obscene gestures.

The youngster admitted he had drunk seven or eight beers before the speeding spree.

A court in Bern fined him 1,000 Swiss francs (650 euros) and handed down a four-year suspended prison sentence, while the passengers were ordered to appear before a minor's court.

< A sentence of four years for one night of fun where noone was harmed. Suspended or otherwise, this is pure bullshit. >

Domain Owners Lose Privacy

The U.S. Commerce Department has ordered companies that administer internet addresses to stop allowing customers to register .us domain names anonymously using proxy services.

The move does not affect owners of .com and .net domains. But it means website owners with .us domains will no longer be able to shield their name and contact information from public eyes.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center said the move violates First Amendment rights to anonymous free speech. And the representative of one of the largest domain-registration companies is concerned that customers who have been victims of stalkers won't be able to protect their privacy without changing their web address to a domain that offers anonymity.

Wired News has learned that the edict came a month ago from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency that advises the president on telecommunications and information policy. The agency ruled with no warning and without any discussion with the companies accredited to sell and register .us domains. The domain companies were told they would lose their right to sell .us domains -- the official, top-level domain for the United States -- if they didn't comply.

The NTIA did not return a call for comment. But it told registrars it was not setting a new policy with the directive -- it was simply enforcing a provision in a pre-existing contract that the registrars had violated. But Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy, the largest registrar of .us domains, disputed this.

"This has nothing to do with them clarifying an existing contract," Jones said. "We've been selling proxy registrations for three years; they knew it but never said anything against it. They established a new policy, and for them to say otherwise is pure crap."

The .us domain has been around since 1985. For nearly 20 years, it was used exclusively by schools and libraries, as well as state and federal government offices. But in April 2002, it was opened to the public for use -- with the stipulation that domain owners either be U.S. citizens or have a business in this country or some other direct connection to the country.

On Feb. 2, the NTIA sent a letter to NeuStar, the company responsible for administering the .us domain and for accrediting companies that sell the domain addresses.

The letter, obtained by Wired News, called on NeuStar to notify domain such registrars as Network Solutions, eNom and Go Daddy that they should cease allowing proxy registration for .us domains by Feb. 16.

The letter also called on registrars to correct existing proxy registration information -- including name, phone number and postal and e-mail addresses -- from .us customers and update the public Whois database for those domains by Jan. 26, 2006.

The law requires that registrars deposit the name and contact information for domains in the Whois database. But a handful of the 80-plus accredited companies that register .us domains offer a proxy service, for a small fee, that lets owners conceal their true contact information from the Whois database. Of the 300,000 .us domains that Go Daddy has registered, 23,000 are proxies.

The NTIA directive applied only to .us domains, because the NTIA doesn't set policy for other domain names, such as .com and .net.

In the letter it sent to NeuStar, the NTIA said its move was intended to increase the accuracy and reliability of Whois information for the public and for "law enforcement officials who rely on the information." It would also allow the NTIA to contact website owners if their domain registrar goes out of business and to transfer their domain to another registrar.

But Go Daddy's Jones said the NTIA's edict would not ensure that registration information was accurate, because those who really want to conceal their identity or true contact information would provide fake information -- even if it violated the terms of agreement for purchasing a .us domain.

She also said nothing about proxy registration currently prevents law enforcement from getting the information it needs. Registrars place the true contact information for domain owners in an escrow account, which law enforcement officials can obtain with a subpoena.

It's possible legal action could prevent the NTIA and Department of Commerce from having their way -- privacy advocates say the directive violates First Amendment rights to anonymous free speech.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC, said the Supreme Court has ruled on at least four occasions that the right to speak anonymously is protected by the First Amendment. He believes this allows individuals the right to express themselves on the internet without having to reveal their identity.

"The government simply may not require people who wish to speak to present their actual name as a condition of speaking," Rotenberg said. "This tradition of anonymity is deeply rooted in constitutional history, and it is very troubling when the U.S. government attempts to impose true-name disclosure requirements on people who are simply seeking to speak online."

Jeffrey Neuman, director of law and policy for NeuStar, said the Commerce Department was within its rights to eliminate proxy services because it is responsible for setting all rules governing .us domains. He added that only a small number of people use proxy services and would be affected by the ruling.

Neuman said he didn't know why the government had not objected to anonymous registrations before now. But he said the department discovered earlier this year that registrars were offering anonymous services that were not in compliance with its Whois policy requiring registrars to provide accurate contact information about domain owners. Therefore, the department ruled it should stop.

"The NTIA is saying this is not a new policy," Neuman said. "They never approved the offering of proxy domains, and they're simply enforcing an already existing policy."

But Go Daddy's Jones said NeuStar and the government knew anonymous proxy registration had been offered since the company began selling .us domains three years ago. She said NeuStar had asked Go Daddy at the time how it intended to verify that proxy registrants had the right to own a .us domain.

"The old provision said you had to have accurate contact data, and we've always had accurate contact data," Jones said. "They've changed it and expanded it to now say there can be no proxy registrations. It's brand-new language. So for them to say this is not a new policy is absolutely not true."

Censor Services Push Forward

WASHINGTON -- Legislation that would allow people to automatically skip over objectionable content in movies viewed at home sailed through a key House subcommittee on Thursday and looks to be on the fast track.

The House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property passed S167/HR357, known as the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, with little debate. The full Senate passed its identical bill on a voice vote on Feb. 1.

The legislation would essentially affirm the legality of software such as ClearPlay, which automatically edits supposedly objectionable scenes out of popular movie titles. Several DVD players now come ClearPlay-enabled and work with more than 1,000 movie titles.

Some Hollywood directors and studios have complained that such filtering violates their copyright by altering their works without permission. S167/HR357, however, would sanction the practice.

Proponents see the bill as empowering parents to protect children from an onslaught of objectionable movie content.

"Just as the author of a book should not be able to force someone to read that book in any particular manner or order, a studio or director should not be able to force parents or their children to watch a movie in a particular way," said bill sponsor and subcommittee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

Smith said the goal is to get the bill to the White House for signing before the Supreme Court decides the big Grokster case.

In that controversial case, entertainment interests have challenged lower-court decisions ruling that Grokster, Morpheus and other peer-to-peer services cannot be held liable because, like a videocassette recorder, they make copyright violations possible but can be used for legitimate purposes.

Entertainment-industry supporters argue that the services profit from users' desire to get music and movies for free. Thus, P2P services should be held liable so they can be sued for copyright infringement.

The fear among supporters of S167/HR357 is that the final Grokster decision could contain language that alters general copyright law, effectively stalling any pending copyright bills in their tracks.

Regardless of how the court rules, Smith said the subcommittee will likely need to address at least some aspects of copyright law in the wake of the decision, although it's unclear what those issues would be until the court rules.

"I think we may have more things to do after Grokster," he told reporters after the hearing.

Oral arguments in the Grokster case are scheduled for March 29, with the Supreme Court expected to rule this summer.

In addition to its filtering provisions, S167/HR357 would also stiffen penalties for the recording of films in theaters with video cameras. Such camcorder footage often becomes the basis of pirate DVDs sold on the black market.

Bill Would Hold Game Makers Accountable For Players' Actions

SEATTLE - Should the people who make and sell "violent video" games be held accountable if someone commits a crime because of playing them?

That's something our state lawmakers are considering, to open game makers up to more liability.

House Bill 2178 proposes to hold the makers and sellers of violent video games liable if someone under 17 years old commits a crime, due in any part, to playing the game.

Supporters of the bill, like Bill Hanson with the Washington Police and Sheriff's Association, say "kids" are getting the games, and they're becoming desensitized.

"If you sit up and watch this and play these games over and over again... it seems that this is alright to walk up and hit a police officer over the head with a bat," Hanson said.

Opponents argue that the proposed bill would shift the responsibility from the person who actually committed the crime.

Lew McMurran, with the Washington Software Association, says violent games are clearly rated for adults only, and that the responsibility should be on parents to use the video game rating system and control what their kids are playing.

"We're removing the responsibility from the person who committed the act, to somebody else who's completely removed from the situation" McMurran said. "There's a very strong video game industry in this state that we want to support. We don't want to bring undo attention to an area where there's actually jobs being created, where there's actually some good economic development in our state"

House Bill 2178 is still in the committee stage in the state House of Representatives.

Nude man covered in nachos gets probation

Michael David Monn of Maryville appeared before Blount County Circuit Court Judge D. Kelly Thomas and pleaded guilty to burglary, theft, vandalism, indecent exposure and public intoxication. In a plea bargain with prosecutors, Monn was sentenced to three years in prison but was given supervised probation.

He also was given a judicial deferral, which means if he stays out of trouble for the next three years the charges will be expunged from his record. Thomas warned Monn that if he violates the sentencing requirements, he must serve the sentence in a state penitentiary.

Early on the morning of July 18, 2004, Monn "was highly intoxicated, broke into the John Sevier Pool snack bar area, stole some snacks and did some damage and was caught naked with some stolen snacks," Blount County District Attorney General Mike Gallegos told the courtroom.

A police officer found Monn that morning in the parking lot of the pool facility after Monn had apparently scaled an 8-foot-tall fence and was seen running toward a Jeep with a box of stolen snacks and a container of nacho cheese.

In addition to being naked, Monn had nacho cheese in his hair, on his face and on his shoulders, police said. He also had a strong odor of alcohol and was semi-incoherent.

In his Jeep, Maryville officers found clothing and an open bottle of vodka.

< When the possibility of sentencing someone to 3 years in prison exists for this kind of situation, the entire system behind it is morally void. A person's entire life can be ruined in those three years. >

A more mature approach to video-game violence

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich devoted a portion of his Feb. 3 State of the State speech to the state of youth entertainment, specifically violent video games. The governor is not amused, and he is committed to making his state the first to criminalize the distribution of such videos to minors.

Gov. Blagojevich has proposed a law to make the sale of explicitly violent or sexual games to under-18 consumers a Class A misdemeanor, carrying a punishment of up to a year in prison or a $5,000 fine. He also wants to require video retailers to label games for content and post signs in their stores explaining the rating system for the games.

In addition, the governor named a task force of educators, medical experts and parents to advise him on the potential harmful effects of suspect videos on minors. Last December, he urged the Chicago Transit Authority to cancel a contract for advertising a mature-rated video game on city buses.

Blagojevich is not alone in the campaign against violence in videos. Political leaders and community activists across the nation and across a wide political spectrum are targeting violent video games as a menace to children and a precursor to real crime.

Earlier this month, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams announced that he was backing a bill targeting the sale of violent games. In Maryland, a bill sponsored by Delegate Justin Ross would impose a fine and jail time for vendors who sold or rented violent video games to minors. Similar legislation is before the Georgia Legislature.

In 2004 alone, according to Clay Calvert of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment at Penn State, more than 20 states and local jurisdictions launched efforts to regulate the sale of video games. Even federal legislation pops up from time to time in Congress, but none has gotten very far.

It is quite clear that politicians and some community groups do not like these games. But millions of kids ? and their parents ? do like them. And while some contain blood-curdling violence, others are visually stunning, technologically advanced and creatively sophisticated. Sales of video games last year totaled $7.3 billion, just $2 billion less than movie box-office receipts.

Those who want to regulate the distribution of video games face some major hurdles, aside from the popularity and appeal of the games.

First is the Constitution. Courts have made it clear that video games are forms of expression deserving the same First Amendment protection as television, movies or books. Further, they have rejected the argument that there is a causal relationship between video violence and real violence.

In 2001, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that struck down an Indianapolis ordinance regulating access to video games. In 2003, the 8th Circuit also ruled that such a law was unconstitutional, noting that ?the government cannot silence protected speech by wrapping itself in the cloak of parental authority.?

In addition to the constitutional barrier to these kinds of laws, there are some inconvenient realities.

The video-game industry voluntarily set up a rating system to guide parents and young consumers. Vendors are supposed to require proof of age before selling M-rated games to anyone under 17. Some of the largest retailers don?t even carry adult-only games. And, according to an industry survey, the average age of a video-game player is 30 and the average age of a buyer is 36. When the buyer is a minor, parents are involved in the purchase 83% of the time.

Rather than attempting to dictate taste and behavior through law, politicians and activists might focus more of their energy on public-awareness campaigns, the independent rating system, and encouraging vendors to ?card? more unaccompanied minors. That would be a much better way to go, not only because it?s First Amendment-friendly but also because it works.

Those who push for laws based on exaggerated science and a low opinion of the moral and emotional fiber of young people and their parents? judgment should think through the logic of their efforts. If we can harness the law to punish any form of expression based on the assertion that it might cause bad acts, or disfavored attitudes, then what is left but a dismayingly homogenized and narrow range of expression, reflecting only the dominant passions and prejudices of the moment?

When dealing with expression that some of us don?t like, it is all too tempting to exploit fear and ignorance. It is all too easy to propose laws to ban it. It is not easy, however, to decide who has the maturity to distinguish fantasy violence from that appearing on the nightly news or in any number of professional sports.

Those decisions shouldn?t be left to a legislator, a jury, a merchant or a police officer. They should be left to a parent.

Panelists Decry Bush Science Policies

WASHINGTON Feb 20, 2005 ? The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush administration, with fewer scientists heard in policy discussions and money for research and advanced training being cut, according to panelists at a national science meeting.

Speakers at the national meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science expressed concern Sunday that some scientists in key federal agencies are being ignored or even pressured to change study conclusions that don't support policy positions.

The speakers also said that Bush's proposed 2005 federal budget is slashing spending for basic research and reducing investments in education designed to produce the nation's future scientists.

And there also was concern that increased restrictions and requirements for obtaining visas is diminishing the flow to the U.S. of foreign-born science students who have long been a major part of the American research community.

Rosina Bierbaum, dean of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, said the Bush administration has cut scientists out of some of the policy-making processes, particularly on environmental issues.

"In previous administrations, scientists were always at the table when regulations were being developed," she said. "Science never had the last voice, but it had a voice."

Issues on global warming, for instance, that achieved a firm scientific consensus in earlier years are now being questioned by Bush policy makers. Proven, widely accepted research is being ignored or disputed, she said.

Government policy papers issued prior to the Bush years moved beyond questioning the validity of global warming science and addressed ways of confronting or dealing with climate change.

Under Bush, said Bierbaum, the questioning of the proven science has become more important than finding ways to cope with climate change.

One result of such actions, said Neal Lane of Rice University, a former director of the National Science Foundation, is that "we don't really have a policy right now to deal with what everybody agrees is a serious problem."

Among scientists, said Lane, "there is quite a consensus in place that the Earth is warming and that humans are responsible for a considerable part of that" through the burning of fossil fuels.

And the science is clear, he said, that without action to control fossil fuel use, the warming will get worse and there will be climate events that "our species has not experienced before."

Asked for comment, White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said, "The president makes policy decisions based on what the best policies for the country are, not politics. People who suggest otherwise are ill-informed."

Kurt Gottfried of Cornell University and the Union of Concerned Scientists said a survey of scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that about 42 percent said they felt pressured to not report publicly any findings that do not agree with Bush policies on endangered species. He said almost a third of the Fish and Wildlife researchers said they were even pressured not to express within the agency any views in conflict with the Bush policies.

"This administration has distanced itself from scientific information," said Gottfried. He said this is part of a larger effort to let politics dominate pure science.

He said scientists in the Environmental Protection Agency have been pressured to change their research to keep it consistent with the Bush political position on environmental issues.

Because of such actions, he said, it has become more difficult for federal agencies to attract and retain top scientific talent. This becomes a critical issue, said Gottfried, because about 35 percent of EPA scientists will retire soon and the Bush administration can "mold the staff" of the agency through the hiring process.

Federal spending for research and development is significantly reduced under the proposed 2005 Bush budget, the speakers said.

"Overall the R&D budget is bad news," said Bierbaum.

She said the National Science Foundation funds for graduate students and for kindergarten through high school education has been slashed.

NASA has gotten a budget boost, but most of the new money will be going to the space shuttle, space station and Bush's plan to explore the moon and Mars. What is suffering is the space agency's scientific research efforts, she said.

"Moon and Mars is basically going to eat everybody's lunch," she said.

Lane said Bush's moon and Mars exploration effort has not excited the public and has no clear goals or plans.

He said Bush's moon-Mars initiative "was poorly carried out and the budget is not there to do the job so science (at NASA) will really get hurt."